Hardwick a no-fuss, caring family man away from footySam Edmund
Herald-Sun
May 24, 2014DAMIEN Hardwick is guiding his Saab into the Alberton Oval carpark when it hits him like one of his trademark shirtfronts.
It is late 2001 and the rugged defender is arriving for one of his first Port Adelaide training sessions after being squeezed out of an Essendon side engulfed by salary cap chaos.
But as Hardwick brings his prestige car to a stop beside several old utes and dime a dozen sedans, he knows it’s not for him.
On his way home he sees an old EH Holden station wagon on the side of the road and doesn’t hesitate. The green and white antique becomes his daily drive for his life in South Australia.
That Hardwick felt more comfortable in the 1960s clunkier is emblematic of a no-fuss family man who admits he would be a “mild mannered accountant” if it wasn’t for football.
But right now, Hardwick is as uncomfortable as he has been in this game. Richmond is a miserable 2-6 and in the wake of last Saturday’s loss to Melbourne, the normally jovial Tigers coach was on the verge of tears.
It is a roadblock that has come after an almost perfect football journey. A premiership player at Essendon (2000) and then Port Adelaide (2004), Hardwick moved seamlessly into an assistant coaching role under close friend Alastair Clarkson where he helped Hawthorn win the 2008 flag.
Awarded the senior job he craved in late 2009 at 37, Hardwick has methodically improved a Richmond side that has won six, eight, 10 and 15 games in his first four years in charge.
But Hardwick brought last week’s emotional post-match press conference to an end with a long sigh. “Not much I can say guys. Disappointing,” he said.
We see Hardwick the coach several times a week, but to find out what makes him tick we need to lift the lid on Hardwick the person.
A former bank teller who studied accounting, Hardwick has always been an American sports fanatic and played rep basketball for Knox Raiders as a kid. These days he watches documentary NFL TV series Hard Knocks, while taking on his coaching staff and colleagues in NFL Fantasy.
He’s also partial to a bit of Modern Family, which fits the profile of a bloke who married young and has three children, Ben (”BJ”), Isabelle and Imogen. He has been goal umpire at BJ’s footy games with Ormond and has scored for his daughter’s basketball team.
Hardwick’s rock is his wife Danielle, who is a specialist at bringing her husband back into the real world when the AFL one gets too consuming.
Those who know him say the 41-year-old is as genuine as you get — a caring father who loves the simple things in life. He has always had a dry sense of humour, but he has always turned uber serious, even emotional, when it comes to footy.
Fiercely determined inside the fence, he is what some family members describe as a “unique character this side of the white line”. Those in the AFL industry use words like “fighter” and “headstrong” when his name is mentioned.
Hardwick grew up in Upwey at the foot of the Dandenongs, with sister Kate and parents Noel and Pam, as a Fitzroy supporter who would travel to the Junction Oval to watch Lions star Garry Wilson.
Four houses down Kooringal Road lived close mate and the best man at Hardwick’s wedding, Mick McCarrick. The pair met when they were three years old and played footy on the road, basketball wherever they could and went to school together at St Joseph’s College in nearby Ferntree Gully.
“With basketball we all picked a player,” McCarrick said. “His was Dominique Wilkins, the ‘Human Highlight Film’. I was Charles Barkley and another mate was Karl Malone. No one ever picked (Michael) Jordan — he was the obvious one.
“He’s just down earth. What you see is what you get, there’s no pretences there. When we catch up with him you just drop into the old routine from the school days. He’s certainly not a stuck-up person who dumps his mates.”
Another schoolmate, Joe Cannatelli, remembered a “true leader”.
“As a group we hung it on each other a bit, but when someone else hung it on one of his mates he was fiercely protective,” Cannatelli said.
“I’ll never forget, there was a mate of ours, ‘Crowie’, who was getting a hard time and Damien was instinctive. If anyone of us was in trouble, you knew he’d be right there.”
Cannatelli and McCarrick were stunned by Hardwick’s emotions after the Melbourne loss, but both had seen it once before.
“The only other time I saw him that emotional was when ‘Noelby’ got cancer about 10 years ago,” McCarrick said.
“It looked pretty dire there for a while. He came through it all right, but it was pretty scary for a bit.”
The father-son relationship between Noel Hardwick and Damien is tight. Noel, a revered junior coach at the Upwey-Tecoma Tigers, rode his son hard in the under 17s where Hardwick won the best and fairest before leaving for North Melbourne under 19s and Denis Pagan.
Noel still calls his son after every Richmond game.
“Especially on Saturday because at these times you’re even closer,” Noel said this week.
“We were always close, but it’s easy when things are going smoothly. When things aren’t happening as they should that’s when families get close and like most, we’re very protective of our own.
“It’s a bloody stressful job.”
Nick Peterson is a former president at Upwey-Tecoma and knows father and son as well as anyone.
“It would have hurt Damien so much, their performance on Saturday, because he’s a proud guy, football is very important to him along with giving your best shot,” Peterson said.
“That’s why he would have been very emotional ... the players had let him down on the day and then one of his young guys (David Astbury), who he’s got a lot of time for, cops a bad injury. I reckon that was the last straw and I could see a lot of Noel in him there.”
Pagan still remembers Hardwick showing up at Arden Street where the teenager would train three nights a week, catching a train across town from Ferntree Gully before embarking on a long cab ride home.
“I think he was captain of the under 19s at some stage. He was a very headstrong, hard-nosed, strong attack-on-the-ball footballer,” Pagan said.
After a stint at Springvale and a year on Essendon’s supp list, Hardwick was taken by the Bombers with the 87th pick in the 1992 draft. He would defy the naysayers from beginning to end in a 207-game AFL career.
“I don’t know if they were that keen on him at the start, but he soon impressed them with his approach,” Pagan said.
At Essendon, Chris Heffernan got to know a “very low-key, but friendly, engaging and honest” premiership teammate.
“He had a good work-life balance and didn’t get caught up in a lot of the other stuff. He was always very normal and he related to people better than most,” Heffernan said.
“He was a family guy who lived across town from the club so as soon as training finished he would be in the car on his way home. We used to try and get him to have a few drinks occasionally, but he was always reluctant to do that.
“He wasn’t a teetotaller, it was just that when you live on the other side of town with kids, when your work is done you head home.”
Several former Bombers teammates laugh that Hardwick would have been the last player they would have suspected would become an AFL coach, but then-Bombers defensive coach Mark Harvey remembers it differently.
“Around the 2000 Grand Final he started voicing his opinion in those meetings ... and talk through situations and what was expected and why things were and weren’t working. Looking back now, maybe that was the first inkling,” Harvey said.
“He is one of the most honest people I’ve come across in the game. He’s not a blamed; he’ll bring it on himself to work through these situations. He’s a fighter.”
If the desire to coach was born late at Windy Hill, it gained momentum at Alberton as Hardwick joined an up and coming side under the tutelage of Mark Williams.
Former teammate Warren Tredrea said Hardwick’s never-say-die approach as a player was the reason he will turn it around as a coach.
“He’ll have a gag and tell a joke, he’s that bloke, but there’s a lot more to him,” Tredrea said.
“He is a bloke whose up for the fight. I can still remember half way through 2004 his knee was shot and he was getting it drained every week and I said to myself: ‘He’s stuffed, he’s going to retire’, but he found a way.”
“He was as hard as a cat’s head on the field, but he’s human off it, which we saw last weekend. He’s genuine.”
A bit like that old EH Holden which, like Hardwick, has probably been written off many times. But it’s still going strong, sitting the driveway of his parents’ house in country Victoria waiting for young BJ to get his licence.
http://www.news.com.au/sport/afl/fighting-headstrong-richmond-coach-damien-hardwick-a-nofuss-caring-family-man-away-from-footy/story-fndv8t7m-1226928968008
