Ron Barassi - Wisdom

Ronald Dale Barassi is a legend for many reasons: incredible footballer, revolutionary coach, enduring media personality. For more than fifty years he has been one of the most influential people in sport, and the shadow he casts is matched by few, if any.

Footballers are often branded heroes or villains according to their team colours, but Ron Barassi is loved and respected by all. He has truly become the father of the modern game, and will always be remembered as one of the all-time greats.

James Money was born in 1974 and graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1995. His illustrations have graced various magazines, newspapers, books and other publications. In 2003 James was awarded the Melbourne Savage Club Drawing Prize. In 2010 his works were selected as finalists in the Archibald Prize, Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and Rick Amor Drawing Prize.

First published in 2011

Copyright Ron Barassi and Robert Parsons 2011

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ISBN 978 1 74237 875 6

Internal design by Squirt Creative Illustrations by James Money Set in 9/15 pt Cooper BT by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

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This book is dedicated to my wife Cherryl, who has been a source of wisdom and inspiration to me. I have often thought that I would have been a much better coach had I been blessed with her skill at communication and diplomacy.

Many suggest that the number 31 has become synonymous with me. It was my fathers playing number and I carried it through all but one of 254 games with the Melbourne and Carlton football clubs. Due to a dispute between the Football Record and the newspapers over the publishing of player numbers for the 1958 Grand Final, I was forced to wear number 2 that daya painful loss I still feel! Elsewhere the number 31 recurs with surprising, sometimes lucky, frequency among the numbers in my life, from the total of the digits in my phone number to winning raffle tickets. In my career as a football player and coach I participated in seventeen grand finals, for ten premiership wins. I had incorporated the numerals 174 (meaning for)10 in my signature and it took me a year before I suddenly realised those three numbers add up to 31! By a less happy coincidence, my father lost his life at Tobruk on 31 July 1941 during World War II. Another spooky coincidence is that I was the 741st player to be signed by Melbourne. In deciding to write this book we had to settle on how many quotes to include. The number came easily to mind!

These quotations and maxims are not all mine. However, they all express ideas that I have embraced in the course of my life and which, in one way or another, have served to inspire me, been used to motivate my teams and given me more than mere pause for thought over the years.

Wanting to do more than simply assemble a list of inspirational words, outside of any meaningful context, I have elaborated on each quote to share with you how they came to appeal to me and influence my own life. Its my hope that some may similarly inspire you.

ForewordIt has been said that the only person who doesnt realise how big and how loved Ron Barassi is, is Ron Barassi.

For a man who has been a giant in the world of Australian Rules football for close to sixty years, who is a living legend in his home city of Melbourne, and is universally respected and loved by friends and opponents alike, Barrass remains a deep thinker, has an amazing capacity to make people feel involved in a cause and, most importantly, has an innate sense of fair play and humility.

Thats not to say this has always been the case. As a player and coach Ronald Dale Barassi would do whatever it took to extract every bit of effort from himself or his charges to win. Nothing was left behind; he was ruthless.

I was born a month after Melbournes (thankfully) last premiership victory, the last time Barassi captained the team against Collingwood. But a few years later his masterminding of Carltons famous record comeback in the 1970 Grand Final to beat Collingwood was my first memory of a football match.

He broke my heart a second time when in 1977 I was attending my first VFL Grand Final and he somehow inspired North Melbourne to come from 27 points down at three-quarter time to force a drawn game and then he inspired them a week later to beat my beloved Pies. I mention this because for all the heartache, for the five victories over the Pies in grand finals, I still grew up in awe of this larger-than-life personality. Whether it was on television on World of Sport , in Column 31 in the Sun or when striding footballs greatest theatres, Barassi dominated my world. Later, as a cadet journalist working at Channel Ten, I had my first experience of meeting RDB and was thrilled that he was everything you could hope for when meeting a childhood hero. Although I was a young man, he left me with that wide-eyed, speechless feeling, impossible to put into words, that we all have as kids on meeting a hero.

Wisdom is a collection of inspiring words from some of historys greatest people. They are made even more pertinent because of the interpretation of them by one our greats. Ron Barassi is the perfect person to teach us all a little something about how to live our lives. He is a man who knows the depths of great loss, through the death in war of his footballing father, Ron Senior; who endured tough love from those entrusted to make the boy a man; who enjoyedmaybe, especially for a Magpie supporter like me, too frequently enjoyedthe highs of being a sporting star; who experienced the pressures of fame, family and fortune, and the battles to achieve them and keep them. Through all this it is the honesty of Ron Barassi that has always been there.