‘How you act may kill the opportunity or open it up’: Pioneering Peggy O’Neal prepares to farewell Richmond presidencyKonrad Marshall
The Age
August 14, 2022Naive is a word no one would associate with Peggy O’Neal, except perhaps the woman herself — albeit eight years ago, when she became president of the Richmond Football Club. O’Neal was already the first female board member in the club’s history, but admits she simply didn’t recognise the significance of becoming the first female figurehead in clubland — or the backlash it would spark.
“I remember someone wrote: ‘It’s like seeing a bear on a bicycle — it’s just not natural’,” O’Neal recalls. “And I must say, there were times when I thought, ‘I don’t have the constitution for this’. I came totally from outside. I didn’t go to school here. I didn’t know anyone. I had no connections with football except loving it and loving the Richmond Football Club. I could see that a lot of people might have thought, without getting to know me, ‘well, this is just gonna be a disaster’.”
Fast-forward almost a decade and O’Neal’s incredibly successful time at the helm of the club — an era that has produced three premierships and more than 100,000 members five years in a row — comes to an end this season. Sunday’s match against Hawthorn is her final time hosting an AFL president’s function, and she spoke with Good Weekend Talks in advance, about sexism and racism and mind games, but also her origin story, including getting her professional start as the first female lawyer at a top firm in Charleston.
“You feel a keen sense of responsibility because how you act may kill the opportunity for someone else, or open it up,” she says. “I’ve said before that when you’re only the only woman in the room, you’re all the women in the world.”
That was especially true later in football. O’Neal expected her role as president to be chairing the board and dealing with stakeholders, but was quickly taken aback by the ambassadorial part of the job — all that time spent glad-handing and schmoozing.
She was fearful, too, of finishing her time at Richmond without other women coming through, yet five of nine directors there now are women, while the league also boasts three other female presidents in Kate Roffey (Melbourne), Kylie Watson-Wheeler (Western Bulldogs) and Sonja Hood (North Melbourne).
In a wide-ranging podcast episode hosted by Good Weekend senior writer Konrad Marshall, the pioneering O’Neal spoke of the platform of financial stability Richmond pledged to establish before their rise up the ladder, as well as the famous 2016 gap analysis and football review that led the club to explore a new leadership model, eschewing “command and control” in favour of personal connection.
“Right away, early in 2017, I started hearing people talk differently, about how ‘It’s great to come back to work’ and ‘I really want to be there’, and I’m sure in 2016 people were going, ‘How soon can I get out of here?’”
The entire experience of helping run a footy club in Melbourne has been an eye-opener for O’Neal, who also chats about everything from the importance of relocating the Richmond Cricket Club away from Punt Road Oval (one of her proudest achievements at Tigerland) to her early education, reading books and learning about the wider world from inside a two-room school house in a coal-mining town in West Virginia.
“I’d never seen an ocean at that point. But I became very, very curious about the big world outside. Where I grew up, there was a very narrow worldview,” she says. “But at the same time, as with country people — or people who don’t live in big cities all over the world — you learn how to make do, you learn how to be pretty self-sufficient. You learn that there’s a community that helps you achieve things, and that at times, you’re called on to help, and at other times, you need to ask for help.”
She drew on the lessons of that past, in a way, during those early public attacks over her leadership gig, and kept right on going — thinking about fighting back but also remembering the advice of a friend: “They’ve invented a play, and they’re finding a part in that play for you. Some days you’ll be the villain, and some days you’ll be the hero. And it has nothing to do with who you are as a person.”
https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/how-you-act-may-kill-the-opportunity-or-open-it-up-pioneering-peggy-o-neal-prepares-to-farewell-richmond-presidency-20220808-p5b86x.html
