Path to enlightenment
By Samantha Lane
The Age
March 11, 2006
CHANCES are you don’t know much about Kane Johnson. And he’d be OK with that. Even now that he’s Richmond captain, there are people at his old club, Adelaide, who still chuckle when they see him on the news or quoted in the papers.
It is not that he’s particularly timid, short of ideas or the fluency to express them, it’s just that Johnson hasn’t been interested in standing out.
When he has been in the news, it has tended to be inadvertent. One unfortunate example was during the 1998 pre-season, shortly after he’d played in Adelaide’s first premiership (aged 19 and in his 25th senior match). Johnson was king-hit outside a city night spot and had his jaw broken in two places.
The next morning, journalists were camped outside his house and Johnson was front page news. A teenage, Victorian ruffian. It was the beginning of a difficult, though professionally fruitful, relationship with the city of Adelaide. One that he vowed to end well before Richmond was able to recruit him at the end of 2002.
That incident and its aftermath go some way to explaining why the dual premiership midfielder, and now the leader of one of the country’s most popular football clubs, is as low profile a skipper as they come.
But those who have known him from the beginning of his career say that Johnson has always set himself apart precisely because he has not sought to stand out.
Robert Shaw, his first senior coach, liked Johnson as a player instantly. Shaw was equally impressed the first time he laid eyes on him off the field.
It was in 1995, at the Melbourne casino, which was then an enormous work in progress, and Shaw and Adelaide football manager John Reid had gone to meet the 27th pick of the national draft, who was working as an apprentice electrician.
"This wasn’t a bloke that came to us in his school uniform. He was out of a construction site, with the overalls on, and the boots, and we thought — that will do us. We’ve got the right one here," Shaw recalled.
"He stood out from all these workers — a young bloke with scraggy blond hair and the Yakka overalls. He was covered in bloody concrete dust. As he walked towards us I just remember that he looked strong and it was obvious that he had a good work ethic."
About to enter his 11th season, as well as turning 28 on Wednesday, "interesting" is how he describes the 12 months since he was selected ahead of Tiger stalwarts Joel Bowden and Matthew Richardson, and Nathan Brown — a relative newcomer to the club, like him — for the captaincy.
Coach Terry Wallace took that research exercise to extraordinary lengths, enlisting the help of external consultants. This time last year, the decision still hadn’t been announced, so this past summer has been considerably more relaxing for Johnson.
"It was a hard sort of pre-season for all of us I think (last year) ... it made the pre-season like a bit of a competition in a way ... it made it a bit sort of individual," Johnson said.
"So it wasn’t until the start of this pre-season that I’ve actually started to develop into the role properly, just start to feel like the captain properly."
While he had rapidly proved his capabilities as a player to his new club and its supporters by coming second in the 2003 and ’04 best and fairests, succeeding Richmond’s longest modern-day servant, Wayne Campbell, was never going to be an easy task.
Not least for someone who had spent just a year in the Tigers’ leadership group following a seven-season career in Adelaide.
But from the outset, Johnson felt he belonged at the place. As a youngster he picked up the footballing persuasion of his Tiger-mad father and grandfather who used to watch their team from the roof of the Punt Road toilet block.
When Johnson was admitted to the inner sanctum as a player years later, he detected a distinct lack of leadership and felt compelled to help bolster it.
"Wayne Campbell was a very good leader, but other than him, there wasn’t a lot of standout leaders around the whole football club, whether it was young or old.
"On and off the field, I think the administration and business side of things at Richmond wasn’t anywhere near up to scratch compared to Adelaide, and that sort of went over into our playing side."
The gap, Johnson says, is closing. It was his idea to nominate a junior leadership group this summer, and in year two of what seems to be a rather yin-yang captain-coach combination — clear extrovert meets naturally more subdued individual — Wallace and Johnson will work more as a team.
"Last year it wasn’t as close," Johnson said. "I think we were both sort of feeling our way through the year. It was his first year as coach, my first year as captain and so we were both probably doing our own jobs without sort of relaying messages between each other.
"I didn’t really talk too much last year. I was just trying to play good footy. Our relationship’s a lot better over the last six months than what it first was."
Solid, uncompromising and reliable are the words Wallace uses to describe Johnson. And of all the captains he has played under and coached, Wallace chooses Gary Ayres, one of Johnson’s former tutors at the Crows, as his nearest likeness.
"We needed a doer ... we needed someone that, if we got a couple of little cracks early, wasn’t going to fall apart," said Wallace.
"With some of the others I didn’t know how they would go with the baggage from past years and the baggage that had been Richmond over a couple of decades. Kane didn’t have that baggage," Wallace said.
"Last year he did everything that I could have asked him to do, but I would have needed to ask him to do it ... there wasn’t the initiative there, whereas now he’s really sort of taken hold of it, taken hold of the leadership group ... he’s really got on the front foot and really been prepared to grow."
Adelaide captain Mark Ricciuto remains one of Johnson’s closest friends and has noticed the development, too. He figures it’s due partly to Johnson’s maturing, and partly to his change of circumstances.
"I think when he got recruited to Richmond he was going there as a high-profile player, and a player that would have been, I guess, on good money and expected to perform. So I think he understood that he had to give everything, not just play footy.
"He was just ready to change. He was ready to be a leader. He was prepared to do that, whereas he probably wasn’t earlier on in Adelaide. But if he’d stayed in Adelaide he definitely would have become one of the leaders. Maybe he would have been captain down the track.
"He’s really sort of the perfect midfielder," the 2003 Brownlow medallist said. "He’s in and under, hard at it, very competitive and very hard running. You tend to miss players like that a little bit because they’re generally at the bottom of the pack."
With the encouragement of Richmond’s hierarchy, Johnson will gradually distinguish himself from that pack publicly. But he’s not about to start hunting down prime time TV gigs just yet.
"I don’t have to be on The Footy Show to necessarily be a good leader," he said. "I like to be selective, I just don’t want to put myself in situations and on different things that I don’t think suit my personality."
He was a reluctant fish in a bowl in Adelaide, but Johnson’s position of leading Tiger in a new den is sitting with him fine.
"In Melbourne I can walk around and no one knows who I am. I can cruise around and there might be a few people that sort of say hello, but I can pretty much live a normal life without too much hassle and I like that," he said.
"That suits me."
Sugar and spice: Kane Johnson
Age: 27
Height: 186cm
Weight: 85kg
Nickname: Sugar
AFL debut: 1996
Career games: 161 Adelaide (104 games, 1996-2002), Richmond (57 games, 2003-)
Recruited from: Ringwood, captain of his junior club and TEAL Cup side
PLAYER HONOURSPremiership medal 1997, 1998 Richmond 2nd best and fairest 2003, 2004 Rising Star nominee 1997 Richmond captain 2004-
Brownlow Medal: 2005 votes 7; career votes 34
JOHNSON ON:
MENTORING YOUNGER PLAYERS … "You get a lot of footballers that come in, and if they don’t feel comfortable their talent gets wasted. So it’s our job as leaders and older blokes around the club to make sure that they feel really comfortable and can express themselves around the football club."
HIS PLAYING STYLE ... "I don’t think I’ve ever been a match winner type footballer. I think I’d be more like a (Mark) Bickley type, doing the right things on the field, putting your body on the line when you have to and trying to do everything right around the club."
RICHMOND ... "When I first got there I just don’t think they were as professional as what the Adelaide Football Club was. That was probably the biggest difference. There was a massive gap in that area."
BEING CAPTAIN … "I’m more of a serious person that likes to do things under the radar and not be out there. Browny and that love their Footy Show but ... I’ve just never liked those sort of things. They’re just not me."
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2006/03/11/1141701733014.html
