By Jake Niall
Whether they were written, or responding to events on the field in the moment, Robert Walls offered the audience hard takes rather than the ubiquitous hot takes of today.
Walls was a notably rugged champion centre half-forward in the 1970s, willing both to inflict physical punishment and take what was coming. As a young player at Carlton, Mike Fitzpatrick – later to be skipper of two Blues premierships and AFL commission chairman – saw “Wallsy” bide his time and clean up a St Kilda opponent who had felled him a year or two earlier.
Robert Walls in 2004 with fellow Talking Footy panellists Bruce McAvaney and Caroline Wilson.Credit: Channel Seven
“He didn’t miss,” Fitzpatrick recalled.
That phrase was often deployed for Wallsy’s media work. When he had a player or team in his sights, he would invariably: a) hit the mark and b) not retreat from his words, no matter the fallout.
“He didn’t worry about what people thought,” said Stephen Quartermain, who called mainly Saturday-night games for Ten alongside Walls from 2002 until 2011. “He always stood by it.”
But these hard takes were always considered, and – this is the crucial point – they were born of conviction and carried weight. They were not in the least manufactured or calculated to create uproar.
He just saw it and called it.
If Wallsy said a player had jumped out of the way to avert contact – an accusation he essentially levelled at some Collingwood players after the 2003 grand final – it was as though he was personally offended.
As a callow young journalist at the now defunct Herald, I recall our editors, who had Carlton affinities, bringing Wallsy in to write some columns in the 1990 season, the year after his brutal culling by the ruthless Blues. He wrote one about Collingwood, detouring into his experience of the Victoria Park cauldron, which he labelled the “most biased” and hostile crowd in the game. “Thank god for police protection,” he added pointedly.
In the 1990s, when Walls was finished up as coach of the Brisbane Bears, he wrote some preview-style pieces for The Age, whose then sports editor was impressed by Walls’ clarity of thought in concise, short sentences.
“Footy doesn’t have a [Peter] Roebuck,” then sports editor Patrick Smithers told Walls, referencing Australian cricket’s most authoritive [ex-player] voice. “You’re good at this.”
And so was launched a media career that was as innovative as his invention of “the huddle” and other set plays he pioneered as coach at Fitzroy and Carlton. Radio – mainly 3AW – and television gigs inevitably followed.
The columns would arrive by fax machine, carefully hand-written with a school teacher’s touch. Wallsy was never “ghosted” by an editor or journo, as per less literate footballers.
An ex-champion who played under Wallsy – and loved him, as so many players and colleagues did – jestingly said on the day of his passing that some of his coaching methods would run into occupational health and safety strife in these more regulated times (the same is true of other coaches). Consider how his disciplining of Bears player Shane Strempel – put in to the ring and pummeled by teammates – would be received in today’s environment.
The same might be said of some of his hard takes. Wallsy essentially wrote that the West Coast 2006 premiership was tainted. He wrote of Tony Liberatore, who had felled Matthew Knights (whom Wallsy had coached), that if Libba had indeed split Knights’ head open, “then he has become a pathetic figure on our football fields”.
He scored a player zero out of 10 for a grand final performance.
In the televisual ring, his most celebrated confrontation was with Kevin Sheedy, which followed a spat on 3AW. Sheedy, who could mix jest and irreverence with an old back pocket’s spite, had quipped “not all the snipers were in Vietnam” in the ’70s, in a snipe at Walls.
Sheedy accused Walls of “hiding” in Brisbane after his stint at Carlton. “See you on Monday,” Walls fired back. The volcanic radio exchange was followed the next Monday by Sheedy’s appearance on Seven’s Talking Footy, where Walls was a panelist alongside host Bruce McAvaney and this paper’s pioneering chief football writer Caroline Wilson.
Robert Walls on air for Channel Ten with Stephen Quartermain.Credit: Getty Images
David Barham, then the producer of Talking Footy and who became of Wallsy’s closest mates (and hired him to call at Ten), instructed McAvaney to do the introduction and let the current and ex-coaches let fly – as they did.
Walls counter-punched – hard – by noting that Sheedy had been driving a Rolls-Royce at Essendon and didn’t know what it was like to get money from his own bank account to pay a player at a broke club, and so forth. The pair ended the program on more convivial terms, like a pair of boxers who had just finished the bout.
It was riveting television.
Walls, as several media people have noted, played the media game as he had coached – hard but fair. His calls landed and even if they upset individuals and clubs, Wallsy had the commentator’s most crucial commodity – authority.
If there is no exact analogue to Wallsy in today’s voluminous footy media, I would venture that his columns were the game’s answer to Niki Savva’s now, in that they came from someone who had been inside the tent (Savva having worked for Peter Costello and John Howard), and who brought that insiders’ vantage and intimate knowledge, but opined without fear or favour.
Unlike today’s media practitioners, Wallsy pre-dated the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, which demands hot takes.
He also had a knack for reading the play in live broadcasts. Quartermain recalls how, in the 2004 game famed for James Hird hugging a spectator following the match-winning goal at Docklands (after Hird had a stunning last quarter), Wallsy had implored West Coast to surround and smother Hird if they wanted to hang on.
In dealing with Wallsy when he was coaching – and I didn’t do so until he was at Brisbane – I was always impressed by his candour and decency. He and Leigh Matthews stood out for their unwillingness to tell untruths, even about injured players. I’m not sure that Wallsy knew how to tell a lie.
This trait made him a formidable figure in the burgeoning footy fourth estate. I won’t call him a “media performer” because didn’t perform at all.
He just called it.
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