By Emma Kemp
If there was a phone booth near the boundary of the SCG, Isaac Heeney would have walked out of it. Under twilight skies on Wednesday, with no cape or lycra but a training guernsey so tight it might as well have been, Heeney adopted the upright power pose. Hands on hips, chest out, ready to save the Swans from Port Adelaide (or at least take some questions from the media).
Superman is blonde these days. Hairdressers would call it “clean blonde” – no brassy tones in that cropped coiffure. Like his game of late, the 28-year-old Heeney is sharply outlined. And, like Superman, he finds himself airborne on a regular basis. This last fortnight has been a blur of replays capturing the moment he climbed onto GWS defender Jack Buckley to pluck a match-turning mark from the sky. It has already been dubbed “Heeney’s Heist” and placed proudly among Sydney’s greatest individual finals performances.
Isaac Heeney strikes a Superman pose talking to media this week.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
A fortnight later, here he is in all his well-defined glory, readying for his 200th AFL game and preparing to “crack in” whenever the contest calls for it. “Horse [coach John Longmire] will sometimes go, ‘All right mate, we need something from you here’,” he says. “Whether that’s me having a bit of a quiet game and he needs to rev me up to get me going, or whether he just needs me to hopefully stand up and try and take the game on.”
At the same moment Heeney is delivering these television-ready grabs, his childhood club is holding a sausage sizzle 150 kilometres up the NSW coast, to celebrate a visit from the AFL premiership cup during its journey across Australia en route to the grand final at the MCG.
The Cardiff Hawks are based in the Hunter region, where Heeney grew up climbing trees and riding calves on the family farm. Heeney’s hair of 15 years ago was more of a mullet crossed with a scruffy bowl cut. Rougher around the edges, it was a blonde mop waiting to be fashioned into the AFL’s golden boy.
“The first-graders back then used to call him ‘little Tarzan’ because he’d always rock up to pre-season training in summer with no shirt on and a sun tan,” says Adam Duggan, who coached Heeney in Cardiff’s under-16s from about the age of 12, when the fresh Sydney Swans Academy recruit started playing up with the older boys.
“One day he’d be mucking around up the farm, then the next up the beach and doing backflips off the posts that hold the sand back. He was always athletically gifted, and always wanting to be a part of everything, but certainly not the boisterous one – that was his brother.”
Boisterous Beau, 15 months older, played too – and had talent. But he did not, from other accounts, possess the quietly methodical drive of his little brother, who set up a running track around the boundary of the farm and used it to test himself with three-kilometre time trials.
Duggan says Heeney was not the most naturally talented runner, even by local standards. How, then, does he consistently win Swans’ pre-season time trials? “He makes sure he gets the most out of himself,” Duggan says, matter of fact.
That is also true of his size, which was not big then and, at 185 centimetres, is not overly big now, but targets opponents with the knack of somebody who has “been tackling bigger bodies his whole life”. That started during the formative 13–15 years playing against 16- and 17-year-olds in first grade, then rep footy and the NEAFL for Sydney’s reserves, before finally debuting for Longmire’s senior team in 2015.
A younger Isaac Heeney in 2016 with Callum Mills.Credit: Jessica Hromas
The rest is well-documented history. Now Heeney is in his would-be Brownlow Medal season, the one undone by high contact to St Kilda defender Jimmy Webster that left him with a one-match suspension and ineligible for the league’s highest individual honour. The earnest, heartfelt and heavily ridiculed “pretty shattered” video that followed seemed to tell the masses Heeney was a bit too neatly ironed inside and out.
The nice-guy persona does, for what it’s worth, appear to be genuine and not just trained for the camera. Heeney is known for being generous with his time when it comes to his ever-growing legion of Sydney fans, despite expressing his preference for anonymity (“it is really nice but I wouldn’t mind if it just left us alone a little bit”). He and Giants nemesis Toby Greene also took their 5th Quarter Camps clinic to Singleton in the aftermath of last year’s bus crash that killed 10 people.
There is also evidence of genuine banter in less formal settings.
A couple of years ago, during a lengthy interview with the Instructions Sold Separately podcast covering all manner of topics from his upbringing and move to Sydney to live with a host family, to sleep and recovery and CTE, Heeney debates the merits of top-knots and flannelette shirts, and Birkenstocks versus Havaianas versus old-school double-plugger thongs.
In 2021, he pranked his mother Rochelle on live radio, ringing her at home to ask for advice after being offered a pretend NRL contract with the Sydney Roosters “worth nearly $2 million a year”. “I like the thought of it, [being the] first person to do it,” he said on Nova’s Fitzy and Wippa. “But I don’t know. What are your thoughts?”
Rochelle was so shocked she stopped the tractor in the middle of a paddock. “First of all, what a compliment,” she said, trying to sound supportive. “But how would league go? F--- me drunk, it’s the dumbass game.” Heeney kept up the ruse for a couple of minutes, dropping Karmichael Hunt’s name into the conversation and verbally trying to work out if he would get game time, before eventually fessing up.
Then there was the other much-loved sport of “tree parachuting”. “You climb up these trees that aren’t too thick,” he said on the same show. “You might be up four to five metres, so a fair way up in the air. As you climb up, the tree will start to bend. And as it bends, you let your feet out so you’re hanging from the top of the tree until the tree hits the ground. But, in saying that, some trees obviously snap. We’ve had a few.”
While still wholesome, it at least lacks the polish of Wednesday’s tightly controlled seven-minute press conference. Perhaps that is why some myths live on. Like how he played soccer as a kid (up a grade, of course), and scored 68 goals in his first 12-game season, including 16 in one game. And how he played cricket up a grade too, averaged 216 runs and took some freakish catches as a wicketkeeper. Then there was rugby league, and his five tries during a school tournament grand final trip to Sydney.
If North Korean state media was involved, Heeney might have even shot 11 holes-in-one in his very first round of golf, just like Kim Jong-Il. It is lucky that we know Heeney used to be little Tarzan, has transformed himself into another being entirely and kicked 258 AFL goals with several years of his career still ahead of him.
And anyway, there is hard truth to Heeney’s fondness for the dominant Novocastrian code. “Newcastle was full of NRL, so I loved rugby league growing up,” he says. “Played it at school, I guess I wanted to do that up until probably the age of 14 or 15. It wasn’t until I was in Swans Academy that I could see a clear pathway there and loved it, and thought I’d decide to have a crack at AFL. I loved fullback, but also I didn’t mind the wing as well. They’d kick it to me and I could jump and hopefully take a grab.”
That he takes almost every grab now is, according to Duggan, the result of a younger Heeney specifically seeking feedback – no matter how critical. “We played a game up at Port Stephens, and at half-time he said, ‘How do you think I’m going and anything to add?’” Duggan says. “I said, ‘You’re going all right, but you’ve dropped two marks’. He said, ‘I didn’t drop two marks’, and I said, ‘Well, sorry, I must be watching the wrong game then’.
“As we ran back out for the third quarter, he pulled me aside and he said, ‘Sorry, I forgot about that one earlier that I dropped, I shouldn’t have dropped that’. That was how determined he was. A lot of other kids just wanted a bit of a praise or a pat on the back, but he knew your skills need to be spot on if you want to make it at the next level.”
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