Vale Ron Barassi: Seismic moment VFL/AFL legend changed football forever

Ron Barassi is a football icon. In the game’s equivalent of the “Big Bang Theory”, he made a call that changed history as we know it.

Ron Barassi. Picture: David Caird

In football terms, it became the game’s equivalent of the “Big Bang Theory” – that one seismic moment that changed everything.

A game that had been essentially that – a game – for more than 100 years turned almost on its axis in the summer of 1964-65, and the aftershocks are still being felt today.

Back then, footballers rarely changed clubs. If they were discarded, they might try their fortunes elsewhere. Or if they sought greater opportunities from a playing and coaching perspective, they might seek a new home.

But if they were stars, they almost always remained in the same constellation.

Kids who had their heroes’ numbers on the backs of their woollen jumpers were content in the knowledge that they rarely needed their mums to unstitch them.

Ron Barassi changed all that.

Ron Barassi and Chris Judd in 2015, marking 50 years since Barassi made the shock move to change clubs. Picture: Mark Dadswell

Just months after leading Melbourne to the 1964 premiership – his sixth as a player and his second as the club’s captain – Barassi accepted an offer to captain-coach Carlton.

It was, as he recalled to this reporter on the 50th anniversary of his move, “the hardest decision” of his life.

It was to become the biggest player-club switch in the game’s history, and a clear reference point for all that was to come in the decades ahead.

“My whole life had been dominated by the Melbourne Football Club — it was my family as much as anything else,” Barassi said in 2015.

“I changed my mind a few times about the move. It was tough, but it turned out to be the best football decision I ever made.”

That decision rocked the football Richter scale.

Kids openly cried, wondering what they would do with their Melbourne No.31 jumpers; grown men held back tears in an effort to console their sons and daughters, and a poor Melbourne supporter from Lilydale was at a loss to know what to do with the parrot she had spent months teaching to say: ‘C’mon Ron, C’mon Ron.’

Barassi was Melbourne. As Richmond legend Jack Dyer said: “Barassi was so much Melbourne we all believed it wasn’t a guernsey he wore, (it was) just the colour of his skin.”

As Barassi recounted: “At the time I was so focused on the job ahead of me that I probably didn’t appreciate how my leaving Melbourne may have affected some people.”

It wasn’t a straightforward defection.

Barassi in 1968.

Barassi initially rejected the Blues’ approach after the offer of 9000 pounds across three seasons had been leaked to leading football journalist Alf Brown from The Herald.

But after he and his family attended Melbourne’s 1964 Christmas party, a few exchanges on the day helped change his mind, as the footy tectonic plates started moving swiftly.

Barassi felt he was getting “some dirty looks” from certain Melbourne officials and his coach and mentor Norm Smith said to him ‘I see you are writing your own stuff (in the papers) now’ in reference to Alf Brown’s newspaper report.

There and then the man who had been linked to Melbourne from his earliest days decided it was time for him to move.

He would later say: “I went home and thought ‘Gee, I have just knocked back an incredible offer and all I am getting from Melbourne are the rounds of the kitchen sink’. Then I thought ‘Bugger it, I’ll start the negotiations all over again’.”

He accepted the role at Carlton a few days before Christmas, but Melbourne initially refused to clear him.

Ron Barassi still loved his Dees long after he left the club. Picture: David Caird

Smith, one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game and Barassi’s long-time mentor, offered to hand over the Melbourne coaching job to him — to keep him at the club.

But as some people close to Barassi told him, if he proved a success with Melbourne as coach, it would always be seen as the extension of Smith’s success. By doing it on his own at Carlton, it would be his achievement alone.

The standoff between Melbourne and Carlton lasted nearly two months before the Demons finally relented, and a phone call to Princes Park late on the evening of February 16, 1965 proved the icebreaker.

It came from Melbourne secretary Jim Cardwell who told the Blues: “He (Barassi) is OK. Melbourne says ‘cleared with our good wishes’.”

Footy’s biggest switch was completed.

Carlton – and Barassi – would go on to win a flag within four seasons; Melbourne would be forced to wait more than half a century for their next one.