Brave and talented Merv Keane turns the spotlight on another remarkable life
With the launch of his first book, Playing with the Field, Richmond premiership star and former Sturt coach Merv Keane has revealed another of his many talents, writes Graham Cornes.
Graham Cornes
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Amid all the turmoil at the Crows, former Sturt coach Merv Keane was in town on Thursday to launch a book, his first, Playing With the Field.
The Story of Scott Field is a tribute to the Sturt rover, an extraordinary young man, who tragically lost his life in 2014 while climbing Mont Blanc in France.
Little was Keane to know when he started the project that his own life was going to be impacted by two devastating tragedies.
Adelaide never truly appreciated Merv Keane. We knew him as the ex-Richmond player who was appointed to the senior coaching role at Sturt in 1985 after John Halbert was not reappointed.
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The aura and influence of the great Jack Oatey was ever-present and had contributed to Halbert’s demise after only two seasons.
While Keane says the one meeting he had with Oatey was as inspirational and influential as any football moment he had experienced, the club was not able to recapture the glory of the Oatey years which had also overshadowed Halbert’s two years at the club.
It was a standard against which Keane was always going to be impossibly measured. When he was not reappointed after his initial four-year tenure, the club was riven with dissent and plunged into a decade of darkness and inferior, unacceptable performances.
Keane had been a typical country boy, growing up in a little Victorian country town called Narraport.
Merv Keane signing - and launching - his tribute book to Scott Field @SturtFC #playingthefield pic.twitter.com/35Trr5kl1z
— michelangelo rucci (@michelangeloruc) September 12, 2019
One of eight children raised on a farm in the often harsh environment of the Mallee, he played his first game of football in the Narraport under-16s when he was 10.
He played one year of senior country footy as a 17 year old before Richmond came calling and took him off the farm to board with Kevin Sheedy’s mother.
His career as a Richmond player may have been overshadowed by more glamorous, extroverted players, but he played 238 games over 13 seasons.
Significantly he played in three premierships: 1973, 1974 and 1980.
He was the consummate foot-soldier who was given the thankless roles in defence. It wasn’t until his 11th season that he polled his first Brownlow Medal votes.
For years his standard, self-deprecating joke was that he had played in more premierships than he had polled Brownlow votes.
However, when modern data-gathering techniques discovered he had in fact polled four votes over the course of his career, the joke was ruined.
After his experience at Sturt he was Kevin Sheedy’s assistant at Essendon and coached in the TAC under-18 competition and the VFA.
However, apart from playing, he seemed to find the greatest football satisfaction in his recruiting role with the Bombers.
He rattles the names off with a Sheedy-like ability to remember names, draft selections and home-towns. “McDonald-Tipungwuti, rookie draft pick 22, Zach Merrett pick number 26, Kyle Langford, pick 17. Andrew McGrath, pick number one, so you’d expect him to be a good player — a future leader”.
In spite of the predicament the club faced after the Stephen Dank/Dean “The Weapon” Robinson supplements experiments, his affection is predominantly with Essendon, although he does sit on a heritage/history committee at Richmond.
He retired from football last year and this year he has been awarded the significant honour of AFL Life Membership, initiated he suspects by one of his former Sturt players Darryl Smith who lobbied the AFL for Keane’s recognition.
In 2014 Merv Keane walked away from Scott Field’s funeral service in Mt Barker with the inspiration to tell the world of the Sturt rover’s incredible journey through a life packed with adventure and high achievement.
However, within three years Keane’s own life was devastated by the tragic loss of his daughter Emily and his wife Kaye.
Emily Keane had always been a high achiever. An intelligent, gorgeous, vivacious young lady, she was an outstanding obstetrician and gynaecologist who, unbeknown to her family, sought refuge from the constant pressure and demands of a hospital birthing room in alcohol.
Within a few years she went from being a casual, social drinker to a medical professional addicted to alcohol.
Despite three attempts at rehabilitation and the care and attention of her family she became incapacitated and eventually succumbed to alcohol toxicity. She was only 36 years old when she died.
Keane’s wife Kaye was the last person to see her daughter alive and the first person to find her after she had passed. She never recovered from the grief and within a month took her own life.
Somehow Keane and his two sons, Joel and Zac, had to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. The book about Scott Field was a work in progress but after emerging from the fog of grief, Keane and his son Joel, who had worked as a researcher on the project, were able to finish it.
Playing With the Field was launched on Thursday in front of a large crowd at the Sturt Football Club. It was the fifth anniversary of Field’s death.
Keane had had no experience at writing a book when he walked out of that funeral service in Mt Barker.
He enrolled in a writing course at a TAFE college and five years later the evidence of his talent is now on display in a beautifully bound, hard copy of Scott Field’s life.
It reminds me that Field was on the original Crows’ training squad that was assembled in late October 1990.
Unfortunately he did not make the final list and I never had the pleasure of knowing him like Merv Keane did. But the world had bigger plans for Scott Field as the book documents.
When he fell to his death trying to scale Mont Blanc he was on his way to Syria as a political affairs officer in the Office of the Special Envoy of the United Nations.
But it’s in the book.
Merv Keane displays a remarkable stoicism in the wake of his personal tragedy. He is involved today in a project working with young doctors, counselling them on their welfare and wellbeing.
The inscription in the fly-leaf of his book also helps to explain: “For Kaye and Emily. We remember your love and your goodness, not our loss. Playing with the Field is cathartic for our family. A psychological relief. A cleansing.”
It won’t be his last book.