Joe McGuire, Eddie McGuire’s son, is a rising star in the US thanks to a big punt
Joe McGuire is used to being stopped in the street - it’s normal when you’re Eddie McGuire’s son. But now he’s a rising star in his own right. See the video.
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Joe McGuire is used to being stopped in the street by strangers.
It’s been happening all his life. When your father is Mr Melbourne, it comes with the territory.
But in Columbus, Ohio, the people wanting him to pose for a selfie or sign an autograph have no idea he is Eddie McGuire’s son. They know him only as the punter for the Ohio State Buckeyes, one of the biggest teams in college football.
And that, after a journey equally remarkable and improbable, is just the way Joe likes it.
“What the world is like at the moment, anything I did in Melbourne there are going to be some people who say you only did that because of your dad,” the 23-year-old says.
“This is just one thing that it just does not matter who your dad is or whatever. You have to put in the work and you have to be good enough, or else there’s just no way they play you at a school like this.”
McGuire has put in the work, transforming himself from a skinny kid who liked having a kick with his mates into a 96kg athlete with a cannon of a right leg. And he has shown he is good enough, because only the best make a team that has won eight national championships.
Even then, however, the Buckeyes almost didn’t play him. A week out from August’s season opener, his coach Ryan Day – whose $US10m pay packet is on par with the wages bill for an entire AFL team – handed the starting punting position to fellow Australian Nick McLarty.
McGuire was undeterred, spurred on by one of the team’s mottos: “Iron sharpens iron.”
“If you’re surrounded by good players challenging you, you have to get better,” he says.
“I knew what I thought I was capable of, and I knew how hard I was capable of training. From the start of the year to now, I had a lot of development that I needed to do if I wanted to be playing … So I gave it absolutely everything.”
It paid off. Kicking off the season against the Akron Zips, Day pulled a last-minute switch and tapped McGuire to make his debut as the starting punter, praising his consistency in training.
In front of a raucous crowd of 102,011 people, including his mum Carla, McGuire nailed three punts and helped the Buckeyes to a 52-6 win. They have since been in dominant form, the starting spot is firmly in his grasp, and together they are dreaming of another championship.
As for his dad? The former Collingwood president has proudly climbed aboard the Buckeyes bandwagon, waking up at the crack of dawn to watch their games, sharing Instagram highlights with his son, and checking in with daily FaceTime calls.
“It was very impressive to watch a young kid have a go at this outlandish sort of dream,” McGuire says of his son.
“He literally started from scratch … and now he’s playing in front of 100,000 every week.”
‘Why don’t you give this a go?’
The idea of playing college football – let alone for a $US127m powerhouse like Ohio State – really did seem outlandish to McGuire when it was planted in his head by a childhood friend.
He had always been a handy sportsman, playing a full season of cricket in Melbourne Grammar’s first 11 and a handful of games of footy for its first 18.
“But I never thought I’d go pro,” McGuire says.
So it came as a surprise, while having a kick with Lachlan Swaney during the pandemic, that his best mate urged him to have a go at punting. They had met on McGuire’s first day of school in Sydney – when his father was running the Nine Network – although Swaney also preferred Aussie rules and went on to co-captain Carlton’s VFL team.
“You’ve got a solid leg,” Swaney told him, “so why don’t you give this a go and see what happens?”
An even bigger surprise followed when McGuire met Nathan Chapman, an ex-AFL player who had a brief stint with the NFL’s Green Bay Packers and then founded Prokick, a training academy that has been turning Australians into punters since 2007.
“What I didn’t realise is that was actually a tryout,” McGuire recalls with a laugh.
Chapman was nonetheless impressed. The 49-year-old has an enviable eye for talent – five out of 32 NFL teams have Australian punters this season, all of whom came through Prokick – and he thought there was “certainly something to work with” in McGuire.
“His motion was good, he was fluent with his kicking,” Chapman says.
“It’s about how we turn what they’ve currently got into a kick that’s going to work fast enough and consistently enough in the college football world.”
It is a different world to Aussie rules. The best kicks in the AFL – think Richmond legend Dustin Martin at his peak – deliver piercing drop punts on the run. By contrast, the American game requires punters who can go high and long off barely a step, giving their teammates a field position advantage while under pressure from opponents rushing at them.
“The little adaptations, the little muscle memory changes we need to make – there’s the journey,” Chapman says.
He wanted to take on McGuire as a student, and McGuire wanted to learn.
“I did more research, watched the games, and sort of fell in love with it,” he says.
“Very quickly, it went from something I might be interested in to something that I was absolutely dedicating my life to.”
McGuire trained twice a day, five days a week, not only to tweak his action but to bulk up.
“I was like 75kg, super skinny, really not strong at all,” he says.
His 5.30am gym sessions were combined with what he jokingly calls a “see-food diet – just see food and eat it”. Over two years, McGuire put on 30kg, later stripping off 10kg.
“I definitely got a bit chubby at one stage,” he laughs.
Chapman says his pupil did “an amazing amount of work” – and always with a smile.
“He’s a young bloke and he’s developing, and all of a sudden he’s in this really highly motivated regime and his body just explodes,” the Prokick coach says.
Then came the biggest surprise of all for McGuire, when Chapman pulled him aside to offer him an opportunity in the US. It was at Ohio State University, which boasts not only one of the best football teams but also a highly regarded media and sports industry program.
“I was sort of like, wow … I wasn’t expecting him to say that, so I was sort of taken aback,” says McGuire, who also aspired to follow his father into the off-field world of sport.
“I said 100 per cent, get me there, and he did.”
The gamut of the sporting industry
McGuire moved to Columbus last year – and spent his first season on the bench.
This was by design. Ohio State already had an Australian, Fremantle’s Jesse Mirco, who had handled the punting duties for the previous two years and was ready to be McGuire’s mentor and mate. He knew he had a lot to learn, about the game as well as life in the US.
“As much as it’s an amateur sport, it’s really professional,” McGuire says.
Every day during the season is a mix of gym workouts and classes in the morning, then training, film sessions, team meetings and ice baths in the afternoon.
“Then you go home, collapse, and do it all again,” he says happily.
Living away from home has been an adjustment, McGuire says, but his family and friends bring Melbourne to him. On the day of our interview, he received a package from his mum with Tim Tams and Arnott’s Venetian Biscuits, while others have sent him meat pies and even a VB. (He cracked that open when Collingwood won last year’s premiership.)
McGuire also keeps close tabs on his brother Xander – a Channel 9 football reporter who won the Clinton Grybas Award for best emerging media talent – with his grandmother’s help.
“Every time he was on the TV, she’d video it and send it to the family group chat, and that was really cool sitting in my apartment in Columbus, especially early days not knowing many people,” he says.
A similar career path appeals to the eldest McGuire boy. Before moving to the US, he was a camera assistant for Fox Footy and worked behind the scenes on The Footy Show and Footy Classified, as well as Millionaire Hot Seat and The Hot Breakfast on Triple M.
At Ohio State, McGuire is taking classes spanning the gamut of the sporting industry, including business, media and law, and he is already planning a masters degree.
“He’s on the dean’s list academically,” his father proudly lets slip, “which is obviously important in our household, and now he’s the starting punter.”
“My wife and I are in awe of the effort, the dedication and the professionalism he put into it.”
Will that professionalism take him to the pros? Chapman says: “The ball’s in his court.”
“There’s plenty of players with great talent whose journey doesn’t go to plan,” the coach points out, saying he advises his students to “focus on the next game and the next kick”.
At Ohio State, McGuire only gets to put his boot to the ball two or three times a game.
“There’s no real job security, I suppose … It forces you to be on your game all the time,” he acknowledges.
“I’m going to work as hard as I can to be as good as possible, and if that means I make it to the NFL, then fantastic.”
“Anyone who steps foot in Ohio State especially, they’re lying if they tell you that’s not their goal. But the main focus is keeping my job at the moment … and helping the team as much as possible, and hopefully we can get all the way to winning a national championship.”
Aussies dominating America’s game
Winters in the McGuire household were all about the AFL. Eddie was Collingwood’s president from before his boys were born until after they finished school.
The rhythms of summer, however, were dictated by American football. The family would watch the NFL playoffs in the morning and then go for a swim in the afternoon.
When Joe was 12, he and his brother went to their first NFL game, between the New England Patriots and the San Francisco 49ers. “Somehow dad managed to get written on the scoreboard happy birthday to me and my brother,” he remembers.
His father – who later took him to several Super Bowls – had long been hooked. As a cadet reporter at Network Ten, McGuire pushed to show NFL highlights, despite his boss’s doubts.
“Americans ask me, what’s Australian rules football, is that rugby?,” McGuire says.
“Australian rules football is to rugby what American football is to rugby – that is, nothing. They’ve both got an oval-shaped ball and that’s about it.”
“What I say to Americans is that you have a unique indigenous game that is the number one sport in your country – that’s Australian rules football.”
As McGuire points out, Aussies are increasingly dominating America’s game. First there was Darren Bennett and Ben Graham and Sav Rocca. Now there is a new generation including Michael Dickson and Cameron Johnston, an Ohio State alum who is mentoring McGuire. And thanks to Chapman’s Prokick, about half the top college teams have Australian punters.
“The Aussie camaraderie amongst the guys has made such a huge difference,” Joe’s father says.
“They’re doing the same things as he is – living away from home, having to study, having to fit into American culture, having to get a kick and stay in the team.”
“It’s all ahead of him … That’s his life now. I’m a spectator.”
As for the 23-year-old, he is relishing being on the field rather than a fan in the stands.
“It is honestly kind of like the movies,” McGuire says.
“We don’t have anything like it in Australia … But it’s cool, just being my own person over here.”
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