Inside Damien Hardwick’s premiership years at Richmond Tigers, and the bond with his players

The visual aid before the 2017 grand final was an A3 sheet with a headshot of every player in the team, only these headshots were action photos, with their tongues lolling out to the side, or their eyes half closed, jawlines kilter or cheeks stretched in panic. They looked ridiculous.

Dimma called them “the munted heads” – but in their expressions he saw individuality and imperfection, and that was what he expected to see because grand finals are imperfect and messy, and he would need them each to bring their best munted selves to the field to meet the moment.

In subsequent years these little expressions of affection turned even more overt. He started giving players gifts related to the theme of the week, whether a De Walt hammer or an NFL ball.

Often the gifts were personalised. A vinyl record, for instance, for each player – Liam Baker got Lose Yourself by Eminem, Kamdyn McIntosh got I Am The Walrus, while Straight Outta Compton seemed the best fit for Dustin Martin – and he penned a handwritten letter for each player explaining why.

At some point, it all started to sound a bit cultish, and outsiders would sneer a little about this perception of Richmond exceptionalism, from the mindfulness program that had players laying in darkened rooms, imaging lines of purple energy emitted from their body and linking them on field, to the tearful “Triple H” sessions in which players broke down sharing three stories about a hero, hardship and highlights from their most intimate lives.

It was all a bit too easy for some to assume the Tiges were drinking kumbaya Kool Aid. Imagine what the punditry would have thought in the days before one preliminary final when the entire playing list and coaching staff sat in the old change rooms of the Jack Dyer Stand, coming together in a frenzied Senegalese drum circle, or the day before another preliminary final, when Dimma invited a Queen cover band to rock the entire club in the Maurice Rioli Room. (We are the champions, indeed.)

Vulnerability and authenticity may well have become buzzwords in the wider sporting world, but the belief in them at Richmond was carefully practised and planted and nurtured, and that only happens when the coach – the sun within the solar system of any club – shines on those programs.

He found that they dovetailed well with his tactical acumen, too, with a defence built on system but dependent on trust and anticipation, and an attack predicated on sharing the footy – the so-called “Spurs mentality” of always putting a teammate in a position to score, giving up a good shot in favour of a great shot – and the desire to “fight forward”, even if through grubby handballs and tap ons and blast kicks.

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In a measured and quantified world that so often focuses on weaknesses, Dimma focused on strengths: “I love your run, Bachar” and “Keep jumping, Jack” and “We look our best when you’re hunting, Cotch.” He knew what it meant to us, too, in the grandstands, and in private meetings with his players he would ask them: “Tomorrow night, what do you want the fans to see?”

He knew what he wanted to see, commissioning his audiovisual team to assemble game clips set to music, so the players could watch ragged, dirty passages of play, and he could shake his head and smile at how proud he was of their ability to corral and chase and menace.

Or he might stop match review vision to demand applause for a player nowhere near the ball, who stopped an exit from an opposition forward line because of a selfless 100-metre sprint to stand on a vacant patch of grass on the fat side of the ground. He saw everything that unfolded on the field, but more importantly he let the players know that he saw them, too, and how they fit within the story of any game.

He was a storyteller to the end, and his favourites were always seemingly about mountains. Overcoming the perilous final “Hilary Step” on Mount Everest perhaps, or the treachery and danger of the Bottleneck on K2. On a trip to America, Dimma stood at the bottom of the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, and marvelled at how a person might claw their way up, alone, with no rope, free climbing its sheer face.

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He constantly compared the AFL season – and even specific matches – to that act of scaling a mountain, imploring his players to strive for the summit together, step after step.

With the announcement of his resignation on Tuesday, it simply feels as though he didn’t have another ascent in him – not right now anyway. Maybe putting one foot in front of the other, climbing that mountain again and again, became too Sisyphean for him to contemplate. Maybe right now he doesn’t want to climb. Maybe he just wants to go for a walk.

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