Phil Smyth on Chris Fagan, Magic Johnson and building a Brisbane Lions dynasty
From death threats over Magic Johnson, four Olympic Games and mentoring AFL premiership coaches, Phil Smyth has lived sport’s ultimate redemption story.
It’s a less-than glorious start to one of Australia’s most celebrated sporting careers.
A six-year-old Phil Smyth is playing his first game of basketball after getting a late call-up when only four regular players turn up for his elder brother David’s under-12 team.
Smyth has previously only been the mascot for the local church team coached by his father Ralph, a former state swimmer and keen all-round sportsman.
He’s pumped to get the call-up on the outdoor courts in Adelaide’s southern suburbs on this Saturday afternoon in the mid 1960s and is determined to show the older boys he can hold his own.
So when a jump ball tip-off lands in Smyth’s hands he turns, shoots and pumps the air when the ball successfully goes through the net.
He’s beyond excited and continues his celebrations until he notices people are starting to look at him with quizzical looks on their faces.
And then he realises. He shot the ball in the wrong hoop. He has just scored two points for the opposition.
More than 60 years later as Smyth, 67, sits down with Mark Soderstrom for his podcast The Soda Room, the four-time Olympian chuckles at the memory.
“I wouldn’t have said it was a great start to my career,” he laughs.
It was, without doubt, an inauspiciousmoment but one of very few faux pas in a resume of sporting achievements that now includes playing a key role in back-to-back AFL premierships.
More on his involvement with Chris Fagan and the Brisbane Lions later but suffice to say Aussie rules football is hardly foreign to the man known in the basketball world as The General and hailed as one of Australia’s best-ever point guards.
Footy was, in fact, Smyth’s preferred sport as a youngster who was making his mark as a quick, highly skilled centre half forward for Edwardstown and won selection in a state under-16 team that travelled to Perth for national titles. He also represented the state in under-16 basketball titles Melbourne.
He and a group of mates decided to concentrate on basketball for 12 months after weighing up the benefits of playing under an old-school, fire-and-brimstone football coach or a more articulate, skills-based basketball mentor.
Smyth’s basketball career soon took off. He was a member of state junior teams that won national titles in 1973, ’75 and ’76, captained a national under-20 team in the Philippines – a year after he madehis Boomers debut as a 17-year-old.
He played his last game for the Boomers 19 years later, by which stage he had also clocked up 356 NBL games including three championships, six All Star teams and one Gaze Medal as the international player of the year.
He coached the Adelaide 36ers for 11 seasons, including three championships, and has been inducted into the Sport Australia, Basketball Australia, and Adelaide 36ers halls of fame.
His decision to choose hoops over footy has been well and truly vindicated, but that doesn’t stop him wondering how he would have fared if he had chosen to pursue the oval-ball sport.
“Sometimes I look at some of the guys like a (Scott) Pendlebury that’s gone from basketball to footy,” he tells Soderstrom.
“I’m not suggesting for a moment that I’d be anywhere near as good as Pendles, but there’s a Hugh McCluggage, a Lachie Neale … there’s a lot of guys at the Lions that played basketball as their second sport and they’re really good at footy. So I often think, I wonder if I would have been OK. Would it have transferred through? I think there is some transfer with the vision, the skill set and all that … I would’ve been OK.”
As his aforementioned resumesuggests, he was more than OK at basketball.
He refrained from joining the National Basketball League for a few years after its inaugural season of 1979 as his beloved local club Sturt lobbied to be part of it.
By 1981 it was clear Sturt’s mission to join the big time had failed as the West Adelaide Bearcats (who would ultimately become the 36ers) entrenched themselves in the competition.
Smyth’s Boomer teammate Brian Kerle enticed him to St Kilda and he spent 1982 commuting four times a week to the powerhouse Melbourne club for the grand sum of $1500 for the season.
He signed up with Canberra the following year and stayed at the now-defunct Cannons for a decade before returning to play for the 36ers and then finishing at the Sydney Kings.
It was a career that also included the Moscow, Los Angeles, Seoul and Barcelona Olympic Games in 1980, ’84, ’88 and ’92 respectively – the last in which he made global headlines because of comments he made about US legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
The LA Lakers superstar had announced in the lead-up to the games he had contracted HIV.
It was the early 1990s and public fear and ignorance about the HIV/AIDS epidemic was at its peak.
Smyth, who was Boomers captain at the time, had just returned from an overseas tour when he was asked in a media interview how he would feel about playing against Johnson.
“I said ‘I’ve got no issue playing against Magic Johnson as long as it’s medically OK’,” Smyth recalls.
“The headlines the next day were: ‘Smyth refuses to play Magic Johnson’ … and it exploded on to the world stage from there that I hated people with AIDS.
“There were articles … with a picture of me with a condom over my head saying, ‘It’d be safe to play Magic Johnson like this.’
“I had death threats. I had stuff thrown at my car. (They said) I hated the gay community. I had to have, in the end, 24-seven security around the house … there was hate-mail coming in to the (Canberra) club.”
Smyth went on The Ray Martin Show to clarify his statement and received backing from Adelaide Crows doctor Brian Sando but the controversy didn’t go away.
Smyth was hounded by the media and became a recluse, only venturing out of his home at night.
The story was still a big one at the start of the Barcelona Games, where the much-vaunted US Dream Team were the undisputed superstars of the event.
The team, still considered one of the best of all time, came together after rules changed to allow NBA players to participate in the Olympics and included immortals such as Johnson, Micheal Jordan, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing.
Smyth wanted to clear the air at the opening ceremony, so he approached Johnson to explain what he had meant.
“He was fantastic,” Smyth says.
“I mean, he’s an imposing (guy) and his profile … He’s one of the guys I loved as a player and admired as a guy. He couldn’t have been nicer – put his arm around me and said, ‘Look, I know how the media works’ and ‘Don’t worry about it, it’ll all be OK’.”
Smyth had a chance to playin the NBA in 1988 but doing so would have made him ineligible for the Boomers – a sacrifice he was unwilling to make.
Australia didn’t play the Dream Team in those ’92 Olympics but when the Boomers played the US a couple of years later at world titles he was at the receiving end of a feisty sledging tirade from Team USA member Shawn Kemp.
The follically challenged Smyth was so happy the Seattle SuperSonics superstar identified him by name in the sledge he broke out in a smile, further agitating the 208cm giant, who then threatened to “snap off his arms like little chicken wings”.
When Smyth agreed that, yes, Kemp probably could deliver on that threat, the latter was even more enraged and thought he was being mocked by this relatively tiny Australian with a dodgy comb-over.
Kemp called over fellow man-mountain Shaquille O’Neal, who weighed in at 147kg and measured 216cm, to join the fray but the future NBA hall-of-famer burst out laughing when he heard about the exchange.
“‘Yo Kempy, that’s pretty funny – leave the little man alone’,” Smyth recalls O’Neal saying.
“Then I had to go to the presser after with Shaq and (as) we’re walking off the court he came over and put his arm around me.
“It was like someone had dumped a cow across my shoulder.”
Smyth is a long-time family friendof Port Adelaide AFL coach Mark Williams and the pair often compared notes and player management styles when they were at the helm of the 36ers and Power in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
His connection with the top echelon of AFL coaching panels continued when Power premiership player Damien Hardwick won the top job at Richmond and he also spent a week mentoring former Western Bulldogs coach Rodney Eade.
His journey with back-to-back AFL premiers Brisbane started in 2019 when former Port Adelaide footy boss Rob Snowdon reached out and said his mate Chris Fagan “needed a bit of a hand” up north.
Fagan had taken over as Lions coach a couple of years earlier and won just 10 games in his first two seasons.
Smyth flew to Brisbane and spent a few days with Fagan discussing life, philosophy, coaching and footy and within days he received a call asking if he could continue in a more permanent mentoring role.
Seven years later he now calls Fagan one of his closest friends and the Lions have flourished, playing finals every year since Smyth has been involved – including the past three grand finals.
His role with Brisbane is relatively undefined but he flies to the Sunshine State regularly, stays at Fagan’s house and says he “loves him like a brother”.
He’s been touted as both a coach whisperer and a mentor – for Fagan, other coaching staff and players.
“I’ve enjoyed the journey,” he says.
“Obviously it expands out of that (mentoring Fagan) to working with all the coaches sitting in the coaches’ box, watch what they do, (and) talking to them about that.
“From time to time the players will come up and obviously in that period of time, they’ve got to know you really well.
“The young guys that come in, they’re quite funny at the start. They kind of look and go, who is this bloke? What’s he doing? Then they hit the magic Google … and (it’s) instant credibility once you hit Google.
“I’ve got some really good friendships with most of the guys on the team – you become just a sounding board.”
Smyth is full of praise for the Brisbane players and coaches – especially Fagan, who he describes as “the most humble bloke you’ll ever meet”.
But it has not all been smoothsailing. The basketball great had a front-row seat in a long-running saga in which Fagan and his former boss Alastair Clarkson were accused of racism during their premiership-winning association at Hawthorn.
The allegations were never proven and two AFL reports into the claims found a “startling lack of evidence”.
Fagan categorically denied any wrongdoing but Smyth says the saga had “a massive impact” on his naturally gregarious mate.
“A lot of people ask me about Fages – is he a great bloke, is he that nice?” Smyth says.
“He is all of that, all of that and more. And so he was damaged badly by the attack on him as a person for something that he hadn’t done. And yeah, he became a recluse. He shied away from people.”
Smyth says there were similarities in the racism controversy with what he had gone through after his Magic Johnson comments and he was able to draw on that experience during conversations with Fagan.
“Mine didn’t drag out (but) I know for that three or four months, how horrendous it was for me, and we talked about those things,” he says.
“But he had to put up with it for two years. It was a credit to him that he was resilient enough to stay through that period.”
After back-to-back premierships, though, Smyth says the 64-year-old Fagan, the AFL’s oldest premiership coach, is back in the game and has no plans to call it a day.
“He’s circling, right? He’s a piranha in the water with some blood … now he wants more.”
Similarly, Smyth is enjoying his regular commute to Brisbane and says he will remain involved with the Lions as long as Fagan wants him there.
The joy of helping steer the Lions to back-to-back AFL premierships on the hallowed turf of the MCG is a far cry from the nervous six-year-old who shot a basket for his opponents in his first ever game.
But it’s just the latest chapter in the remarkable life of one of South Australia’s most celebrated sporting figures.
“It is a privilege to still be involved in high level sport and still be able to contribute in some way,” Smyth says.
“So I see myself as lucky.”
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Originally published as Phil Smyth on Chris Fagan, Magic Johnson and building a Brisbane Lions dynasty
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