Damian Drum was 53 games into his AFL coaching career – including nine straight losses in 2001, his third season – when he went for a toilet break during a routine meeting with the AFL over the Dockers’ plans for a future training base.

The club’s chief executive David Hatt, who had been at the meeting at a Perth hotel, warned him that he might want to go out the back way. There was a posse of media waiting for him.

Drum saw no reason why he shouldn’t go out the front way. He had nothing to hide.

Unsuspectingly he began to climb the stairs when the media swarmed and informed him it was being reported in Melbourne that he had been sacked as Fremantle coach.

Wide-eyed, almost smiling in shock and disbelief, Drum could only offer a few words: ‘Is that true? I thought you were just mucking around. I don’t know anything about it.”

The coach was the last to know that at a secret board meeting across town the Dockers board had decided to sack him. They hadn’t told him, but someone had leaked it out.

“I’m sure the vision has been played a million times,” Drum told the Sacked podcast about the most bizarre day of his footy life.

“It was a bit like reality TV before its time. ‘Let’s sack a coach and let’s do it on television … that might make for good viewing’.

“I am standing there in front of the cameras and (former Eagle and television reporter) Adrian Barich is more or less telling me I have been sacked.

“I said ‘That can’t happen, surely. That’s not right’. I nearly collapsed on the stairs.”

‘WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T BUGGER IT UP’

Time has long since healed Drum’s wounds, and in part, he has a degree of sympathy for the blundering Fremantle board who so woefully botched their sacking strategy.

He even hopes his own pain spared those coaches who have been on the chopping block over the past quarter of a century of a similar lack of respect in a sacking execution.

“Whenever you’re going to do something like this (sack a coach), you don’t want to bugger it up,” said the man who has seen his fair share of axings in his football and later political life.

“So if you are going to sack a coach, you need to be very, very clear as to how to do it.

“If you are going to do it, it has to be done with a lot of integrity, it has to be done with a lot of thoughtfulness, it has to be done in a pretty careful way.

“It has to be done with a sharp knife if you are going to take his head off.

“And they (Fremantle) couldn’t have botched it (worse) if they had tried.”

Having been stunned by the question the media had thrown at him on the stairs, Drum immediately sought an answer on the phone from Dockers’ football manager Gerard McNeill.

Still hoping it was just a horrible misunderstanding, the phone call crushed those hopes.

“I said ‘Has it really happened, Gerard?’ Drum recalled. “Then you realise it’s happened and you go home. There is not much else you can do.”

All these years on, he has a theory as to why the board didn’t tell him straight after the decision was made to sack him, even if that doesn’t excuse the leak out of the meeting.

“I think in their defence, the president (Ross McLean) had a business trip to Victoria planned for the next day, and maybe he wanted to tell me personally,” Drum mused.

“Maybe he (thought) … ‘We won’t say anything for 12 to 24 hours, let me get back from my business trip, and I’ll go and see him (Drum)’. That’s the only defence I can give them.

“As it turned out, someone leaked it out. And once it’s leaked, it can’t be brought back in.”

MAINTAINING DIGNITY

From the moment he was confronted on the stairs, Drum was determined to maintain his composure.

He “learnt something from observing” sacked coaches previously, and noted how they had responded to their situation.

“This one over here did it with a fair amount of grace, this one over here got a bit nasty on everybody, this one here blamed the players or the coaches or someone else,” he said in charting how certain individuals respond to a sacking.

Drum still honoured a commitment to Channel 7’s Dennis Cometti in a live cross that night. He even wore his club polo.

“Even in that very short time, you know how to act,” he said.

“I was able to just keep it together (in the cross) and say, ‘If this has happened, so be it’.”

He explained to Cometti that he wasn’t expecting good news the following day, but as much as he was bristling inside, he said the right things.

The kid from Congupna was going to go out with some class and dignity.

“It might not be what you’re thinking, but you know how to act and maintain your dignity,” he said. “I didn’t want (my coaching career) to end in a disaster or a name-calling situation.

“I really felt I (mostly) got great support.

“I reckon there was one chap there that probably could have been a bit more upfront and honest as to how things were going. But that didn’t happen.”

Still, the human element to his sacking was on display that night. As he spoke on camera just outside his family’s front door, one of his young kids poked her head through the blinds.

“Most of the kids were a bit young (for it to impact on them),” he said. “But my son Luke, who is 33 now, got into a blue at school the next week because someone’s teasing him about his dad being sacked.“

Drum says the good experiences his family had in Sydney, when he was an assistant coach, and in Perth, in his short stint with the Dockers, outweighed the negatives.

“Unfortunately, the footy didn’t work out and if you don’t win games of footy, you know you’re gonna get sacked,” he said.

“The club had every right to do it. Apart from the way they botched it at the coalface, behind the scenes they were incredibly good. It’s a shame it went that way.”

CONGUPNA TO THE CATS

Drum’s values in life were shaped by his family upbringing in Congupna, near Shepparton, in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, and at the local footy club where his family played, his father was the long-time secretary and his mother used to run the kiosk.

His mum also had another task. She had to pick up the umpires each Saturday from the train station, where they had travelled from Melbourne.

“I remember mum having to leave the kiosk and she would go into town and pick the umpires up, then take them back out to the farm and give them lunch, a full roast,” he said.

“She made sure she told them what numbers her sons were wearing. Then she would bring the umpires back to the ground (to officiate the matches).”

Drum’s sister married Richmond great Francis Bourke, and he thinks in hindsight that went a long way to him having a desire to chase his own VFL career.

“She (his sister) didn’t just bring home a good footballer, she brought home an amazing individual,” he said of Bourke.

“So probably Bourkey’s influence would have played a small role in driving that ambition that you need to have a crack.

“A lot of things went right for me in the last couple of years of me being in the bush. I won a (competition best and fairest) medal when I was about 19, about to turn 20. And without winning that medal, I don’t think any football club would have been interested in me.”

It led to an invitation for Drum, who was doing a carpentry and joinery apprenticeship, to train with Geelong, even if the Cats had stuffed up one element.

“The very first invitation I got was inviting me to come down and train with the under 19s,” he said. “I am thinking Geelong really haven’t done their homework here because I was already 20. I quickly rang them up and said: ‘I am not able to train with the under 19s because I had already turned.’ They asked me to come down and train with the seniors and the reserves.”

BLIGHT’S ULTIMATUM TO GAZZA

Drum had four coaches in his 63 games at Geelong, but his final two seasons under coach Malcolm Blight taught him so much about the game – and coaching.

As good as he found the likes of Billy Goggin, Tom Hafey and John Devine, it was Blight who stood out in terms of teaching.

He started to teach his players how to win rather than the traditional reason why you should win.

“He was uncompromising,” Drum said of Blight. “One particular start to the year stood out … He said to us: ‘Listen Gary (Ablett) hasn’t turned up again’. This is our third or fourth training session and Malcolm said: ‘If he’s not here on Friday, he’s not playing this whole year’.

“He was (threatening) to get rid of him. So we were like, ‘Wow, here’s Malcolm Blight telling all the players that turning up for pre-season training is so important that if the club’s best player doesn’t turn up on Friday, that’s it for him’.

“Quietly, Malcolm would say (later) ‘don’t ever make closed statements’.

Thankfully, Ablett finally turned up on Friday and a crisis was averted, but the rest of the Geelong playing group had a valuable lesson.

POWER OF PORT

If Drum learnt so much about footy from Blight, he learnt almost as much about life as the coach of Port Melbourne.

“You could walk in after a game or on a Thursday night after training and lined up at the bar you’d see a parish priest sitting next to a cop sitting next to a criminal and you would say ‘well, that’s works’,” he said

“Everybody came from all these different groups and backgrounds, but Port Melbourne was the only thing they had in common.

“It was an amazing club to be a part of, and it still is.”

One of Drum’s early lessons about just how different the Borough was came when saw a group of people standing around a car boot.

He went over to find out what was happening, and asked them ‘Boys, what are you selling?’

“One of them said, ‘Drummy, you like golf, don’t you?” I said ‘Yeah, I am addicted to golf’.

They said ‘OK we’ve got some golf balls, how many do you want to buy?’

I said: ‘I lost about four on the weekend and I can put them into the woods. I’ll take them all.’

He got a shock when he was told: ‘We’ve got a container load’.

His Port Melbourne coaching experience led him to Sydney where he became one of the game’s first full-time assistant coaches under Ron Barassi, before his move to Fremantle.

STARING DOWN TONY ABBOTT

If AFL coaching is a cutthroat industry, at least it prepared Drum for what he was getting himself into when he spent two decades for the Nationals in the Victorian Legislative Council and the Federal House of Representatives.

Was it a tough time for a man who had a strong reputation for loyalty and for sticking by his principles?

Maybe, but he loved the experience and he loved getting his teeth into projects that could help the people of the bush.

It brought him into day to day contact with a range of people including Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull and National leaders Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack.

He once confronted Abbott about his sniping of Turnbull.

“I stood up one time (in a meeting) and confronted him (Abbott) and called him out,” he said.

“He grabs me as we are leaving the Parliament that night and wants to know why I said what I said. I told him, ‘You are openly contravening the party rules … and slagging off the Prime Minister in front of the party room, and that’s just not on.

“He looked at me and said: ‘Fair enough’.”

As the Nationals whip, he had to sift through the tensions between Joyce and McCormack, and try to keep things on an even keel.

“I loved every moment of those 20 years … I look at some of the arguments that they have with each other now and I can’t believe they’re arguing,” he said with a smile.

“But that’s what it takes to play the game.”