Australian Football Hall of Fame 2025: The soaring highs and tough lows across Garry Lyon’s legendary footy career

Garry Lyon’s prolific media career means everyone knows about that infamous broken leg clip. But, while injuries played a part in his career, there’s no denying his importance to Melbourne’s history.

The broken leg that launched a thousand laughs on the Footy Show still gets numb every now and then.

But Garry Lyon is thankful it is attached to his body after it snapped in THAT final home-and-away round in 1987 as the Demons broke a 22-year finals drought.

Kyabram prodigy Lyon was a young star on the rise and the Demons needed to defeat Footscray at the Western Oval plus factor in Hawthorn knocking over Geelong to play finals for the first time since 1964.

EVERY INDUCTEE: TEARS, TRIUMPH AND AN ALL-TIME HOF SPEECH

Garry Lyon after breaking his leg against Footscray.

Lyon remembers it vividly: “We had to win and rely on a couple of other things so the build-up was huge. We ran out onto the ground and we had a large Melbourne contingent and it was heaving.

“I remember floating. It was the first sense that this was really big. I kicked the first goal and we were up and about and I went for this mark and I heard a snap.

“I know we have all seen (the footage). I went to stand up and my leg just flopped because both bones were broken and I thought my leg was going to drop off. I was looking at it thinking, ‘If I take my sock off, my foot will drop off’. So I started screaming like a banshee.”

Lyon sits in an office at Fox Footy recalling the tale with the trademark wit and comic timing that has propelled him to the top of Melbourne’s football media landscape.

And for a younger generation that have seen his sharp work on The Footy Show and Fox Footy, that much-replayed moment might well sum up his career.

Injuries certainly were a defining narrative of Lyon’s career – his capacity to play through them, his search for answers to remedy them, his 1990 training collision with teammate Steven O’Dwyer that might have ruined his one true chance at a flag.

Yet they were only a subplot of a 14-season, 226-game career that makes Lyon a worthy Australian football Hall of Famer.

As Lyon says, he was still proud of his resilience to eke out 20-game seasons when he might so easily have been sidelined.

Garry Lyon and James Brayshaw on Channel Nine’s The Footy Show.

Lyon is now a co-host of Fox Footy’s AFL 360. Picture: Tony Gough

He boasts five All Australian jumpers, he kicked 426 goals in Demons colours but was happier playing defence.

He held the Demons together as captain remaining impartial through merger talks as his own president Ian Ridley recommended a union with Hawthorn.

With an uninterrupted run with injury he had the talent to sail past 300 games.

With a touch of luck he might have nabbed the flag that eluded him for so long.

But his football career?

It speaks for itself.

Seven years after that broken leg he would battle against Footscray again, this time in the 1994 semi-final as Neil Balme’s Demons charged through September.

History buffs will remember Lyon’s glorious ten-goal haul.

Remarkably, it came in less than three quarters of game time as the rangy 193cm forward dominated five Dogs opponents.

“I could take you through every goal,’’ Lyon jokes, having relived the moment on YouTube with sons Ben, Josh and Tom enough times across the years.

“Honestly, it was one of those days. I played pretty well but when I watch it, Todd Viney hit me laces-out four times on his left foot. He couldn’t usually hit me on his right foot. So I kicked 10 goals but I had kicked 10 halfway through the third quarter.

“I had 14 shots by then. 10.4. I got a slight corky and felt it in my hamstring and stayed out and then when we ran out for the fourth quarter I could feel it and we were winning easily so the obvious thing was to come off and sit on the bench.

“I am not trying to be falsely modest. But I had 14 shots in two and a half quarters. It was a fun day.“

The Dees legend kicked 10 in a final in 1994.

Father Peter played 16 games for Hawthorn, with the Hawks failing in a cheeky attempt to loosen father-son eligibility rules to 15 games to nab his son.

But after a delegation of Demons officials arrived on the doorstep in Kyabram to request Melbourne-zoned Garry move south, his persistent lobbying convinced his parents.

Lyon trained as a teenager under the famously brutal Under-19s coach Ray ‘Slug’ Jordon, and was whipped into shape by senior coach Ron Barassi who ordered a gym-shy Lyon to hit the weights.

His debut game was at half back against Richmond’s Michael Pickering who ran him ragged.

“My career was coming to an end. He killed me, but he got injured, thank Christ”.

Lyon went forward to kick two late goals, played the next week in defence on “football god” Trevor Barker then by round 3 was playing centre half forward on Fitzroy’s Paul Roos.

He was away.

Shane Crawford, Garry Lyon, Robert DiPierdomenico and Jason Dunstall pose during the Australian Football Hall of Fame at Crown Palladium.

He would play 20 games as an 18-year-old under new coach John ‘Swooper’ Northey (26 goals), then kick 28 goals in that infamous 1987 season.

He is still thrilled the TV cameras didn’t witness his attempts to watch that first 1987 final with leg broken in two.

“I had a broken leg and an ankle the size of a watermelon so I had to get wheeled out of hospital in a wheelchair. I got pushed into the MCG in a wheelchair and we sat there and watched us kick the shit out of North Melbourne by 20 goals.”

Two weeks later he was watching as Jimmy Stynes ran through the mark against Hawthorn to end the club’s flag dreams.

Success came in a hurry for Lyon, a rangy, athletic key tall with a shock of jet black hair.

By 1988 he debuted for Victoria, kicking the winner late in an elimination final against West Coast then added three preliminary final goals to set up a grand final against all conquering Hawthorn.

“We would have been 20 to one to beat Carlton and we went out and beat them. I played on ‘SOS’ (Stephen Silvagni) and ‘Rhys’ (David Rhys-Jones) and had a good game and ran off saying, ‘We are in a Grand Final’,” he said.

“Hawthorn had played a single final and were all powerful and we had smashed ourselves and if we had played them 100 times we might have beaten them once or twice.

Lyon speaks to the crowd after his induction.

“I have never watched it back. It was a blur. It was so one-sided it wasn’t funny.

“It was disappointing but it was my third year. We will get one soon. They never came around again.”

The 1990 campaign still burns.

Lyon dominated in defence across the 1989 and 1990 seasons, with Melbourne beating Hawthorn in round 22 and the elimination final to set up a home semi-final against an Eagles side they had beaten in Perth weeks before by six goals.

Disaster struck at training.

“Everything had fallen into place. Collingwood and West Coast drew so we got a week off, we were rested and I felt as good as I had felt. I was running around doing the last two minutes of a drill and (teammate) Stephen O’Dwyer cleaned me up. We literally ran into each other,” he said.

He never won a premiership himself, but was on hand for a piece of Demons history. Picture: Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images

“I got a little crack in my cheekbone which didn’t stop me but I got this huge cork. I did a fitness test in Burwood and I couldn’t run but we said we will get over the top of them and I will play the next week. And we didn’t.”

Lyon has put up a veneer while on the media stage given his lack of premiership heroics but says it isn’t true that it didn’t eat away at him.

“No, that’s not quite right. I was sh***y. I wore that pretty heavily. You make peace with it but once you stay in the media you are hanging out with Dermott (Brereton) and (Jason) Dunstall and all these blokes who have won grand finals.

“I didn’t go into a dark cave but it used to get to me and then you make peace with it. You have to make peace with it. Because I felt a bit unfulfilled.”

Inductees Erin Phillips, Nick Riewoldt, Garry Lyon, Luke Hodge and Daisy Pearce.

Those countless hours crisscrossing Victorian doing clinics for the AFL along with great mate Danny Frawley eventually worsened back pain he had suffered since a childhood ailment.

He and club doctor Andrew Daff tried everything to avoid surgery – epidurals, a piriformis release, a chymopapain injection that involved pawpaw extract.

By the time he and his then wife Melissa went to pre-natal classes for the birth of their first child he knew every pain relief technique about to be used for their women about to experience labour.

One last glorious year in 1998 under Neale Daniher saw him kick 40 goals in 21 games until an “epiphany” struck early in training in 1999.

“I had a very, very strong memory of training. I saw the ball bouncing, I wasn’t able to bend down to pick it up and I just sensed the whole training drill slowly grinding to a halt while I was fumbling about bending over to pick this ball up. I got up and walked off and went home.

“Neale in his inimitable style knew, so he came to my house that night without me telling him and he said, ‘What do you think?’. I said, ‘I think I am f***ed”. I don’t think he disagreed.”

And yet instead of taking up one of the many coaching gigs offered him over the years – Adelaide, Melbourne, Richmond among them – he had already eased into the media world.

From AFL Squadron, to Nine’s Today show, to that network’s AFL broadcasts, to co-hosting The Footy Show with James Brayshaw before a necessary move to Fox Footy.

Garry Lyon with his Australian Football Hall of Fame certificate.

It is part of the Lyon story that his relationship with great friend and Footy Show regular Billy Brownless was ripped apart when Lyon entered a relationship with his mate’s ex-partner Nikki.

It brought about a year out of the industry while the famously private Lyon worked on his ailing mental health.

Lyon and Nikki are engaged to be married all these years on, with Brownless and Lyon having enjoyed a rapprochement in recent years.

He is a strong mental health advocate, having battled in the years before his public battle before briefly seeking then abandoning professional help.

Lyon addresses the crowd at the 2020 Spud’s Game. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

“When you have relationship breakups, everyone’s got their own thing happening in the world, and people deal with it differently.

“And I very much thought I had my life in control. I had been a leader, and saw myself as a leader who had the answers for everyone else, like I often sat down with lots of people over the journey and talked through as a captain, a friend, whatever.

“And then your own problems start to rise, and your issues and where you fit in the world, and then I didn’t seek any help. So that’s why I’m a great strong advocate for reaching out and talking.

And I was lucky. I got put onto some great people and a year away from the game, which was hard, but I had these really good, professional people in my corner. And I was able to come back and put life into the perspectives that it needs to be.”’

His happy place is the couple’s acreage on the peninsula where Lyon can escape footy’s gaze spending hours on the mower before a beer at dusk as the mist rolls in.

Now he adds Hall of Fame status to a career with its share of low moments and controversies but also so many soaring highs.

Originally published as Australian Football Hall of Fame 2025: The soaring highs and tough lows across Garry Lyon’s legendary footy career