All-round champion

EVEN in his final hours, Barry Round’s sense of humour remained.

The football giant – who famously wore the No.25 on his back for South Melbourne and the Sydney Swans – had always fancied himself as a mug punter.

Admitted to palliative care in a Gold Coast hospital last week, Round had told wife Jenni that he was going to get the trifecta.

He was in ward 25, bed 25 and said he was going to be out on December 25. Sadly, he died on Christmas Eve, aged 72. About 60 friends and former teammates gathered at Williamstown Football Club for a beer that afternoon in honour of a man who would have a coldie with anyone.

“It doesn’t matter who you are or how good the individual is, for whatever reason there is always someone who doesn’t like someone,” good friend Brad Hardie said.

“But I don’t think there was a person in football that disliked Barry, which is quite remarkable in itself. It says a lot about the bloke.”

Hardie first met Round when he won the 1985 Brownlow Medal in his first year with Footscray. Round was already in the Brownlow Medal club, having won his own in 1981 while playing for South Melbourne.

“He was one of the very first that came up and congratulated me when I won mine,” Hardie said. “We just remained close ever since.”

Hardie last saw Round at the Australian Football Hall of Fame function, which was held in Melbourne in June.

The pair and their wives shared a taxi on the way back to their hotel. The towering 193cm Round had to lie down in the back seat to get out.

“He was stuck in the taxi, the poor bugger,” Hardie said. “He was a very solid guy.”

The man who tied with Round for the Brownlow Medal in 1981, Bernie Quinlan, began his career with him at Footscray in 1969.

“He’s always been the same,” Quinlan said.

“He’s just a fantastic bloke and very sociable. He loved to have a good time and he loved to have a drink with anyone. Everybody loved him.”

By 1981, Quinlan had moved on to Fitzroy and Round was captain of South Melbourne.

But the pair travelled to the Gold Coast together that year with their families for a preseason training camp.

“We did beach runs every morning from Surfers Paradise to Southport. For such a big bloke, you wouldn’t believe that Roundy was such a good long-distance runner,” Quinlan said. “We would get up to Southport and we would do a series of exercises like pushups and sit-ups and then we would turn around and run back. With about 2km to go, Roundy would start picking up the pace and I’d say ‘Hang on’. He’d say ‘No, come on, come on’.

“It was fair dinkum unbelievable how well he could run for a bloke his size with his frame. He’d run me into the ground.”

It was fitting that after that unofficial pre-season training camp, Quinlan and Round tied for the competition’s highest individual award later that year.

“To win the Brownlow is fantastic but to share it with Roundy, a mate I’d known since 1969 when I started at the Bulldogs, was even more special,” Quinlan said.

Despite relocating to the Gold Coast, Round had remained tightly connected with the Swans, and his impromptu renditions of The Gambler and Sweet Caroline were always a highlight of club functions he attended.

AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan said Round was a “larger-than-life personality” who had “held the player group together” during South Melbourne’s “turbulent” move to Sydney.

Swans chairman Andrew Pridham described Round as “a great of our club” who would leave “behind a legacy which will forever live in the folklore of our club”.

Round is survived by wife Jenni and their children David and Natalie.