Damien Hardwick’s rise from dual-premiership player to triple flag-winning senior coach at Richmond
Damien Hardwick has three premierships as Richmond coach and is eyeing more. But will his personal life derail his shot at adding another in 2021 and cementing his legacy?
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For a man who notoriously has always hated meetings, Damien Hardwick knew he needed to call one immediately.
It was day one of Richmond’s pre-season campaign last month, and the triple premiership Richmond coach gathered his players in a room at its Punt Rd headquarters.
There were the usual pleasantries and the welcoming of the players back, but everyone was well aware of the elephant in the room.
Over the festive period it had become public that Hardwick’s marriage with Danielle – whom he jestingly referred to as “Mrs Hardwick” in media conferences for many years – had ended.
That in itself is sad but it was no one’s business, not until it had become a club issue following the revelation Hardwick had started a relationship with a Richmond staffer.It needed to be addressed.
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Leading sports psychologist Dr Noel Blundell, who has consulted with 10 AFL teams and helped 15 Olympic and world champions, said these types of situations had the ability to upset team success if not handled well.
“Once you get different perceptions and opinions in a locker room and it starts to fester, then even winning is not going to cover up that type of issue or situation,” he said.
Hardwick knew this, which is why he was upfront and honest with the players in explaining the delicate situation.
The owning of vulnerability has become a strong Richmond trait, and Hardwick needed to lead by example by getting out in front of it.
“It was important the first time they saw me I spoke about it openly and honestly,” Hardwick said on SEN this week.
“That’s something we do at the club and it was important we did that so we could get on with the business of preparing for Round 1.”
Whether it has caused any kind of friction at Tigerland remains to be seen, but a big part of whether Richmond can navigate this sensitive matter will be how successfully Hardwick can separate his personal and professional life.
Dr Blundell said the ability to compartmentalise varied for people.
“Working with AFL teams, I’ve known a player who had a business outside of football that was just about to be totally wiped out,” he said.
“But he would walk through to the doors to the locker room on a Saturday afternoon and be totally involved in football and that was his haven.
“And I’ve seen others with different personality traits, where if there is something minor going on outside their world, they walk into that locker room and they’re not as totally absorbed and they can perform very poorly accordingly.
“Some have a better capacity to generally turn off, and I’m talking generalisations but from a fair bit of experience having seen a lot of different examples.”
The way Hardwick has addressed the matter with his players, and in some ways put it to bed, means he is in a strong position to this year join a very exclusive club.
If the Tigers can salute again in 2021, Hardwick will join the likes of his former coach Kevin Sheedy and long-term friend Alastair Clarkson as a four-time premiership coach.
That is rarefied air, and it is still surprises some who remember him well before taking the helm at Punt Rd.
The Bomber years
Sheedy was fed up.
It was the mid-1990s at Windy Hill and a young, strongly built defender from Upwey – at the foot of the Dandenongs – was testing the Essendon coach’s patience.
It came to a head one day when some Hardwick skylarking in a local park the day before a game resulted in a month’s layoff.
“I’d known Sheeds had been riding him pretty hard around that time because I think he did his hamstring having a kick in a park with some mates the day before a game,” then teammate and Essendon great Matthew Lloyd recalled.
“I’ll never forget Sheeds really challenging him on his professionalism at that point in time around saying ‘you won’t have a career if you keep missing games through stupidity’.
“Sheeds, I think, questioned his commitment a bit in the early days, but I could see the hard side to him straight away.
“It was more the consistency in his preparation that I don’t think he’d found yet.”
Lloyd said he never imagined at the time Hardwick would go on to forge such a successful coaching career.
“Damien hated meetings and the little things you had to do in footy,” he said.
“He didn’t love training, but when he did train he trained hard.
“He just wanted to play and that’s what he loved to do...the strategy part of him is not something I really saw as a teammate.”
Hardwick’s professionalism got better with time, which saw him become the club champion in 1998 before playing a key role in Essendon’s 2000 premiership side.
He was one of a number of Bombers forced out for salary cap reasons at the end of 2001, landing at Port Adelaide.
Lloyd said it was not until grand final day in 2004, when Hardwick became a two-time premiership player, that he truly understood the loss of Hardwick.
“I’ll never forget watching that grand final,” he said.
“That first half when maybe there would be a few Port players doubting whether they could conquer the almighty Brisbane Lions, his attack on the ball and the man and his ferocity… it hit me that day that we didn’t just lose a player, but we lost probably what Essendon had stood for.”
It was the last game Hardwick would play, but Clarkson – an assistant at Port Adelaide who’d just been appointed Hawthorn coach – had him in his sights.
Becoming a coach
The new Hawthorn assistant coach was not happy.
Back in Melbourne in 2005, the reluctant trainer couldn’t believe it when he was still being forced onto the track by the Hawks’ new coach.
“One of the main things that Clarko emphasised for all the coaches was that they had to compete and train like we did,” former premiership Hawk Campbell Brown said.
“I remember Dimma was filthy in the early days.
“He’d be saying ‘I’ve retired so I don’t have to do a pre-season and here I am having to do one as a bloody coach.’
“We’d have a laugh, but it was great from a player’s perspective too because if they’re doing training with you, you very quickly build that rapport.”
Hardwick, who worked with the Hawks’ forwards, was quickly loved by the players.
He was big on relationships and was a bit unconventional, which appealed to them.
They could also relate to him well as he was only just out of the playing ranks.
“He hated meetings in his early days,” Brown said.
“He was a great coach in terms of relationships and obviously he had a great footy brain, but those early days the training and the meetings would do Dimma’s head in a little bit.
“The first few years if you’d asked me whether he’d go on to be a senior coach, I probably would have said no.
“But he got the coaching bug, though, the longer he coached.”
The near miss
Did Hawthorn, perhaps inadvertently, cost Hardwick the Essendon coaching job at the end of 2007?
In the 2009 book ‘Glory & Fame: the Rise and Rise of the Essendon Football Club’, then Bombers chief executive Peter Jackson claimed Hawthorn, which was in the middle of a finals campaign, made Hardwick surrender the computer on which he had compiled his presentation and notes.
Down to the final interview with just one other applicant – former Tigers skipper Matthew Knights – Hardwick faltered during the interview owing to a borrowed laptop he was unfamiliar.
This with due to Hawthorn’s fear of the potential leaking of sensitive information.
“I got the impression he was burning the candle at both ends trying to get it going, then on the day, he wasn’t familiar with the computer, and it didn’t start up properly, and Damien can get a bit annoyed with himself,” Jackson said in the book.
“His final performance was probably not as good as his second one, whereas Matthew’s was terrific, and on the day, that’s what the full board saw.”
He missed out, and also the Melbourne job to Dean Bailey around the same time, and was still at Hawthorn when it won the 2008 premiership.
Less than a year later, he would take the helm at Punt Rd.
Becoming a Tiger
When Brendon Gale was appointed Richmond’s new chief executive in 2009, the hunt for a new coach to succeed the sacked Terry Wallace was well underway.
By the time Gale came on board, it was down to four candidate.
He threw himself into the process, and said Hardwick possessed many traits the club was looking for.
“We felt like he had a passion for coaching and teaching and he had gotten great experience at Hawthorn, who had gone from pretty much the bottom to pretty much the premiership in 2008,” Gale said.
“He’d been a part of the transformation of a club, and for that reason we felt like he had the ability to address the needs of our list and our club now at that point in time.
“We also felt like he had a real passion for learning and a curiosity, which meant that as our list and the game evolved he would be able to meet those needs.”
He won the job, narrowly beating out Ken Hinkley, but by 2016 there were plenty that thought Hardwick should be shown the door.
He’d taken his side to the past three elimination finals, but no further, and patience was waning.
“There was a lot of external noise and that’s legitimate noise,” Gale said.
“That’s noise you need to try and manage and it can be quite distracting, but within the club there was a strong sense of what success looked like.
“The mere fact we were making finals showed progress, and we weren’t getting far but we were playing finals after coming from a long way back.
“So we thought as a board that Damien had all the attributes to be a really good coach.
“That guarantees nothing but we felt strong about that and we felt he and the program was doing a whole lot right.”
Just over a year later the Tigers would win their first flag since 1980 and this year will shoot for a three-peat.
When Hardwick and Gale started together in the same month in 2009, the Tigers were a basket case.
Almost 12 years later they’re the benchmark of the competition, on and off the field.
“I feel proud but it’s funny, the pressure never abates as once you’re reigning premier you’ve got to defend,” Gale said.
“But I’m proud of the collective buy in as it’s a program and the coach is a very important part of it, but I’m really proud of the way we’ve all committed to it.
“And I’m really happy for Damien as it’s a tough role coaching Richmond, it’s historically tough, and also I’m happy for our fans.”
TIGERS CHIEF BREAKS SILENCE ON DIMMA’S SPLIT
Richmond chief executive Brendon Gale has declared coach Damien Hardwick’s marriage breakdown will not affect the club’s quest for its first premiership three-peat in its 135-year history.
Hardwick this week revealed he’d spoken “openly and honestly” to his players on the first day of pre-season last month after it became public he’d entered into a relationship with a club staffer.
Danielle Hardwick, who was often referred to affectionately as “Mrs Hardwick”, is a much-loved figure at Tigerland and is close to a number of the players’ families.
Gale told the Sunday Herald Sun he was confident the delicate matter would not cause any divide at Punt Rd.
“It will have no impact at all,” Gale said.
“I think there will be some players, as I am and people involved at the club, who are saddened to see the end of a relationship.
“(But) our guys pride themselves on having a really focused performance mindset.
“They’re experienced, they’re match hardened, they focus on the things they need to.
“They’re preparing really well and focused on the season ahead.”
Gale, who became the Tigers’ CEO in the same month as Hardwick was appointed coach back in 2009, said it was important Hardwick addressed the situation with the players.
“At the end of the day these matters are intensely personal and private, but when they could impact the club you need to be very much across it,” Gale said.
“We’ve really built a culture of care and connection and celebrating that the individual is enough.
“Everyone brings skills and attributes but no one’s perfect.
“Fronting up and being proud to be and embracing imperfection has, and will continue to be, a really important part of who we are.
“So I think that was a really important step for Damien and the playing group.”
Hardwick is out of contract at the season’s end and the Tigers have been in discussions with him about extending his contract.
Gale said he was confident a new deal would soon be struck.
“We’ve been in discussions for a fair while and this will all take care of itself,” he said.
“He’s a wonderful coach for our football club and he’s been a very strong and effective coach, but he’s also part of a very strong program with a litany of good people.
“I’m confident he’ll be coaching at Richmond for a few years to come.”
Originally published as Damien Hardwick’s rise from dual-premiership player to triple flag-winning senior coach at Richmond
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