The day the Dogs dumped Legend Royce Hart as coach

IT'S unlikely any VFL-AFL coach has been treated with as much disrespect as the great Royce Hart was when he parted company with Footscray in mid-1982.

IT'S unlikely any VFL-AFL coach has been treated with as much disrespect as the great Royce Hart was when he parted company with Footscray in mid-1982.

He wasn't sacked; he was demoted. All for the sake of saving a few bucks.

The Bulldogs tried to get one of the most revered names in football to go from senior coach one week to coaching the under-19s the next, so they didn't have to pay him out his full entitlements.

Hart wouldn't stand for it and told them to stick it. He walked away instead.

"The clause in my contract said that if I got sacked, they had to pay me a heap of money," Hart recalled.

Asked if he ever thought about staying on under those circumstances, he answered instantly: "What do you reckon? Of course not."

He got paid a severance payment, but not his full entitlements.

Hart coached the battling Bulldogs in 53 games from 1980 until the end of Round 10 in 1982, for only eight wins.

He was replaced in the same week that his long-time mentor Tom Hafey was sacked as Collingwood coach.

"We just didn't have the players to play the type of game style that I wanted them to play," he said. "It was a real struggle."

But Hart did bring through a number of players who would go on to good careers, including Stephen Wallis, Steve Macpherson and Michael McLean.

He was also responsible for pushing Kelvin Templeton out to centre half-forward, where he won the Brownlow Medal in Hart's first season as coach, 1980.

"It really developed him," Hart said. "I didn't think the ball was getting down there enough, so it is not good having your best player have limited opportunities."