Tim Lane opens up on his 2002 fallout with Eddie McGuire, the fiery phone call and his one big regret
He was the big name recruit to help lead Channel 9’s football coverage. But a secret clause in his contract regarding Eddie McGuire was the hidden detail few knew about – until it blew up the footy media landscape.
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Tim Lane stands awkwardly in front of a packed studio at Channel 9’s Bendigo Street headquarters in Richmond.
It’s the second week of February, 2002, and the veteran ABC broadcaster has just been unveiled as one of the star recruits for Nine’s showpiece Friday night commentary team.
Kerry Packer, the network’s billionaire owner, has seized control of the AFL’s prized TV rights from arch rival Channel 7 and Lane is among the array of big-names being paraded at a gala season launch.
But Lane has a problem. A big one.
Moments earlier, the late Ian Johnson, the then interim chief executive of the Nine network, had introduced the evening’s master of ceremonies: “The man who will be the face of Nine footy and caller of all Friday night games, including Collingwood games, Eddie McGuire.”
Unbeknown to all but a few in the room, Lane had signed a contract specifically stating that McGuire, the Collingwood president, would stand aside from commentary duties for all Magpies matches.
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Lane’s rationale for the clause was not so much that he believed McGuire would have a conflict of interest, but that he had one of his own as an ABC employee where he correctly anticipated it would become a hot topic for weekend football talk back callers.
He had agreed to juggle his new gig at Nine with his position as the ABC’s chief footballer caller.
“I felt a responsibility as an ABC broadcaster to be able to guarantee independent coverage of the issues that might appear on my radar,” Lane reflected this week.
“If I was to work alongside Eddie in the broadcast of Collingwood games, I felt my hands would be tied. If Eddie’s role became a talking point on ABC Radio, as was clearly foreseeable, I was the one who would have a conflict of interest.”
It was McGuire, the imperious host of Nine’s smash hit The Footy Show, who had first approached Lane about joining the commentary team in May 2001.
“A lingering cause of discomfort for me is that it was Eddie who first established contact on behalf of Nine, and I imagine it was his idea to invite me on board. We met and had coffee and he laid out the opportunity,” Lane said.
“Should I have asked Eddie there and then whether he was going to be involved, and to what extent? With hindsight, perhaps, but I didn’t have the benefit of hindsight in that meeting. It was an out-of-the-blue job offer and I wanted to give it careful consideration.”
At the end of that first meeting, McGuire told Lane that the negotiation should be conducted with Nine producer Cos Cardone.
Lane hired an agent, Isaac Apel, a lawyer who knew his way around the media landscape, then headed to England to cover the 2001 Ashes tour.
SIGNING THE DEAL
BACK in Melbourne two months later, Lane told Apel he was keen to call for Nine on Friday nights so long as the ABC remained his primary employer and the role didn’t conflict with the performance of his day job.
The ABC was initially uneasy about Lane entering into a commercial media arrangement, knocking back his request to do so, before the decision was overturned by then managing director Jonathan Shier.
Lane’s multi-year contract with Nine, signed in November 2001, included two specific clauses approved by network boss David Leckie.
The first was an assurance that McGuire would not call any Collingwood games alongside Lane. And the second was an exemption for Lane having to wear the station’s distinctive ‘Nine Dots’ on his blazer. All was agreed.
But the first hint of trouble emerged early in the new year after Leckie was replaced by McGuire’s great mate and mentor, Ian Johnson.
“I heard something that made me wonder whether the ground had shifted on the matter of Eddie’s role,” Lane recalled.
“I can’t remember now what it was, but it bothered me enough that I contacted Isaac. His discussions with the network caused him to be confident things remained as they were.
“The answer, when he got back to me, was a very definite ‘no, nothing has changed’.”
But quite clearly it had. Without consultation, Nine changed its mind.
When Johnson introduced McGuire at the season launch and announced that the Pies boss would be behind the microphone for all Collingwood games, Lane knew his instincts had been right.
“I wasn’t completely surprised, but I also felt sick,” he said.
“We left the stage to mix and mingle and right in front of me appeared Isaac, greeting me with the words: ‘We have a problem’.
“I could have just backed down and accepted what was before me — and pressure was put on me to do that — but I had to ask myself why it had been important to push for these conditions in the first place.
“There was now another imperative for me and that was to talk to Eddie. I wanted to explain the tide of events to him so he at least had a full understanding of my actions. But unfortunately, because it was now a legal matter, I had to accept Isaac’s instruction to sit fast and wait for Nine to act. My advice was to discuss the issue with no one beyond personal confidants.
“So, I waited. The pre-season competition started a few days after the launch, and I found myself calling my first game on Nine with Eddie.
“It was fun but, under the secretive circumstances, it was also excruciating.
“It wasn’t until the middle of the week prior to the start of the season that the go-ahead came. At that point I made the call to Eddie.”
He told McGuire he could not go back on the terms of his contract.
“Our conversation was convivial, and he encouraged me to give it some more thought and ring him back the following day,” Lane said.
“While I knew nothing would change in that time, perhaps foolishly I agreed to sleep on it.
“The second conversation took a different tone.
“When I told him my position was unchanged, Eddie was angry. The call — I was going to say ‘conversation’, but it was hardly that — lasted close to 50 minutes and my contribution was minimal. But it was done.”
EDDIE TEES OFF
THE story quickly got out.
“The day after my ‘departure’ from Nine was announced, Mike Sheahan wrote in this paper that I didn’t ever belong there and that on the night of the launch I looked as though I didn’t want to be there, or words to that effect. Perhaps he was right.”
A defiant McGuire hit the airwaves declaring he was angry his integrity had been called into question. He said he knew nothing of the clause in Lane’s contract.
“Nobody knew about it other than Tim and his manager and whoever did the contract,” McGuire said.
“My reputation and integrity is everything to me and to have that questioned is a bit of a blow.
“This is big time football — if you’re not 100 per cent committed to Channel 9 football, there’s no place for you.
“If Time Lane got his way, it would have meant Channel 9 would have had to dump me or I would have stepped down from Collingwood. Those are big calls and neither was going to happen.”
But Lane was ahead of the game. McGuire’s conflict of interest became a sore point for fans, who accused him of bias.
A 2004 report by Professor Jack Clancy at RMIT University found that McGuire made 18 pro-Collingwood calls about umpiring decisions during a match against Brisbane at the Gabba and no pro-Lions calls.
“McGuire is seeing the game as a supporter,” Prof Clancy declared.
“The trouble with that is it doesn’t fit in with the task of giving an objective call of the game.”
McGuire outright rejected it.
“Ask yourself this: Does a surgeon perform any differently when operating on a friend,” he declared.
“I detach myself when calling Collingwood games, despite what people say about a supposed conflict of interest.”
Opinion was divided, but Lane took a stand.
“I received a lot of public support, for which I was grateful: even if much of it was based on what I felt was the misinterpretation that I had ‘called out Eddie’,” he said.
“Clearly, the foisting of a club president’s description of his own team’s games on an audience was disrespectful. That was a matter on which the AFL should have been prepared to exert some influence.
“These telecasts were, after all, exclusive to one channel. But my action had more to do with the performance of my own job at the ABC.”
McGuire, of course, no longer commentates on Collingwood games. On reflection, Lane, who reached a confidential settlement with Nine, wishes he’d been clearer about his stand being more about his own conflict than Eddie’s.
“Seeing that front-page story again makes me cringe because the experience wasn’t a pleasant one,” he said.
“It created tension between Eddie and me which I don’t think either of us particularly enjoyed. It also caused me to feel antagonism towards some prominent media colleagues who went hard against me without fully understanding, or representing, my side of a complex story.
“Nevertheless, I take some responsibility for this. One thing I learnt from the experience was how important it is, in the face of a public controversy, to have your message distilled so it’s easily understood. And not to be diverted from it because the media at large have their own popular line.
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“In this case, the popular angle was ‘Eddie’s conflict of interest’, and the day the story broke they were the words reporters wanted to hear from me. Amid the heat of being in an unfamiliar position, I fell for it.
“What I should have done was to better explain that my action was taken so I could avoid my own conflict of interest. Because that was the essence of the issue from my point of view.
“When I look back on it now, that simple response might have taken some of the heat out of the drama.
“But it’s probably fanciful to imagine it would have killed off the idea that ‘Lane was taking a stand against McGuire’s conflict of interest’.”
