AFL Grand Final: From Maitland to the MCG - how ‘Little Tarzan’ Isaac Heeney became king of the AFL jungle
Isaac Heeney was born and bred in the quiet NSW country town of Maitland, where even the flies wore Newcastle Knights’ rugby league jerseys. To go from Maitland to the MCG for an AFL grand final is the unlikeliest and most imaginative of life stories.
A young Isaac Heeney would rock up to training for the Cardiff Hawks shirtless, madly fit, wild-haired, wilder-eyed, sun-drenched and fearless. The older blokes at the Newcastle club would roll their eyes and wonder who the footloose, freewheeling teenager reckoned he was.
“Little Tarzan,” laughs Heeney’s junior coach at the Hawks, Adam Dugan. “That’s what the senior players called him. He’d turn up at 13, 14, 15 years of age with no shirt on, that big mop of blonde hair, healthy and outdoorsy, his skin brown after summer, and the guys would go, ‘Who does the little bugger think he is? Little Tarzan?’ He could do anything. We went on a footy trip with his dad and his brother one time, camping up near Mungo Brush, and he never stopped moving. He’d go sliding down sand dunes, then he was doing backflips off poles at the beach. He was a talented little bugger.”
The 28-year-old Heeney was born and bred in the quiet country town of Maitland, outside Newcastle in NSW, where Australian Rules was an afterthought in his formative years. Even the flies wore Newcastle Knights’ rugby league jerseys. To go from little old Maitland to the MCG for an AFL grand final is the unlikeliest and most imaginative of life stories, as though Little Tarzan himself has been holding the pen and writing the chapters. From Maitland to the hustling, bustling, cavernous MCG as the Sydney Swans’ leading man against the Brisbane Lions … it’s Boys’ Own Annual stuff.
“I had the best childhood in the world,” Heeney once told News Corp Australia. “It was a really simple way of living, but it was epic. My parents were so supportive and loving and it was simple and cheap. We never had much money. We’d come home, eat sausages for dinner, always be outdoors … we built a bike ramp that we’d go down on this hill, and it was sort of like a quarter pipe, shooting off into the dam. You’d probably be a good four or five metres in the air with a pushbike that had a couple of milk cartons on it, so it didn’t sink to the bottom, and just launch into the dam. Dad, (brother) Beau and I would kick the footy to each other every afternoon and pretend to take hangers on each other … like kids do.”
Little Tarzan said of his junior days in Australian Rules: “I loved it from the get-go. Credit to Cardiff Hawks - it was a really fun, family sort of vibe. Everyone knew each other and was really welcoming. They were amazing for me. At the same time, I was the only kid in my primary school who played it. Then at high school there was only a handful of us out of, like, a thousand.”
A handful out of, like, a thousand? Sounds about right. I grew up in Newcastle, admittedly a couple of decades ahead of Little Tarzan, but none of us snotty-nosed little brats knew a Sherrin from a milkshake. Marks came from exams. Hangers were for clothes. The only forward arc I knew of was Noah’s. Any mention of Australian Rules had us slapping our thighs in laughter. Aerial ping pong! No way! For a Maitland boy to be going up there Cazaly on Saturday on one of the greatest days in Australian sport … it’s ca-razy.
“He stood out from day one,” Dugan says. “He was running rings around the boys his own age. You see the highlights reel now of him playing, where he’s sitting on blokes’ shoulders to take high marks, well, that was always him. Flying for species, kicking miraculous goals. You know how sometimes a special kid comes along? He was one of those kids. His standard was high. He had a go. He was diligent in trying to improve. He never bludged and he never wanted to get into any bad habits.”
Dugan adds: “Talent like that doesn’t know boundaries. It emerges and then takes on a life of its own. You see those stories at the Olympics – how did they get there? - I think Isaac’s story is like that. Would you have guessed this path when he was ten years old? No. Has he taken his opportunities to get himself there? Yes. He deserves a lot of credit. And he’s got a lot of support up here. He’s taking this whole region around Newcastle, his whole region, on the ride with him to an AFL grand final.”
Dugan will be at the MCG. Watching from Moss Vale, in the NSW Southern Highlands, will be Chris Smith, the John Hammond of our yarn. Hammond was the Columbia Records talent scout who discovered Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen; Smith started the ball rolling from Maitland to the MCG by signing a 12-year-old Heeney to the Swans Academy. It was a hot group, including future NRL superstar Tom Trbojevic and Michael Dickson, now with the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL. Without Smith easing Little Johnny Weissmuller towards an Australian Rules junior pathway, he might now be the Newcastle Knights fullback or batting three for the Australian Test cricket side.
Mate, we tell the wonderfully cordial Smith, you’re a genius! “I don’t know about that!” he laughs. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not offended, and you can go right ahead and call me a genius if you like. But I’ll tell you the truth about it all. I’d love to say it was brilliantly strategic but it was very much by chance that we got Isaac Heeney to the Swans.”
Do tell. “There was a carnival at Coffs Harbour and I knew the teams were made up of kids who played lots of different sports,” says the genius, Chris Smith. “It was a chance for them to get away from school and play some footy with their mates. When I say it wasn’t strategic, I mean, there was a game on at the main oval but it was a little one-sided, so I ventured down to the back oval and started watching that game instead. And there was one kid whose movement caught my eye. He was quite distinct-looking, with the blond hair, and he moved like a cat. Within minutes, he took a lovely mark. I thought, ‘Jeez, you don’t see many 12-year-olds taking catches like that.’ A few minutes later, he flattened some kid, which was fair play, nothing untoward, and I thought, ‘Good, he’s aggressive, too.’ That was how it happened. Just like that. It’s funny how it works. It was as simple as watching him play and thinking, ‘I have to follow up with this boy.’”
As a follow-up question, genius, how did you follow up with the boy? “It was a matter of speaking to a couple of people and asking where his parents were sitting,” Smith says. “I casually went over to them and said, ‘Look, your boy has a lot of promise. He has a lot of healthy attributes that could be nurtured.’ The beauty of the Academy was that I could say hand on heart, ‘Here’s a program where he can get proper development and guidance with like-minded kids.’ That’s basically how it started, with an innocuous glance at a game on a back oval at Coffs Harbour. If you were sitting there, you would have seen the exact same talent I did. It was obvious. It’s not like I saw something in Isaac that nobody else did. But feel free to keep calling me a genius.”
The stories about Heeney’s junior exploits have assumed an almost mythical status around Maitland and Newcastle. They reckon Little Tarzan went ape at every sport he tried. In soccer, they reckon he kicked 68 goals in 12 games as a seven-year-old. In cricket, they reckon he had a batting average of 216 as a ten-year-old. In rugby league, they reckon he scored five tries in a grand final as a 12-year-old. Which was the year Smith, the card-carrying genius, pulled off his recruiting masterstroke, signing up his prized cygnet.
“Once he hit the Swans Academy, his development really took off,” Dugan says. “He kicked on and on. He was travelling to Sydney once or twice a week from the age of about 12. He thrived. We could see it here. He was quiet, well-behaved and well-mannered and he was having a go. There’s a sort of quietly determined streak in him. He’s not aggro, but he stands up for himself. Even with his profile now - he’s pretty polished but when he first started getting interviewed on radio and television, he was a little bit shy, awkward and hesitant. He’s grown into that side of his life. He’s always been a diligent and very likeable young bloke and now more people are seeing it.”
Heeney’s salt-of-the-earth parents, Rochelle and Adam, did the five-hour round trip from Maitland to Sydney so Little Johnny Weissmuller could do his weekly sessions with the Swans Academy. Aged 18, their son moved to the big smoke. Now Heeney earns $900,000 a season. He has the AFL grand final at his feet. I reckon he’s the new beaming face of Sydney if the Swans get up. His handsomeness doesn’t hurt. My daughter saw his photo and said, “Good God, he’s gorgeous!” And now she plans to watch the match with her mates. Seven new AFL fans, right there.
“Yeah, he’s a good-looking rooster,” Dugan says. “We get a bit of that here, too, given there’s so many girls’ teams at the club now. We’ve got a life-size picture of Isaac. We had our presentation the other day and the girls kept getting their photo taken with this life-size Isaac Heeney. Every time we have a club function, the Isaac Heeney comes out and the kids all gather round to get a picture with him. It’s six-feet-two so it’s as big as him. The kids stand next to it and say, ‘Look how tall I’m getting!’”
From Maitland to the MCG. “In any classroom in Newcastle in 2010, when Isaac was at school, if there were 30 kids, only one may have played Australian Rules,” Smith says. “He was it. The relationship developed quite strongly between the club and his family. All pathways are littered with uncertainty, doubts and challenges, but he made the most of it. It wasn’t just that he looked like Little Tarzan, he played like it, too, but there’s other qualities that give you confidence he will succeed. There’s an element of trust in a young guy who makes you think, yes, he actually has the ambition to be the best he can be. You see his commitment is strong. It’s not necessarily about what they’re doing when they’re under your nose. You knew he was a boy that wanted to achieve anything he could. And that he would do whatever it took.”
What about Little Tarzan’s 68 soccer goals? What about Little Tarzan’s batting average of 216 in cricket? What about Little Tarzan’s five tries in a league game? He was a budding league fullback growing up in Knights country. Andrew Johns country. No country for aerial ping pong. “I think that was the beauty of NSW at the time,” Smith says. “You look at the southern states and normally kids start to specialise quite early in any given sport. In NSW, and with the Swans Academy, we found most of the kids had played most sports in some way, shape or form. If you threw them a basketball, they could shoot a hoop. If you threw them a soccer ball, they knew how to dribble and run. They knew how to kick a footy. What was deemed a bit of a disadvantage, to be an all-rounder, we thought was a plus. Kids like Isaac came in who had skill literacy from other sports. You see Isaac has this nice, tempered touch with his kicking and his handballs. I think from the beginning he brought in a lot of lovely touches from a lot of different sports. He’s always had maturity and there was always confidence his path would lead him somewhere very special.”
The adult Heeney isn’t too far removed from Little Tarzan. He still goes ape in a game of footy. He still glows with good health. He’s opted for a spivvy city-clickers hairstyle but he remains a blond bombshell. Good God, he’s gorgeous! He could play the grand final shirtless, madly fit, wild-haired, wilder-eyed, sun-drenched and fearless. Who did he think he was at the Cardiff Hawks? Nobody knew who the golden child would become.
“He’s very humble and he’s very selfless,” Dugan says. “He’s always happy to help out. His mum and dad have been off-grid and travelling round Australia for 12 months. They had to drive up to Darwin and jump on a plane to get to the preliminary final last week. I dare say they’ll go to the grand final and then fly back to Darwin and get back in the car and keep having their holiday. They’re good people. The apple hasn’t fallen far. Isaac’s mum was telling me the other day, ‘He feels guilty he never gets back up to the club.’ I said, ‘Don’t be silly. You have no idea how much good he’s doing. All the kids watch him on tele. All the kids love him. We’re all on his side. All he has to do is keep chasing his dreams.”
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