Fearless and at times ferocious, Robert Walls never took a backward step at any stage of his lifetime in football.

Across a career spanning half a century, he went from hard-edged player in footy’s most brutal era to a senior coach who mixed innovation with the discipline of those playing days.

As coach and player, he never backed down and never shirked a contest from those who stood in his path.

As a football commentator and media personality his metaphorical ‘baseball bat’ swung hard and true at his targets.

As a player, coach and TV expert he rarely missed his mark.

And yet for all the blood and thunder of those early decades, his final chapter in football saw his warmth and humanity emerge for all to see.

By the time he said his final goodbyes to those close to him, the ruthless disciplinarian – with the cutting tongue and fierce stare – had been universally recognised as one of football’s most popular and revered figures.

BECOMING A BLUE

Walls was a lanky teenager with long arms and big dreams when he rode his bike to Princes Park to try out for the Carlton’s under 19s side.

Having been born in Dunolly in the Central Goldfields in 1950, Walls grew up in Brunswick with his family and played his early football at Coburg Amateurs.

He had been a passionate Essendon supporter: “I would be at Windy Hill every second Saturday before the gates opened with my mates on the fence and be there until the end of the main game.”

But once he came into the orbit of Blues master coach Ron Barassi, everything changed.

“Ron Barassi was my hero as a 16-year-old kid,’’ Walls said when he was made a Carlton legend in 2011.

He kicked a goal with his first kick in his first game in 1966 – as a 16-year-old, and was so principled early in his career that he once told the Blues to give his $25 match payment to his sister as he felt he hadn’t earned it.

Walls played in the first of what would be three premierships with Carlton, knocking off Essendon in the 1968 grand final.

He kicked two goals in the most famous come-from-behind grand final victory against Collingwood in 1970.

Then, in a shootout between Carlton and Richmond in the 1972 grand final, Walls kicked 6.1, had 24 disposals in a performance that saw him judged best afield by many scribes.

He might have won a Norm Smith Medal if it had been available at the time, but the award was not introduced until 1979.

The star centre half-forward would play 218 games and kick 367 goals for Carlton, he captained the club for a period, was twice the club’s leading goalkicker and was selected in the Blues’ team of the century.

THE HUDDLE

Walls sought a transfer mid-season to Fitzroy in the middle of 1978 when Carlton was experiencing upheaval, despite being Blues captain at the time.

He ended up playing two and a half years with the club, playing 41 games and kicking 77 goals, taking his career tally to 259 games and 444 goals.

He took on the Lions coaching job at the end of 1980 – at 30 – and took the financially strapped but heart and soul Lions to three finals series in five seasons as coach.

One of Walls’ great innovations was ‘The Huddle’, which revolutionised how teams moved the ball from kick-ins.

He and the club’s fitness advisor, Chris Jones, devised a plan which saw the Lions players congregate at centre half-back for kick-ins before swarming in different directions.

It caught the opposition off-guard as Fitzroy’s speedsters opened up space and it gave the club a decided edge before other teams caught on, and zone defence later took over.

MIKE SHEAHAN: MY LAST MOMENT WITH EXTRAORDINARY WALLSY

‘WE RUN THE CLUB’

Outspoken Carlton president John Elliott delivered a veiled threat at Walls’ first interview for the Carlton coaching role in late 1985.

“Us three run the joint”, Elliott said of himself, chief executive Ian Collins and chairman of selectors Wes Lofts.

Walls wasn’t happy with that, but still signed a three-year contract.

He sensed pressure from the outset, and even more so when the club lost to Hawthorn in the 1986 grand final – in his first season.

Walls knew that if he didn’t get it done a year later he would be on the coaching precipice.

So when he hatched a plan to play David Rhys-Jones in an unorthodox match-up on Hawthorn superstar Dermott Brereton ahead of the 1987 grand final, he feared the outcome would determine his future.

“I knew going into the game that if it didn’t work, my chances of staying were pretty slim. I thought that would be the end of it,” Walls told the Sacked Podcast.

Walls’ four-man match committee disagreed with the positional switch, so did the president.

“I got to training on Thursday and John Elliott said, ‘Why would you want to change a winning team?’,” Walls said.

“After training, Wes Lofts said, ‘Do you still want ‘Rhys’ to be centre half-back? We can’t go into a Grand Final with a coach not having the team he wants’.”

The match committee relented.

Rhys-Jones rose to the challenge and won the North Smith Medal, with a best afield blanketing of Brereton, helping the Blues win by 33 points.

Walls’ job was safe … for now.

‘IF YOU HAD ANY BALLS, YOU WOULD SACK ME’

A fortnight after winning the 1987 flag, Walls launched a tirade against Elliott in the most unlikely of places.

It came in the cramped rooms at The Oval, in London, after Australian football’s ‘Battle of Britain’ had exploded on-field between the Blues and the Kangaroos.

The mayhem was sparked when North Melbourne teenager Alastair Clarkson broke the jaw of Carlton’s Ian Aitken, and Walls blamed Elliott for partly inciting the animosity.

“After the game we were in this very small cricket dressing room … Elliott was there with his Foster’s mates and I was looking at my blokes all battered and bruised and bleeding,” Walls recalled in Sacked.

Walls detailed how Elliott was at fault for not only fixturing a game he didn’t want his players to play in, but for delivering a pre-game jibe he believed incited the violence.

“The night before (the game) the two teams had dinner together and John Elliott gets up and says ‘If we win the game, we’ll get the $10,000 (prizemoney) and put it on the bar and if North wins, you can go and pay your coach’,” Walls said.

“He was talking about the great John Kennedy. I could see North Melbourne people (fuming), and it was on from the first bounce.

“We had just won the flag, my boys had been on the drink … and two weeks later, we were in a grudge match.”

The following morning Walls knew he was in a bit of trouble when Collins delivered a stinging rebuke: “‘How dare you speak to the president of the Carlton Football Club like that!”

“I said, ‘I couldn’t give a stuff!’.

“I went back to my room and my wife said, ‘How did it go? Are they going to sack you?’.

“I said, ‘They won’t sack me after we have won a flag, but when the wheels get wobbly down the track — and they eventually will — I will be gone’.

“Then 18 months later, I was gone.”

The sacking came midway through the 1989 season when a shock loss to the Brisbane Bears sealed his fate.

As Walls recounted: “(Warwick Capper) takes the mark 55m out, (he’d) never kicked a goal longer than 40m, and he just puts it through.”

Unbeknown to Walls, Collins flew to Canberra to speak with Alex Jesaulenko about returning as coach hours after Capper sunk the Blues.

Walls knew his fate was sealed when he took a call from Lofts two days later, requesting a meeting.

“I drove to Loftsy’s house knowing I would be sacked. I got to the house and looked down his driveway and could see this white Volvo, which I knew was Collo’s,” he told Sacked.

“Loftsy opens the door and he said, ‘We’re in a bit of strife’. He said to me, ‘They want you to resign’. I said, ‘I am not going to resign. And by the way, is that Collo’s car back there?’.

“He sort of mumbled and said (Collins is) in the kitchen. I said, ‘Well, tell him to come up here’ and he (Collins) came up and said ‘We want you to resign’.

Walls later realised he had been too hard on the players following their 1987 success: “I just drove them relentlessly … I was too brutal, hard and uncompromising.”

BAD NEWS BEARS

Walls took on the basket case of the Brisbane Bears in 1991 – based out of Carrara at the time – as he worked against a myriad of handicaps to drive them into the finals in his final season.

He experienced the weird and the wonderful, including eccentric millionaire private owner Reuben Pelerman regularly going through the process of “locking the gates” at Carrara, seemingly shutting down the club.

The first time it happened, it shocked Walls, until football boss Shane O’Sullivan told him: “Don’t worry, he does that all the time.”

“I said to him (O’Sullivan): ‘Thanks for warning me!’”

“Reuben knew nothing about football. He had an entertaining suite next to the coaches’ box so I would walk up the steps before the game and everything would be in full swing.

“There would be lobsters, there would be champagne, there would be flowers. I thought ‘Oh, Christopher Skase (the original Bears owner), here we go again’.

Years later, Walls conceded he had been too tough on some of his players.

In one incident in 1991, he had a group of players take turns in sparring with a player Walls was furious with – Shane Strempel – in what turned out to be a brutal boxing session.

The story only came out in an AFLPA video a decade later.

The coach had been frustrated by Strempel’s lack of commitment and support for his teammates. The incident left Strempel bloodied and bruised before Brad Hardie called a stop to the session.

One of the other players called a stop to the one-sided session, fearing it might ‘kill the boy’

Walls rode the highs and lows of the Brisbane experience, working with a host of young talent including Nathan Buckley (for one year), Marcus Ashcroft, Shaun Hart, Chris Scott, Nigel Lappin and Michael Voss.

When Brisbane won a three-peat of flags from 2001-2003 – long after Walls’ departure after leading the club to its first finals appearance in 1995 – the club credited their former coach for helping to blood half of those premiership heroes.

‘I WAS GLAD TO BE OUT OF THE JOINT’

Walls never intended to coach Richmond but took it on when John Northey went from Punt Rd to Brisbane.

He didn’t take long to regret it.

Walls recalled on Sacked: “I should never have taken the job. I was pretty much worn out after 14 years coaching. But I took it.”

“It was a funny club at the time. What I noticed was that people and staff were all uneasy and fingers were being pointed … ‘You are to blame, you are to blame’.

“I had two assistant coaches who didn’t talk to one another.

“I liked the players but it was a situation where outside people who had been a part of the club had a bit too much to say and people at the club listened to them too much.

“The first year we won 11 and lost 11 … and the last game of the season depended on whether we made finals. Anyway, we didn’t get in.

“The second year I think we were six wins and 11 losses when I got sacked.

“When I was sacked at Carlton I was really disappointed and angry and upset in some ways. When I was sacked at Richmond (after round 17, 1997), I thought ‘I am glad to be out of the joint’.

FOURTH ESTATE

Walls’ departure from coaching wasn’t a departure from the game as he became one of the most fearless and forthright members of the media – on television, radio and in print.

If he felt he was right, or saw an injustice, he didn’t care if he ruffled the feathers of players, coaches, clubs, and even an international, if somewhat ageing, rock star.

He took aim at West Coast after the off-field issues of some of its players came to light following the 2006 premiership, questioning the integrity of their success.

“At the start of 2007, I wrote a (newspaper) column … and said the Eagles don’t deserve it, that the premiership was tainted because of their conduct,” Walls told Sacked.

“(Eagles chairman) Dalton Gooding contacted me, and said ‘we strongly disagree with what you said, we feel slighted. ‘You should come over here and see what a great club we’ve got’.

“I couldn’t say no. I was there for three days and he (Gooding) organised 30 interviews ... I sat down with individual players and coaches, doctors, welfare people, sponsors.

“I won’t name the person ... but I walked into this person’s office and ... that person said ‘you’ve got no idea what is going on here with the behaviour and drugs’.”

His expose came years before the full extent of West Coast’s drug issues came to light.

Walls was also a part of one of footy’s most riveting TV moments when he went head to head with Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy – a former on field protagonist – on an episode of Talking Footy in 2001.

It came when Sheedy was incensed by some of Walls’ criticism, leading him to say in a press conference: “Not all snipers were in Vietnam in the ‘70s”, a pointed reference to Walls’ robust playing career.

The showdown came live on TV soon after.

Walls defended his record of coaching a then lowly Brisbane, saying to Sheedy: “You have no idea of what it is like to take on a wooden spoon team and for you to say (about Walls) that ‘you went to Brisbane and hid’, that’s offensive and insulting.”

“You wouldn’t know what it’s like to have an owner of a club (Pelerman) who wanted to close it down every second week. You wouldn’t know what it is like to have 90 per cent of your players who have come from outside that state, who are homesick, don’t get opportunities because no one is interested in Aussie Rules up there.

“You wouldn’t know what it is like to go to your own bank and pull money out to pay your best and fairest winner because the club couldn’t afford it.”

Then, there was Walls’ run-in with Meatloaf, whose performance before the 2011 Grand Final proved to be an all-time shocker.

“It was a wet day and there was a bit of lightning in the air,” he recounted on Sacked. “Evidently, the big ‘Loaf’ was worried about being struck on stage.”

“His manager came up and said ‘Meatloaf is not going to go on stage, it’s too dangerous’. I said ‘That’s as weak as piss. Tell him to harden up and get out there.”

Fired up by the message, the US singer bumbled and stumbled his way through a set of songs barely recognisable.

In later years, following a stint living in France, Walls would also become an unofficial mentor for Carlton coaches – a role he carried deep into Voss’ tenure.

The Herald Sun interviewed Voss and Walls at Princes Park midway through last season.

Walls was in remission from his rare and aggressive blood cancer at the time, yet still giving guidance to Voss, whom he set on the path to his AFL career three decades earlier.

“He (Walls) was going to take you to the well and force you to drink,” Voss said at the time.

“I’m forever grateful for the opportunities Wallsy gave me in those days and for the support he has continued to give me over the years.”

Two generations of past players, past and present coaches, and so many connected to the game and the media would absolutely say the same.