The mouth that roared
COLLINGWOOD president Eddie McGuire didn’t mince his words describing the state of the club he inherited on October 29, 1998 — the day he turned 34.
“The joint was rat-infested,” McGuire declared in a 2006 rant aimed at former coach Tony Shaw’s regime.
“The club was in disarray. The playing culture was appalling — off-field, on-field, every field.”
But almost 22 years on, rats in the ranks continue to plague McGuire’s own long-running reign at the top of Australia’s most famous sporting club.
Incidents involving star forward Jordan De Goey and vice-captain Steele Sidebottom — and the spectre of the Heritier Lumumba racism investigation — are just the latest in a litany of off-field scandals at the Magpies under McGuire’s watch.
Few clubs, if any, can match the Pies for such a sustained run of serious misconduct.
Since May 2000, more than 50 separate incidents involving Collingwood players have made headlines linked to drugs, alcohol, violence and gambling.
Many have been repeat offenders.
One of them, 2010 premiership star Dane Swan, explained last week that McGuire would privately rip through players who made the news for all the wrong reasons.
“(But) once he got that out of his system, he was very supportive in trying to get you out of what you are in or the best way to manage the situation,” Swan said.
“No matter what you do, he will come out to bat for you.”
From as far back as 2006, when Chris Tarrant and Ben Johnson escaped suspension over a 4.30am brawl, McGuire has been taking bullets — and making excuses — for his players.
“When these kids start to go off the rails … I tend to think that’s when you stand by them and you put your arm around them, rather than publicly humiliate them and castigate them,” he said.
McGuire is loved by the
Collingwood faithful. He is one of the most influential figures in the game’s history, and among the first AFL boss Gillon McLachlan sounded out when the COVID-19 crisis hit.
The majority of talkback callers on 3AW radio last Sunday sprang to his defence.
He helped rebuild a broken club, masterminded the shift to
Olympic Park and has one premiership cup from five grand final years.
But he has also heaped untold pressure on the club, thanks to a series of gaffes in his other job as a media commentator, none more damaging than his 2013 suggestion that Swan Adam Goodes be used to promote the musical King Kong.
Those who dare question the culture at Collingwood, as Tony Shaw attempted to do again two years ago when De Goey was charged with drinkdriving, cop a savage dose of McGuire’s wrath.
“Tony’s a great supporter of the club, a great friend, one of our greatest-ever people but has no insight at all as to what’s going on in the club. That’s dial-a-quote stuff,” McGuire said of the 1990 Norm Smith medallist.
Former premier John Brumby, a Collingwood supporter, ruffled feathers in 2008 when he suggested there was something wrong with the club’s culture after Heath Shaw and Alan Didak brazenly lied about a drunken car crash.
“Didak will be accused of the Kennedy shooting next,” McGuire famously said when asked if Didak was in the car.
McGuires’s other favourite line in fending off controversy is that nothing can sell a newspaper like a Magpies yarn.
In June 2004, after a group of players overindulged at a Mooloolaba hotel in Queensland — with one defecating and another vomiting on a balcony where a young family was staying — McGuire said his club had taken steps to “make sure it never happens again”.
But four years later, after rookie Sharrod Wellingham was arrested for drink-driving at Lorne, McGuire again flatly denied his club had a problem.
“There’s a situation out there since time immemorial with people drinking too much,” he said.
“There’s a far bigger alcohol problem with journalists than there is with footballers.
“I know because I’m involved in both sides of the ledger there.”
McGuire’s go-to defence — almost always aggressively prosecuted — is that a story about Collingwood or its players is a beat-up or driven by people who “run agendas”.
But the same standards are often not applied when he’s talking about another club or its players.
Brisbane Lions great Jonathan Brown this week said McGuire’s public comments and defence of Sidebottom after he was picked up by police drunk and half-naked on the streets of Williamstown was “hurting” Collingwood.
“I’ve been involved in these campaigns and it can quickly tip over,” Brown said.
“You need to keep them smooth as possible and administrators especially need to stay as much as they can out of the football side of things.”
The Pies boss scoffed at Brown’s assessment, saying the triple premiership star had “zero understanding” of what happens at his club.
McGuire once claimed that running Collingwood and sacrificing time for his own TV career had cost him “four or five” Gold Logies, but maybe being the game’s most outspoken president is a part of the problem.