Unretired football legend Tom Hafey at 80 Andrew Rule
From: Herald Sun
July 16, 2011 IT'S not quite 6am and not quite 6C, and the most unretired man in football has not quite finished his usual 200 push-ups.
His muscles knot like baseballs as he fights the daily battle in a lifelong war against gravity and time.
Two hundred push-ups is double what fit young men might do, 10 times the average slob's tally. Not bad, considering one of Tom Hafey's shoulders is hurting and the wind is icy.
Not that Hafey is wearing a tracksuit. That would be against his religion: the one that gets him up at 5.20am every day, even if he's spent half the night driving back from preaching the gospel at a footy ground anywhere from Orbost to Ouyen.
Hafey's religion is strict on dress. It requires him to work out with nothing but a few grams of nylon between him and nudity.
Doing that in winter with an audience might worry most of us. But Hafey ignores weather and watchers - and a calendar that says he should be a pensioner playing bowls or bingo.
He throws himself into the Spartan regime he has imposed on himself - and hundreds of footballers - since before the Korean War.
Everyone knows Tommy, and many love him. Few veterans of the VFL era are as instantly recognised as the little man with the body of a weightlifter and a head like an old fighter's.
His dawn workout is like a fight-movie scene where passers-by greet the old champ and he greets them back, tough but lovable. The St Kilda joggers and cyclists call out "G'day Tommy" and he says "G'day mate".
Hafey never boxed but he identifies with fighters, with the discipline it takes to push the pain barrier.
He even runs like an old fighter, swinging the knotted arms close and high as if cocking a punch, pounding the pavement on ankles and knees that should have worn out around the time decimal currency came in.
As an athlete, he looks like a small bulldozer chasing a brick wall to run through, which figures: that was how he coached generations of footballers to win.
After the run, he does 10 minutes of stretching, then the push-ups, then he plunges into the freezing water for a swim, rubs himself down and trots across the road to the bayside apartment he shares with Maureen, the pretty girl he married in 1955.
By then, you would reckon, he'd be due for a hot shower, a hot breakfast and a lie-down. Instead, he does 700 crunches and sit-ups.
This is Hurricane Carter stuff - the time-killing, body-building routines lifers do in prison cells. Hurricane Hafey does it just because he believes in it.
After an hour of brutal exercise he treats himself to oatmeal, fruit and a cup of tea. But no biscuits or cakes. He gave them up 37 years ago, to give his daughters an example of will power.
Tom Hafey turns 80 this winter. He has just starred in a Jeep TV commercial, playing a super-fit 70-year-old who runs up steep hills in a tight T-shirt. He looks 60. And did it easy.
The headquarters of Hafey Inc is the apartment where Tommy and Maureen have lived for 21 years. It has no email but the home phone and fax machine ring all day.
He will go anywhere to spread the word. The work ethic that led him to speak at local schools when he was coaching Geelong in 1983 has grown into a regular roster of motivational talks - and training sessions - at everything from schools and country football clubs to bowls clubs and old people's homes. And jails.
Hafey also does a sideline in footy memorabilia packed in the new Jeep supplied by a grateful sponsor.
Ask him how he is and he says "Good - and getting better", a line his old players mimic affectionately. Hafey has a lot of old players. It's not surprising they haven't forgotten him. More unusual is that he hasn't forgotten any of them.
A friend drove him to the football a few years ago. They were in the carpark when a middle-aged man knocked on the window and said "Bet you don't remember me?".
Hafey studied him and said: 'Yes I do. You played for Shep United in the early 1960s." Shepparton United had played against the team Hafey coached then.
Ask Hafey where he lived as a boy and he says "Six different rented houses in Richmond", then recites the streets he'd lived in before he turned eight. In order.
Richmond was Struggletown in the 1930s Depression and Tom's father a tradesman printer. Tom, born in August 1931, was the oldest of five and remembers his dad working one week in four.
The family went to Canberra "when it was the size of Benalla", chasing work. They returned (to East Malvern) during the war, when young Tommy was in fifth grade.
He started playing football, rising through the East Malvern teams. The Hafeys followed Collingwood but Tommy was tied to Richmond under the zone system.
He went to Melbourne High in year 9 and hated it. "If the school had burnt down I would have been prime suspect," he says. "I wanted to work."
After a year as a messenger boy he started a printing apprenticeship. And played footy.
For someone later described admiringly as "a dirty little back pocket player" he made the most of limited ability. Tough on the field, off it he was a hard trainer and clean liver, at a time when most weren't.
His mates drank and smoked but he didn't.
His weakness was dancing. He met Maureen - "She looked like a Hollywood starlet" - at the Ziegfield dance at Glenferrie.
He bought his first car to get to Preston to take her out. They married when she was 21and he was 24. By then he got 10 pounds a week to play football, another 10 as a printer. League footballers didn't get rich back then.
By today's standards most didn't get really fit, either. But Hafey did. It started back when a school friend from East Malvern, Len Treganowan, trained as a weightlifter. Hafey trained with him in the Treganowans' garage. He bought his own secondhand weights in 1952, just before Richmond called him up for the seniors.
Treganowan went on to compete at the 1956 Olympics. By then Hafey was a regular at a city gym and had built himself into one of the strongest small men in football. He still might be.
Almost 60 years on, he still has those old weights. "They're rusty now but they weigh the same," he says. He's making a point: effort counts, not flash equipment.
Tom Hafey occasionally forgives but forgetting is against his religion, too. He can tell you exactly how Richmond sacked him in 1959 - he was listed "not required" in the newspapers just before the season started. Without warning. It meant he was too late to land a playing-coach job in the bush that year.
Instead, he played the season for Richmond amateurs alongside then heavyweight champ Reg Mack and "Australia's best streetfighter", Leo Berry, a boxer whose mates carried guns. No one caused trouble in the Hafeys' milk bar in Bridge Road.
It could have been the end of a minor football career. It was the start of a great one. In 1960, Hafey went to Shepparton as playing coach, on four times his VFL pay, and working as a printer.He took his weights with him. Soon most of the team were queuing to use them.
Maureen gave him a book by the "eccentric" running and fitness guru Percy Cerutty, who had trained Herb Elliott up Portsea sand dunes to win the 1500m gold medal at the Rome Olympics.
"I couldn't put it down," recalls Hafey. "I wrote to Percy Cerutty. Just addressed it to 'Portsea' and it got to him."
Hafey took his team to Portsea to run up sand hills. He formed theories there that his players still think were 30 years ahead of their time. They worked he led Shepparton to three straight flags.
Richmond's power brokers had been watching. In 1966 Hafey was called back to Tigerland and glory. He broke the club's 20-year finals drought with four premierships.
After 12 seasons he left and the Magpies swooped. He led them to five grand finals in six years, before a new committee sacked him.
He hasn't forgotten that. Nor his three years at Geelong, where he signed up rejects from other clubs. One was Gary Ablett.
Hafey's coaching swansong was in Sydney, where he took the transplanted team from second bottom to second top, trebling the crowds, before being sacked for training them "too hard". He hasn't forgotten that, either.
Tom Hafey's is a broad church with many followers. Dozens of middle-aged men call him a father figure.
On the beach one summer he urged a tall ocean swimmer to do push-ups, to add one push-up a week until it matched his age. Ted Baillieu, now Premier, has been doing it ever since.
Hafey's discipline appealed to the undisciplined. At a function recently he was approached by a grateful man who said Hafey's advice four years before - in Bendigo jail - had turned his life around, and maybe saved him.
He was a master at spotting a tough or talented "failure" with a point to prove. He took Ricky McLean from Carlton and made him a fearsome Tiger forward. McLean invited him to his son's wedding recently.
McLean's team mate Robert "Bones" McGhie admits being "a cocky young prick with a bit of lout in me" when he got into trouble on an interstate trip with Footscray in 1972. Hafey took him to Richmond and the raw-boned speedster repaid him well in finals games.
"I could have ended up in jail - but Tommy pulled me back to reality," says McGhie, now a respectable businessman. "He was special. A second father."
McGhie speaks to Hafey "once or twice a week". Many others do too, especially old Richmond and Collingwood players.
Every year Hafey organises and pays for a pre-Christmas lunch for as many of his old players as can find. He makes hundreds of calls to get his "boys" to a Richmond pub, where he spends thousands of dollars on their lunch.
"We do the best we can to send him broke," jokes Tiger legend Francis Bourke, who calls Hafey "a phenomenon".
"All these guys were willing to go to war for Tommy. He was able to get to them."
Hafey is the archetype back-pocket player who found a vocation - and founded a dynasty - in coaching a game he never starred at. Tactics were incidental. Attitude was all.
Last month his most famous disciple, Kevin Sheedy, flew from Sydney to run a training night and dinner in South Gippsland with the man who took a chance on him in 1966.
Sheedy, then a 17-year-old apprentice plumber who had just lost his own father Tom Sheedy, loves Hafey. He estimates Hafey has influenced 20 coaches, including reigning champ Mick Malthouse.
"Playing is over in a few years but he imbued us with a passion that goes past playing," Sheedy says. "He still rings me every week to ask me how I'm training."
On the frosty night Hafey and Sheedy do their master class for juniors at Poowong Football Club. After training, half the district jams into the rooms to hear the famous pair speak.
Sheedy is one of football's great communicators, the AFL's ambassador in western Sydney. It's no wonder he is good at this.
But Hafey is 80 and talking to teenagers and younger kids. At first, it seems the kids don't quite get it. Then the whispers die and he nails it. In five minutes, they're rapt.
Next is a dinner and a fund-raising auction, Hafey and Sheedy the guests of honour.
Afterwards, a small boy waits, eyes shining. He sidles up to Hafey, taps him on the arm and asks nervously if he can learn how to train to be stronger so he can make the team.
Hafey smiles, turns his back to the crowd and starts teaching the boy how to be the best he can be. It's then you realise why he drives all over Victoria to clubs like this. He might train like Rocky Balboa, but he's really Mr Chips.
Of course, even legends have their secrets. Francis Bourke says he has heard a shocking rumour about Hafey ... Lately, he's been taking an afternoon nap.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/footy-legend-tom-hafey-at-80/story-fn7x8me2-1226095521979
