‘He only shows you little slices of him . . . he loves walking in the countryside’
Outgoing Richmond president Peggy O’Neal got to know Dustin Martin in ways not many people have, and says he has a secret, nature-loving side.
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It was late 2016, and Richmond president Peggy O’Neal was congratulating her Western Bulldogs counterpart, Peter Gordon, on his side’s first flag in almost three generations.
She told him she couldn’t imagine Richmond playing in a grand final and scoffed when Gordon warned her – after the first premiership, you’ll want more and more.
“One would be enough,” she replied. “Then I’d walk away happy”.
O’Neal tells the story as a kind of confession. She was wrong. One Richmond flag was not enough; but after three flags in four years and almost 10 years as the first female AFL club president, it’s time to move on
O’Neal is sitting in the club’s Punt Rd boardroom. Downstairs, to dance music, players do light gym work, including Dusty Martin, who may or may not have added to his tattoo collection in the post season.
O’Neal has just finished her last photo shoot as president. She seems unlikely to miss the singular attention which comes from her perch, or the trailblazing label which never seemed to dim, or the critics who doubted her composed way in troubled Tiger times.
Thoughtful as always, she has brought along her so-called Peggy scarfs, which now can be bought in shops, for the shoot. A patient subject, she lugs premierships cups like luggage from one photo setting to the next.
Her final official engagement is the club’s annual general meeting on Monday, then a dinner afterwards in what has felt like the world’s longest farewell tour.
Standby to hear about O’Neal as the chancellor of RMIT and the head of Victoria’s Commonwealth Games organising committee.
But what of the legacies of her time at Richmond? Under O’Neal, the club relished its biggest change since Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. She brought leadership and calm, in ways of thinking that once seemed so foreign to traditional approaches to football.
On reflection, she describes her approach to the “first woman thing” as “naive”.
O’Neal was an American, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia, who discovered her Tigers in 1993, when Richmond played the Demons at the MCG, just down the road from her home – and duly lost by 93 points.
O’Neal had not grown up on footy statistics and weekly blasts of triumph or despair. Many Richmond fans would outplay her at a club trivia night.
As a lawyer, a partner at Freehills, she had set firsts – the first woman of seniority, say, or the first woman in a leadership role. To be the only female in the room in such settings typically felt unusual – for about a week or two.
“I knew being the first woman president was significant,” she now says. “But I didn’t know that that interest would go on for as long as it did. I’m so thrilled there have now been four of us as women presidents of clubs (North Melbourne, Melbourne and Western Bulldogs). But at the time I was the first. I just didn’t understand the curiosity about me as a person, as opposed to the club.”
She had joined the Richmond club board in 2005, despite former captain Wayne Campbell advising her that proximity to football club politics dimmed the romance of the game.
Internally, her ascent to club president in 2013 made sense. She was the consensus candidate, whose proud lack of demonstrable animation lent stability to a club which had lurched from crisis to crisis, like a sinking ship which refused to go down.
She was comfortable with her place in the club bubble, a component of the bigger whole. But she was unlike some other club presidents. She was never going to be the loudest voice in the AFL clamour.
“Looking back, I understand what an outsider I really was,” she says. “Besides being a woman, I was from another country, I had no real long-term contacts in Australia. I think my election may have signalled to a lot of people that football clubs were not what they had traditionally been, and change can be hard to handle sometimes.”
There were knockers. She recalls watching television when someone dismissed Richmond as a worthy club – because its president was female.
It was several years before she settled on her approach.
“I didn’t expect or quite know how to handle all that attention,” she says.
“But you handled it?” she is asked.
“I kept showing up,” she says. “I knew I couldn’t be second guessing myself all the time. If you second guess yourself all the time you’ll never build up that confidence. You’d drive yourself crazy if you tried to explain yourself too many times to a journalist, or to the off-handed comment that someone makes. I thought I’m just going to have to turn all that off. And I did.”
O’Neal brought corporate speak to Punt Rd, words such as “connection”, “mindfulness” and purpose”, and headed the tangible successes which flowed from such mindsets. She came to embody a club culture which valued poise over hysterics, and belief over bloodlettings.
There are no airs with O’Neal. She prefers “we” and “us” to “me” and “I”. When she chuckles, her eyes seem to twinkle. She likes people, describing random encounters with fans as “delightful” and “warm”.
Over many chats over the years, O’Neal has never expressed anger. She hasn’t bagged anyone, nor seemed tempted to. Her modern management style is spliced with old-world nods. Football clubs may be bathed in blokey humour, yet you suspect that O’Neal has been spared the worst of the jocularity.
She headed a club which had barely won a final, much less a flag, this millennium. Its fans seemed haunted by inexplicable outcomes. Supporters under the age of 45 had never known it to be any other way.
The year of 2017 loomed as more of the same. The previous season had been typically dispiriting: underwhelming results; board level shenanigans.
This snapshot described a Richmond default since 1980: testosterone-fuelled purges; requisite blood in the water.
She shies from describing this time as the “hardest moment”. But her voice betrays exasperation with an aborted boardroom coup in 2016. O’Neal’s take on that year differs from the external perspective.
A rival board ticket, focus on footy, decried poor results and demanded changes, including the axing of coach Damien Hardwick.
O’Neal stood oddly accused for on-field fumbles, in attacks described by an insider as “misogynistic”.
For her, the aggressive line seemed so misplaced with the methodical off-screen changes at the club.
Every organisation has “reviews” these days; the buzzword often results in recommendations doomed to be stillborn. The effect of Richmond’s 2016 review, headed by club chief executive Brendon Gale, was easier to gauge.
Gale sought internationally-accredited methodologies for a gap analysis – determining the difference between where the club wanted to be, and where it was.
Hardwick had been reappointed and was to be given time, as coaches in other sports often are (O’Neal still does not grasp the reflexive start over AFL club response to lacklustre results).
Hardwick reluctantly agreed to attend a Harvard Business School course where he absorbed the need for trusting relationships with his players as well as broader strategies.
The club identified a neglect in the nurturing of leaders. Players would later talk about the “Hero/Hardship/Highlight” sessions, when each of them would share highs and lows of their life experiences.
“There were so many balls in the air, the thing we didn’t need was to trash it all and start again,” O’Neal says. “Dealing with distractions like that was not something you want. But it was so solid on the inside, we felt like we had great unity and support.”
The breakthrough flag inspired dancing on cars in Swan St. The next flag two years later inspired flares and feet poking out of a wheelie bin.
In 2020, the pandemic year, O’Neal hoped the season would be cancelled. She weighed lives lost against the playing of a game. Gale disagreed; he wanted back-to-back flags.
O’Neal reassessed the privations of hub life for the players, deciding that “whoever gets this Covid thing right, and I think it can be us, will win a premiership”.
Richmond’s 2020 premiership cup itself, now on display, boasts a deep graze on the rim said to be linked to a late night Queensland dance floor outing and Dusty Martin.
O’Neal will miss the text messages from Martin before big games. He would promise to her to win beforehand, and later declare that the Tigers had indeed won after each of the three recent premierships.
“I think he only shows you little slices of him,” she says.
“I’ve always found him to be pretty funny and thoughtful. When he’s away from everybody, he doesn’t mind talking about what he’s doing, the next trip or the last trip. He loves going out walking in the countryside now.”
She will also miss the catch ups with fellow female presidents and board members. The women have met regularly before and after the men’s season to exchange ideas and experiences since 2005.
There was dinner at Jeanne Pratt’s Raheen, and last February a Government House catch-up with Essendon tragic, Linda Dessau.
Fellow outgoing president, Hawthorn’s Jeff Kennett, says presidents’ meetings will suffer for O’Neal’s absence, mostly for the non-footballing wisdom she brought to discussions.
“She doesn’t speak often, but when she does she is listened to,” Kennett says.
Perhaps Gale is best placed to judge O’Neal’s footballing legacy. The pair, for Tiger fans, shine as a football club equivalent of Hawke and Keating, or Howard and Costello.
For almost a decade, they plotted footballing successes, in between chats about music, books and American history. They applied legal acumen to problem solving, and shared small town origins for understanding the needs and hopes of club members, in forging record numbers of paid-up fans.
Gale calls O’Neal “almost paradoxical”. He describes football’s traditional crash through approach – the need to take control, to do something – when things go amiss. O’Neal’s approach was “more feminine”. She didn’t get angry; she got determined. She didn’t panic in crisis, but instead pondered problems in the pursuit of solutions.
“She has left a powerful lesson for all of us,” he says, “and that is that there’s another way to winning.”
O’Neal will head off to Philadelphia, Trinidad, and Singapore in coming months in her new roles at RMIT and the Commonwealth Games. But her self-ascribed role as Tiger Chief Fan will live on.
She plans to keep the footy rituals; the walk to the home ground, the watching of a replay the following day, hopefully with a glass of celebratory bubbly. But from now on she can choose when she does or does not go. No longer mindful of TV cameras, she may now indulge in a little bubbly during the game itself.
The only problem? “Where am I going to sit next year?” she wonders.
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