Hamish McLachlan: Sam Stynes on keeping Jim’s legacy alive
Jim Stynes never admitted his fears that cancer would beat him. Not to a person, anyway. But he once said it into a video camera and then left his wife Sam a special document on her computer that she still reads today. Sam chats to Hamish McLachlan about keeping his legacy alive and finding love again.
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I remember thinking how incredibly brave Samantha Stynes was when she read a poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye at her husband Jim’s state funeral in 2012.
“Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep … I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow …”
Football had lost one of its great players and characters to cancer, and Sam had lost her husband and the father of her children.
We spoke about an accidental meeting, breakups, broken hearts, the diagnosis, car parks in Budapest, alternative therapies, finding love again and her work to keep Jim’s legacy alive.
HM: Is it true you met Jim by accident in Cairns after a tumultuous breakup?
SS: It is. I’d arranged to meet a family friend that I hadn’t seen in five years. We were supposed to be meeting at a big horseshoe-shaped bar. I was on one side and Jim was on the other.
HM: Did you know who Jim was?
SS: No — I didn’t follow football at all! So I was looking for a friend, Stephen Pollard, and I met eyes with Jim and he waved, and I smiled and waved back thinking it was Stephen and walked around to say hello.
HM: But it was Jim?
SS: It was. He’d not long before won the Brownlow. I must have subliminally seen his face in the media — maybe that’s why I smiled and waved. By the time I got to him I realised it wasn’t Stephen. Jim asked for my name, and when I said Sam Ludbey, he said, “You’re not Wayne Ludbey’s sister, are you?” I said that I was. Apparently, Wayne had taken a picture of him. That’s how we got talking.
HM: First impressions?
SS: I thought he looked quite daggy to be honest — he was so tall and lanky!
HM: Did you understand what he was saying?
SS: Not much. I stupidly commented that he was so tall, so he lifted me up onto the bar, so we could be face-to-face when we spoke. I was interested, but I also thought to myself, “He is a really daggy dude!”
HM: So an attraction?
SS: An intrigue — I’d never met an Irishman. He had a great accent. I hadn’t really travelled very much at that stage in life, so I guess he was a bit exotic, and different to the private school boys that I’d grown up with.
HM: So how do you go from a mild level of intrigue, to married with kids?
SS: It was a bumpy road. We met that night, he gave me his phone number — a landline — but I threw it away.
HM: Solid start.
SS: I thought I’d never see him again. I was heartbroken by a boy and I was away trying to forget him — I think his name was Mark Achermann. My parents sent me to stay with my grandma to get over the breakup.
HM: It seemingly worked — you can’t remember his name!
SS: Exactly. When I was back in Melbourne I got a phone call from Wayne, my brother, who was a sports photographer at the time. He rings me and says, “Why the f--- is Jim Stynes ringing me for your number again? How do you know him? Why does he want your number? I don’t want you knocking around with footballers!” He was actually quite cross. Wayne gave Jim my number, he phoned me, and invited me to go to dinner.
HM: Where?
SS: I was a really sheltered 20-year-old, and our first date was to a dinner at Government House when President Mary Robinson was out from Ireland. A state dinner at Government House … at 20 … as a first date. Can you imagine?
HM: What had Jim told you?
SS: He just said “You need to dress up”. My friend was doing fashion designing at RMIT, so she gave me some ridiculous black dress to wear. Jeff Kennett was there, as he was premier at the time. I was at one end, he was up the other, and I didn’t know a soul. They put a government official next to me, who had been briefed on who I was, to make conversation with me. I was a duck out of water, quite frankly. It was a great night, and we were laughing because it was a new experience for Jim too. Here we were at Government House for a state dinner with everyone that was anyone in Melbourne. That was our first date … thanks Jim!
HM: And from then on it just kicked off?
SS: We went out for eight months, and then we broke up. I was really insecure, to be honest. Jim was quite well known at that stage, and I struggled coping with all the attention around him.
HM: You don’t like attention anyway, do you?
SS: No. At that time, I’d accompanied Jim to a Brownlow dinner, and he picked me up in a limo. This stuff sounds more normal these days, but back then it wasn’t normal. It was a bit of a big deal. On the way, he said “When we walk in, you might get asked who you think is going to win”. I didn’t know and quite frankly didn’t care. He said: “You need to care, and you need to know who you think is going to win”. He told me who to say, and it was horrific because I walked in and Sam Newman came straight up and made some derogatory comment about the way I looked. The whole scene, at 20, was too much for me.
HM: You checked out. How did you rekindle the flame?
SS: I checked out, and then four years later he rang and asked me to come to his 30th.
HM: Had you spoken at all?
SS: A little bit. We stayed friends, because I was studying visual art and then I swapped my degree to teaching. He was a teacher, so he used to lend me books and give me advice about different things. We were genuinely just friends, but then he invited me to his 30th and we entertained hanging out again for a while. It didn’t last because I still thought he was the same dude that he was. A couple of years after that, when I was then working as a primary school teacher and still studying, we went to see a film. The third time around we dated for years until we were married.
HM: Married in what year?
SS: I think it was 2000. Actually, no, maybe it was 1999. No, that can’t be right, maybe 1998. I’m not sure …
HM: I love the fact you don’t know when you were married.
SS: Hang on, let me get this right — it was on the 4th of November 2000, actually. It was Derby Day.
HM: Who gets married on Derby Day?
SS: Not many! A lot of people weren’t happy about that. It was the only day we could fit in because of his schedule.
HM: Shocking choice of day — I’m amazed anyone went. Jim had an amazing threshold for pain. He played 264 games for the Demons — 244 games in a row. What was the closest he got to breaking the streak?
SS: When he fractured his ribs and played, although he probably shouldn’t have. He was a mental giant. He had an alternative physician, and I was at the game when he did the rib. He was rushed to hospital, and they said, “You probably won’t be able to play”. We drove the next day to Trentham, where this particular physician had his rooms, and he did all sorts of weird things and said he’d be right to play. And he did. He shouldn’t have, but he did.
HM: Two hundred and forty-four in a row is unlikely to ever be broken. He was so brave with the cancer too — when did he first realise he was sick?
SS: He was diagnosed in 2009, but the lump in his back was there in all of 2008.
HM: You could see it?
SS: Yeah, it was a golf ball-sized lump. At the beach his friends would tell him that he had a golf ball sticking out of his back. He had it checked, but the doctor said it was clear initially.
HM: Who finally diagnosed him with cancer?
SS: Dr Graeme Southwick, a fabulous plastic surgeon. He used to do a lot of voluntary work at the Melbourne Football Club. He knew Jim from stitching up his cuts that he’d get when he played. Jim went to see him just as a mate, really only because I kept telling him to go and get the lump checked. He said: “Come back tomorrow and I’ll take it out on the table”.
HM: He wasn’t seemingly too stressed by it?
SS: No — it was all very casual, and he was pretty sure it would be nothing. When Jim got home from having that lump cut out, he said it all had gone from being quite jovial and everyone making jokes, to all of a sudden Graeme working away dead silent with the nurse.
HM: He knew.
SS: He must have. It was sent off for testing, and then it was maybe four days later when we were called in on a Friday. It was also the night of one of the Reach Foundation gala balls, a big night for Reach to raise a lot of money. We were told how bad things were. Jim and I then went for a cup of tea across the road from the surgery, sat there and cried. Then Jim said, “S--t, it’s 5 o’clock. We’ve got to go and get ready for the ball”. I said, “I can’t go to that” … “Yes, you can”. We went home, dressed up and went to the ball and pretended that everything was fine.
HM: He was a brave, pragmatic man.
SS: He was. In the end they labelled it melanoma cancer, because it had the most matching markers.
HM: He always thought he would beat it, didn’t he?
SS: Absolutely he did. It’s funny you ask me that. A few days ago, (our daughter) Matisse found a video he’d taken of himself four or five months before he actually died, after he got back from Jakarta.
HM: He had alternative therapy in Jakarta.
SS: It was the most horrific thing that I’ve ever seen in my life. It involved smoke therapy, where you drink tonics and then they heavily massage you. We were there for three weeks — he was getting worse and worse. It seemed like a third-world, weird treatment. I was on the phone to our oncologist Professor Grant McArthur the whole time, beside myself with the two young kids there. Jim was so adamant that the treatment was working, but it wasn’t.
HM: He was very open-minded — open to anything?
SS: Anything — but this took being open to anything to a whole new level. He wouldn’t leave because he was convinced that the treatment was going to work. Eventually I had to get him back, and he got taken off the plane from Tullamarine straight to Peter Mac in an ambulance. They found four or five bowel tumours that could have killed him — he was so ill.
HM: What did he say on the video?
SS: Once he got that news how bad things were and that the treatment hadn’t helped, he was just so disillusioned. He was given the news that the treatment wasn’t working, but he couldn’t tell me face-to-face. On the video he said: “I haven’t told Sam yet, but I’m feeling defeated and deflated. I think this is going to beat me”. That’s the only time I’ve ever heard him say that throughout those three years, and even then, he didn’t say it to me. He said it to a video camera.
HM: Did you ever say to him at any point, “Jim, this is going to get you at some point, we need to plan for this”?
SS: Only at the very end. Jim’s heart was so strong. It was common that the palliative care doctor, Peter Sherman, would come and say “This will be it”, but then he’d live another week because his heart was so strong. I felt an ethical responsibility to let him know, but by that stage he wasn’t completely coherent. When he had a moment of clear thought, Dr McArthur and I decided that he should be told. He heard it, and he said, “F---. I’m really scared. I don’t want to talk about it again. I just want to keep fighting for every extra minute I can get”.
HM: And he did.
SS: He did. He got more months than anyone predicted. He never wrote me a letter, he never said anything about the end, because he didn’t think it was coming. All he said was: “You’ll have to rebuild your life for you and the children”. He left me some bullet points on a document, which is on the computer, which I re-read all the time. It told me financially what I needed to do, and what he wanted me to do with the kids. He bought me a beautiful necklace before he died, with a heart, that I wear every day.
HM: Julia Gillard described him as “a man of superhuman courage”. You’ve said jokingly that everyone that knows him said he was “a selfish prick”. How would you describe him?
SS: (laughs) He was! I was just thinking, and it’s not answering your question, but another conversation we had in the last days when he was nearing the end, he apologised to me and said, “I f---ed it up. I should have spent more time with the family, you and the kids. I’m really sorry”. My genuine heartfelt response was, “No, you didn’t, because I don’t reckon that’s what you were here for”. He was still a great husband, and a wonderful dad, but I said, “I just think you were here for all the other things that you did in your life, and I reckon that’s the way it was meant to play out. I’m strong, and the kids will be strong”. Jules (Lund) was on an interview on A Current Affair the other night, about this business he’s building and how Jim had been his major role model in driving him to succeed. He said: “Every day I grapple in my own head, because towards the end Jim said to me, ‘don’t f--- your family up because of your own personal business goals, or financial goals. Get that balance right’. Jules said he still grapples with that.
HM: What’s been the most difficult aspect for your children with not having their father around?
SS: They’re fortunate because they have an amazing stepdad as a role model in that fatherly role. Geoff (Porz) has been incredible having his own three children, who are young adults at 24, 22 and 20. Matisse is 17 and Tiernan is 14. Geoff was a little bit ahead in parenting, and to take on Matisse and Tiernan so hands-on … because he’s a confident guy, there’s never been any sensitivity issues or insecurity. I think it helps that he’s a huge Melbourne supporter.
HM: He was a Jim fan?
SS: He didn’t know Jim well, but he knew him and was a fan, yes. The kids are really fortunate that they’ve had Geoff as a role model, to have consistency and stability. The hardest thing for them, I suppose, is not really ever knowing him like they would have liked to, or like a child should know their dad. In 2012 when Jim died, Tiernan was seven, and three or four when he was diagnosed. Those years when he was fighting the cancer, he was busy. Matisse would remember a little more. They’re really well adjusted, and I’m super proud of them. They could have been a lot more troubled and dark, but because they don’t have a father but they know what happened, I feel they see life differently than they would have if Jim hadn’t have died. Death is real for them, too. “Our Dad died, people do die, and you only get one shot at it” is their view, so they work seriously hard at life, enjoy it, and appreciate that it’s precious. They love life, because I think they realise it can be taken away from you very quickly.
HM: You lost your father to cancer and you lost your husband to cancer. How do you see life? The kids see it as precious and privileged. Has your view changed through your father, and through Jim?
SS: Definitely. I’ve relaxed a lot. I still have beliefs, ideologies and passions, but I’m not so angry about them. I don’t mean to sound apathetic, because I do care about things, but I don’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t really matter, whereas in the past I might have wasted time on some stupid conversation or having an opinion on someone. I don’t judge anyone anymore, about anything. In the past I might have been more opinionated, but now I just take a deep breath and move on.
HM: Jim said that you had to rebuild your life, for yourself and the kids, and you’ve been lucky to be able to. Does the Brady Bunch work pretty well?
SS: It’s great! We are lucky because all the kids are different ages, so there’s no age clash. They’re all great kids, and the five kids are pretty close now. Like a traditional biological family where you’re all blood related, they’ve come to a place where it just feels like that. The five kids all basically hang s--t on Geoff and I.
HM: And they all get on well?
SS: They’re very close. We’ve worked hard at it, all seven of us. Geoff’s kids have their own mum, so I never overstep the mark of mothering Geoff’s kids, and while Geoff was a role model and a father figure, he never overstepped the mark in over-fathering Matisse and Tiernan. We’ve just approached it that way, and it’s all come together really nicely. There’s a lot of respect, fun, laughs, jokes.
HM: You’re fortunate to have found love again — some husbands and wives really struggle to.
SS: That’s true. When I met Geoff, I said to my parents, “The timing’s pretty s--t. It’s too early, I’ll get judged”, and I did, by my friends and people who didn’t know me, but that’s OK. I have a theory on that, though. My stepdad, when he met Geoff, said, “We think it would be unlikely that you’d meet someone that you’re so like-minded with again in this lifetime. Would you let that go because of timing, or give it a shot?” They encouraged me to give it a shot.
HM: Jim’s mother looked you in the eye one day. What did she say?
SS: She took my hand and she said, “Sam, you have to live now, this is your time. Get out there and do your thing”. She was great, an amazing woman.
HM: You said you were judged and there was backlash. You have a theory on it?
SS: When Troy Broadbridge died in the tsunami, (his wife) Trish was criticised for not coping, and not moving on. I think it just comes with the territory. You can’t really win. You either don’t move on fast enough — “get on with your life and get a grip” — when people are over you being a victim and complaining, or you move on too fast and all of a sudden, you’re uncaring — “how could you have room in your heart?” For widows it’s hard either way. You can’t really win, so you just have to do what you want to do.
HM: I’m glad you are happy. Where did the passion for early education come from with Jumbo (the early education program she founded)?
SS: I was a primary school teacher, and like the way Jim approached most things in business, he was throwing lots of darts at the dartboard. Have you heard of Robert Kiyosaki?
HM: He wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad?
SS: That’s right. Jim was obsessed with him, and he was coming to Queensland to do a conference, so he decided to go to that. At that course he got along well with a guy, and they decided that child care was the way of the future. “If you get in now, you’ll do really well.” When he walked out, Jim said we were starting childcare centres. What? Don’t be ridiculous. But we did. We ended up with 18 of them and getting very lucky.
HM: You had 18 of them?
SS: Yep — that’s the weird s--t he did all the time. We had a car park in Budapest!
HM: (laughs) How did that go?
SS: Not great, because we couldn’t get the money out of Hungary. We had so many crazy ideas including a hotel in Launceston; apartments in Hobart; he was into shark cartilage sales. Even when I first met him, he was selling vacuum cleaners, he was even excited by Amway. He was always into something. He was entrepreneurial by nature, and with his brother, Brian, they were some team. It’s quite scary when you’re a young family and you’re mortgaging your house to invest in a car park in Budapest. We got ripped off in America. We built properties and the guy sold them from underneath us, so we had to go to America to sort everything out. There was always some crazy business thing, but the childcare is the one that paid off everything.
HM: Did you ever get the money out of Budapest?
SS: I don’t think so! Only an Irishman could do it!
HM: (laughs) Now you spend your days growing Jumbo Early Education — an early learning centre in South Wharf. How does it link with the Jim Stynes Foundation?
SS: All the money that it produces goes to the Foundation, which distributes to charities that support disadvantaged youth. I just felt this overwhelming responsibility to do something to assist with his legacy. Jim said it would be a good way of creating a sustainable income without having to hassle people to come to functions and ask for money, which I’m not good at anyway. He was right — again. We have got the model right, and it’s going well and it funds the Jim Stynes Foundation and maintains Jim’s desire to help disadvantaged youth and help youth with sport — they were his two life passions.
HM: You don’t pay yourself, do you?
SS: Nope — labour of love. It’s been fun, though. My best friend Kirsty, who was an air traffic controller, agreed to do it with me. I asked her, “Can you come and work with me and be the director?” We met at Melbourne Uni. She then ended up becoming an air traffic controller and I thought, well, she’s got the educational background, she’s a teacher as well. She said, “Because you’re doing it for good, I’ll be a part of it. Why not”. As best friends, for four years we’ve spent this amazing time together building it up and creating something meaningful. Kirsty Fletcher’s husband, Chris, loved Jim. She’s actually Dustin Fletcher’s cousin, so she’s from the Essendon side of town. It’s been really good for us, and we’re just having a ball. It’s been really hard work, but that part has just been so joyful for me. We could make a TV show about it that’d be quite funny.
MORE FROM HAMISH McLACHLAN:
PHIL DAVIS ON HIS GRAND FINAL DREAMS AND HIS BRUSH WITH DEATH
DYLAN ROBERTON HOPES TO COME BACK FROM HEART CONCERN
AFLW STAR DAISY PEARCE KICKING NEW GOALS IN HER ROLE AS MUM
HM: I think Jim would be looking down and he’d be very happy with the way you and the kids are going.
SS: I reckon too — I hope so. This will sound a bit kooky, but I do sometimes look up and say to him, “I hope you’re proud of what we’re doing”. When I mother, I try and take into account what Jim would want and what he’d think. He made some things really clear early on. When Matisse gets her first car, he doesn’t want her to have particular brands and the like. I honour all that.
HM: Was the brand about being flashy, or the brand about being safe?
SS: Both. Safe and not flashy. He left me a list about the traits that he would like the children to have as they’re parented, and as they grow up. That was quite nice. In my own head I always refer to them.
HM: He’d be proud all right.
SS: Thanks. I’m really hopeful he would.
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