Round #23 - Fages
Chris Fagan
Like all great coaches, Chris Fagan is someone you feel good about, but his ‘secret sauce’, if I can boil it down to one thing, is that he also makes you feel good about you.
We’ve all tried it.
An effort, without expectation, but “Why not?”, you tell yourself.
“You just never know”, you reason.
“Might as well have a throw at the stumps”.
Put together a resume, print off a few copies, and whack them in the post.
“You just never know”.
—
You’re a footy coach with dreams of getting into the AFL system, as many do.
You have spent your life in Tasmania, learning to play on the fabled gravel oval in Queenstown, shredding skin off knees and elbows as a 15-year-old playing senior football against the town's hardened miners. But you did well. A Hall of Fame state league playing career, including a couple of premierships, but you never quite made it into the AFL system, save for an under-19 pre-season practice match with Essendon as a teenager a couple of decades earlier.
After your playing career concluded, you went coaching, a natural progression for the son of a footy coach who was brought up around this part of the game. You are also a trained teacher. Again, you did well, appointed as the inaugural coach of the Tassie Mariners in the TAC Cup Under 18 competition. You are now coaching players who are hopeful of a draft call-up, which some receive. This role puts you in conversation with AFL recruiters and scouts seeking extra insight as they rate players in preparation for draft day. They value your take.
These conversations whet the appetite that little bit more.
The “Why not?” question changes over time.
Soon, it becomes, “Why not me?”
—
You've done some homework, run a filter over all the options, perhaps put them in a few columns headed with ‘yes, no, and maybe’, based on gut feel as much as information and insight.
Your gut has always served you well.
You have put together that resume, unsure how many will read it, and aware that it will only ever tell part of the story. The part it can never tell is, in fact, the reason it should be read.
The resume will speak about your experience (where you’ve been), and something about your expertise (the skills you have learned), but no matter how hard you try, no amount of wordsmithing can describe your most important qualities, your essence (who you truly are and what you truly bring).
You look down at the columned list. There are sixteen AFL Clubs, and I estimate about half of them end up in the ‘yes’ and ‘maybe’ columns. You print off enough copies, buy enough A4 envelopes and stamps, and post them off.
—
I'm not sure how many you sent, but I know that one landed on my desk, just one of the dozens you receive across a year.
I had recently been appointed as CEO of the Melbourne Football Club. That season, 1997, we finished last on the ladder, winning only four games, half as many as the next-worst team.
I can only guess, but I am reasonably sure that the Demons would have been at the top of the ‘yes’ column for any coach seeking opportunities to break into the system.
For a developer of talent, as your resume well explained, we sure had a lot of developing to do.
We were in the throes of restructuring our football department, and I was charged with leading this process.
Your resume went from my desk into a folder I carried around with me for the best part of three months, accumulating articles, ideas and notes on what a coaching structure might look like for the Melbourne Football Club.
This comprehensive process led to the appointment of Neale Daniher as Senior Coach, and we then went about putting together his support team. In those days, over a quarter of a century ago, we had just enough budget for a couple of full-time assistant coaches.
One of those would focus on player development, as well as coaching our Reserve Grade team.
When I sat down with Neale, we wrote a long list of potential development coaches on a whiteboard in his office. Given the job specification, I retrieved your resume from the folder and handed it to Neale, who read it carefully.
We spoke about you for just a couple of minutes. Neale got up from his seat, marker in hand, and with typical languid disposition and purpose, added a name to the bottom of the list.
“Chris Fagan”, he wrote.
—
I can remember clearly why Chris Fagan’s name was added.
On his resume, he listed a few referees, including Paul Sproule, a two-time Premiership player of the Richmond Football Club, who would later coach the Tigers for just one year, sacked in an era where the club had made sacking coaches a pastime.
Because of my relationship with Richmond, I knew the respect and esteem in which Paul Sproule was held as an outstanding football person, who also hailed from Tasmania. My father, Alan, was Secretary of the Tigers and had recruited Sprouley from Essendon in the early 1970s. He quickly established himself as a key player in great Richmond teams. He would soon become one of my favourite ever players who seemed to save his best for the biggest games, of which the Tigers played in plenty.
Sprouley had coached Chris Fagan at Hobart Football Club, where he played in a Premiership, inspired by Sprouley to be better and get better. He then continued to mentor him when he went coaching.
It was the connection that led to Fage’s name being added to a long list of ‘possibles’ on that whiteboard. His resume showed that he had at least part of the requisite experience and expertise, although there is no doubt that the lack of AFL experience was a factor, a kind of bias that, while less pervasive today, still exists.
With a little more homework from both Neale and my networks, we included Fage’s to the short list of coaches we would interview for the role.
Those we contacted spoke to what his resume could not tell us; the essence of the man. The feedback was universal. Chris Fagan is a very special person, something they had known for years, and it’s about time you mainlanders caught up.
—
The interviews would take place in the Grand Final week, and we flew Fage’s over from Tassie.
Many reading this have had this experience and needed to check themselves. When interviewing candidates for a role, there is always part of us hoping upon hope that the next person who walks into the room is going to show whatever it is you need them to show, so we can get on with doing whatever it is you are not doing because you are in a room interviewing people for the job that needs get done.
We are ten minutes into the interview with Fages, and I am thinking, “We have our man”. I cannot remember exactly what it was because, without being in any way disrespectful, it is less than obvious. Fages' offers this nuanced combination of humility, decency, and respect that cannot disguise the feisty competitor and deep football and coaching insight and instinct, which he offers freely, without expectation or anticipation, knowing it is simply an invitation to a deeper conversation, a curiosity to learn, and a courage to unlearn.
—
It was clear Neale Daniher felt the same way when we interviewed Fages.
The conversation shifted, and as Neale explained what he hoped to achieve, his plans and aspirations for the Melbourne Football Club, the challenges that we need to overcome, the work we need to do, it was clear that he was including Fages as part of the we.
Whatever 'no AFL experience' bias we held coming into the interview soon evaporated; in fact, I am not even sure we spoke about it.
Grand Final week is also the Royal Show Week in Melbourne. I have heard Fages tell how he took a phone call from Neale when he was on the Ferris wheel at the show with his wife, Ursula, overlooking Melbourne. Neale offered him the role, and the lives of the Fagan family, as well as three AFL clubs and countless people, would be changed by all facets of the man, who he truly is and what he truly brings.
—
Like all great coaches, Chris Fagan is someone you feel good about, but his ‘secret sauce’, if I can boil it down to one thing, is that he also makes you feel good about you.
All of this comes to mind when I am watching his Brisbane team dismantle Fremantle at Optus Stadium. It was a massive game for both teams in the context of the season.
I was hoping for a Freo win. They have worked hard to rebuild their club, and while I spent eight years as CEO of the club and loved it, I offer no more insight than that of a very interested observer. But from what I have seen, they are building it the right way.
My sense is their time is coming, but of course, there are no guarantees.
Fremantle, their coaches and players, do not need reminding of this, but on Friday, they were in for a timely lesson from an experienced and hardened squad that exerted its dominance from the get-go, and then met and repelled whatever Fremantle could muster, which clearly wasn’t enough on the night.
There are many ways to build a club and team, and there is certainly no ‘one way’ despite the often binary and one-dimensional commentary that often suggests otherwise. Brisbane, both club and team, has also been built the right way, their way.
It began with the appointment of Chris Fagan as Senior Coach almost a decade ago, and even that has a backstory. When approached by Brisbane CEO Greg Swann, Fages was the Football Manager at Hawthorn, playing a key role in the Hawks’ Premiership Three-Peat.
Fages had to remind Swanny that he was, in fact, a coach.
And so he is, and now he is the reigning Premiership coach, who at 63 is the oldest man to coach a Premiership, and the first in well over a century to do so, having never played in the VFL/AFL.
Whilst it is never down to one person, despite the often myopic focus on the Senior Coach, the Fagan fingerprints are everywhere, yet nowhere, precisely as he would like it.
Fages understands, perhaps better than anyone, that ‘team’ is an outcome, and a group of individuals wearing the same colours do not maketh a team. As a leader, his role is to create the conditions for the best version of this to occur, and to this extent, he is just a role player, a significant one, yes, but a role player nonetheless.
Fages is easy to underestimate, and he gives all the appearance that this suits him, but I doubt it.
Fairness sits at the heart of the Chris Fagan mindset, and that would be his expectation as to how he is judged, but he is also a realist, and there is no doubt that aspects of his coaching have been judged unfairly.
I think of the same bias that was there for him almost thirty years ago when he posted his resume in the letterbox in Tassie.
There are times when he quietly bristled against this. You can see it, but he has never allowed it to be a distraction. In the end, performance has done the talking for him, as it did with his team's super impressive performance away from home against Fremantle.
The performances have been such that he could have given the naysayers the proverbial ‘up yours’, but, as always, he understands that his role, with all of its responsibilities, is all on him, but is never about him.
As his old mentor and great mate Neale Daniher would say, “Fages, life is good, but doesn’t promise to be fair”.
And so it is.
“You just never know”.
Play on!
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