Kennedy a Hall of Fame legend
FIRSTLY, it’s best to close your eyes and listen before coming back and reading this.
Go on, go to YouTube and type in: “John Kennedy Sr Don’t Think, Do”.
Now listen. Did you close your eyes?
In a kind of football wonderland, did you supplant yourself to the rooms at halftime of the 1975 grand final, where the Hawks were down by 20 points to North Melbourne, and where Kennedy, you could imagine, is pacing and pleading, his eyes darting to player after player, as he delivers one of the all-time great speeches?
“At least DO SOMETHING! DO! Don’t think, don’t hope, do! At least you can come off and say ‘I did this, or I shepherded, or I played on. At least I did something’.’’
It is more than folklore, that speech, it’s football treasure.
The Hawks lost that day, but it’s not about that.
It’s about the pressure of that moment, down on grand final day, and the clarity and urgency of Kennedy’s words, which, they say, separates the good coaches from the great. And that voice.
People like to say Kennedy had a booming voice. But that undersells it. Kennedy’s was altogether authoritative and distinctive and punctuated by confidence and intelligence.
Master storyteller Martin Flanagan once described it as ‘’the bellow of an old stag trapped in a forest of despair, refusing to surrender’’.
That old stag was last night the 29th legend of the Australian Football Hall of Fame.
That speech is a treasure, yet as time has paced it has become a sense of amusement for the Kennedy clan, mostly for Kennedy’s six grandkids and maybe for some of his six great-great grandchildren.
“It’s had a funny elevation of status,’’ John Kennedy Jr said.
“The grandkids, they raise it. They say to dad, ‘You used to say “Don’t think, do”’, but the kids would say sometimes you’ve got to think before you do and don’t do stupid things just because someone tells you do it. It makes him scratch his head sometimes.’’
Even Junior has adopted it. Dad is 91 and his health is failing. “I’ve said to him, ‘Don’t think, just do. Just walk around the block on his frame, don’t think about doing it, just do it’.’’
Still, that voice was never for the home in Camberwell.
But when Junior went got into his teens and saw how his dad was roaring at the players, he says it was “quite an eyeopener for me”.
“I hadn’t seen him like that before. It was like I had a Jekyll and Hyde dad. I saw him as placid, but he was very vocal when he got to the football arena,” he said..
“I guess as I got older I came to appreciate what he was saying. He wasn’t yelling nonsensical stuff and I came to appreciate it. He was a hard taskmaster, but the irony of all that was whatever he asked them to do, he did it himself. If it was a 12km run to Ringwood, he’d be doing it himself.’’
Kennedy first coached the Hawks in 1957 while playing and, after retiring, from 1960-63 and 1967-76.
A teacher, his career was sidetracked after the ’63 season when he was posted to Stawell, where he also coached.
Kennedy’s philosophies would define him.
“I had a plan, I had the desire,’’ he said. “I feel I had something to give in the way of the direction of the play, the way we should play, the importance of the team winning, and the not so importance of individual success.’’