Ron Barassi: pioneering player and formidable coach who embodied Australian rules football

Eddie McGuire once said that Ron Barassi was the only man in Australia who didn’t know he was Ron Barassi. For generations of young Australians and newcomers to these shores, the name Barassi was one of first football words you learned. “Three syllables,” Martin Flanagan wrote, “coming off the tongue in a hiss of passion.” “The Barassi line” was coined to delineate the footy-loving southern states from rugby territory to the north. Barassi, who has died aged 87, was chosen because he embodied the sport. In many ways, he still does. Few Australians dominated, influenced and defined their sport quite like him. Few inspired fear, reverence and affection in such equal measure.

His father, Ronald Sr, was killed by a German naval bombardment at Tobruk. He was the first VFL footballer to die in the second world war. He had just played in a Melbourne premiership and young Ronald was just five years old. The telegram announcing his father’s death is his first memory. Decades later, his wife, Cherryl, found him weeping alone. “I miss my father,” he told her.

Norm Smith took him under his wing, housed him in a bungalow in the back yard, afforded him no favours, and eventually coached him to six premierships. Barassi was 17 when he debuted. He was too short to be a ruckman, too tall to be a rover. He became a ruck rover, embraced and defined that relatively new position, and proceeded to stamp his name on football in this country.

When Ron Barassi (pictured in 1964) left Melbourne to captain-coach Carlton, it was as big a story as the game had seen. Photograph: Getty Images

Barassi was a magnificent footballer, one of the best of a golden generation that included Coleman, Whitten, Skilton and Reynolds. He played more than 200 games, won six premierships, two best and fairests and would have won at least two Norm Smith medals if such a thing existed then. He would bust packs, run all day, and saved his best for finals. His statue in the MCG’s Parade of Champions captures him perfectly – his robust physique, his lantern jaw, his beautiful kicking action.

Not blessed with an abundance of natural talent, he imposed himself on contests and on games. He squeezed every drop of ability. In what was a violent era, he was never a dirty player, though he played with a frightening intensity, and a certain belligerence. Like many of the best players of all time, he never won a Brownlow medal.

Ron Barassi playing for Carlton in the VFL in 1965. Photograph: Getty Images

When he left Melbourne to captain-coach Carlton, it was as big a story as the game had seen. Letters poured into Melbourne newspapers. Young fans wept. Some burned their No 31 guernseys. Pet parrots christened “Ronnie” and even “Barassi” had to be renamed, and re-programmed to rattle off new phrases. Football would never be the same again. Melbourne lost its champion, sacked its coach and sunk into a torpor that lasted for decades.

As a coach, Barassi was not a man to be trifled with. Few men demanded more of their players. These days, if you said some of the things he said, you would be led away in handcuffs. But he was tactically astute and a genuine innovator, hiring hypnotists, installing floatation tanks, using video analysis and becoming the first coach to watch from an elevated vantage point. The Blues became the most prolific handballers in the game. He encouraged them, or cajoled them, to take risks, to switch the play, to take the game on. In the 1970 grand final, he orchestrated the most extraordinary comeback in the history of the game. Many believed the game changed that day. It haunted Collingwood for years. It cemented Barassi as a great of the sport.

Incredibly, just 12 months later, he was finished at Carlton. But 12 months after that, he heard the bugle call. North Melbourne had never won a premiership, and were coming off a wooden spoon. He was coaching some of the most sublime footballers in Australia, and some of the most difficult to manage. His powder blue suits, Polaroid sunglasses and quarter-time outbursts would be grounds for arrest in some jurisdictions. He just missed the finals in his first year, and went down to a pitiless Richmond in the following year’s grand final. That evening, he berated them like few footballers have ever been berated. “Unbridled abuse, pure vilification” Sam Kevovich described it.

In 1975, they won the club’s first premiership, downing a Hawthorn side that had beaten them three times that season. At the celebrations that night, Bruce Postle photographed the coach, curled up asleep, still wearing a shirt that would shatter many lenses, the premiership cup perched just above his head. Barassi played and coached with a grimace, but at that instant, he was a man at one with the world.

Ron Barassi talks to his Swans players during a match against Hawthorn in 1993. Photograph: Tony Feder/Getty Images

Barassi was the subject of books, documentaries and plays. “Rostov”, the ferocious coach in David Williamson’s The Club, was surely based on him. In 1977, he was the subject of John Powers’ The Coach. The book may as well have been written in capital letters. Elton John is said to have been a fan of Powers’ book and desperate to meet the master coach. When the two men met, both at the top of their game, Barassi addressed him as “John Elton”.

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His subsequent coaching stints were less successful. He was lured back to Melbourne with great fanfare where he adhered to an Israeli army diet, donned a jumper that presumably had to be surgically removed and looked fitter than half his players. At first, they were dreadful. “Jesus Christ, they are bloody hopeless,” he said at the first summer training run. He banned beards. He implemented a five-year plan. They steadily improved. To much mirth, he insisted that Gaelic footballers could be turned into Australian rules players. By the mid-80s, his time was up. But the Swans of the early 1990s were in a wretched state, being slaughtered every week. Barassi helped whip the place into shape. Within a year of his departure, they were playing in a grand final.

Several players he coached – Malcolm Blight, John Nicholls, Robert Walls, Denis Pagan and Alex Jesaulenko – went on to coach VFL/AFL premierships. He managed some extraordinary individuals: Kekovich, Mark Jackson, Tony Lockett, Dermott Brereton, Brent Croswell. For all his regimented ways, he always embraced mavericks, always encouraged his teams to attack, to utilise their gifts. A keen chess player, he brought the same blazing intensity to that pastime. Croswell recalls playing with the coach, describing it as “the most arduous and excruciating contests I have ever experienced, ranking among the worst moments I have spent on Earth”.

Ron Barassi waves to the crowd during a tribute lap at an AFL match in 2003. Photograph: Adam Pretty/Getty Images

Post coaching, Barassi mellowed. He ran pubs, travelled everywhere from Kokoda to Mongolia and was a passionate advocate of national expansion. One New Years Eve, he a tackled a man who had assaulted a woman in St Kilda. He was a regular presence at the MCG – always affable, always obliging and always hopeful that his Demons would finally come good.

There was a humility to Barassi – almost a certain irony – that took decades to reveal itself to the general public. Conversations about his achievements would always be deflected. But few have had a greater impact on the sport of Australian rules football. He was ruck-rover in the team of the century, was the first legend inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame, and is one of only three Australian rules footballers in the Sport Australia Hall of Fame. When he would sign his name, he would include the numbers 17410 – 17 grand finals, four clubs, 10 premierships. In a part of Australia that obsesses over football, and in an industry that canonises its share of charlatans and blowhards, he led a complete footballing life.

Ron Barassi, Australian rules football great, born 27 February 1936; died 16 September 2023