Ron Barassi, the eternal son of the Melbourne Football Club

Not many people get a line on a map named after them.

Ron Barassi did.

The Barassi line was a phrase coined by the historian, Ian Turner, to separate the Australian Rules-loving southern and western states from the rugby codes to the north.

It was a symbol as much as an imaginary line.

And why Barassi?

Because in 1978, when Turner first used the term in a public lecture, there was no bigger figure in Australian Rules Football than Ronald Dale Barassi — he was the closest thing you could get to a living embodiment of the game

Nowadays, it might be called the Dustan Martin line, or the Bontempelli line.

But not even the hardest and most skilful players of the modern day get close to emulating Ron Barassi’s status in the game from the 1950s through the 80s.

He was the star player who created a new position, a revolutionary coach, the game’s greatest thinker all rolled into one.

Even now, Ronald Barassi is regarded as one of Aussie Rules most important figures and it’s hard to think who stands above him.

He’s as much a symbol as that line named after him.

And it all goes back to his spiritual home, the Melbourne Football Club.

“Ron is the biggest name in footy. He was the biggest name when I arrived at Melbourne. He was like a god,” said former Demon’s captain Gary Lyon.

The journalist and author of “Barassi the Biography”, Peter Lalor, said Barassi was Melbourne’s “eternal son.”

“I think it was his life,” said the former Hawthorn, Fitzroy and Carlton coach, David Parkin.

Parkin grew up as a mad Melbourne supporter during the Demons’ most successful years in the 1950s.

After joining Hawthorn, he played against Barassi for a few years and later, the two became firm friends.

“I think that of all the things that he’s been a part of and the influence that he’s had, that club means to him more than anything else,” Parkin said.

Ron Barassi’s father, Ron Senior, also played for Melbourne and won a grand final with legendary Melbourne player and coach Norm Smith in 1940.

The following year, Ron Senior was killed in Tobruk — the first VFL player to die in WWII. He was just 27 and Ron Junior, just five.

From then on, Norm Smith became a huge figure in Barassi’s life.

When Ron’s mother remarried 11 years later and planned to move to Tasmania, Smith built a bungalow in his backyard for Ron to live in.

Smith became Ron’s de facto father as well as his coach, when he debuted in 1953 at just 17.

Despite the close relationship, Smith maintained he didn’t give Ron preferential treatment and if anything, he was harder on Barassi than the rest of the team.

An understatement, said Lalor: “He was more than hard, he was brutal.”

“He treated him like a son and the downside was he was twice as hard on him as he was on any player,” Lalor said.

“His teammates said it bordered on cruelty.

“He made him cry more than once, but he also loved him dearly.”

Barassi wasn’t an overnight star — at 179 centimetres, he was too big to be a rover and too small to be a ruckman.

But he was fast, strong, a good kick and pack mark and above all had a fierce determination to be in the thick of the action — all of the time.

At the time, teams generally played with two ruckmen, a rover and centre in the middle of the ground. Barassi revolutionised that second ruck position by creating a new position of a ruck-rover

“I think he would have loved to be a ruckman, but he wasn’t tall enough, and he wanted to influence the game, so he basically stayed on the ball; he was the first middle-size player who ran all day,” Parkin said.

That partnership between Smith and Barassi, who later became captain, became the foundation of one of the great dynasties in Australian Football.

Melbourne played in seven straight grand finals between 1954 and 1960, winning five and added another in 1964.

Only Collingwood from 1925 to 1930 and Hawthorn between 1983 and 1991 have come close to matching that record of success.

Parkin said at the time only Footscray’s Ted Whitten could match Barassi for public image, skill and his ability to lift his team with an individual effort.

“Ted Whitten was a very gifted and skilful and talented player; Ron was much more of a physical, bullocking player,” Parkin said.

But whereas Whitten was more of a key position player, generally at centre half-forward or centre half-back, Parkin said Barassi covered the whole ground.

“Ron was seen as an on-baller and someone who could affect the game, back, middle and forward, which he did,” Parkin said.

“But he was on his own rating in terms of leadership — I don’t know anybody else in the game that quite matches him.”

He was the embodiment of the Melbourne Football Club, which made a decision at the height of his powers all the more extraordinary.

After Melbourne won the 1964 Premiership — their sixth of that golden era — Barassi stunned the football world by announcing he was leaving to take up a position as captain-coach of Carlton.

The move was shocking and unthinkable; critics decried it as the beginning of professionalism and the end of loyalty.

There were two lures: one was money — Barassi was offered 20,000 pounds for three years — a staggering amount for the time equalling around five times the average weekly wage and 10 times what an average footballer was getting paid.

But Lalor argues the other reason is that both Smith and Barassi saw that Ron had to step out of Norm’s shadow, and that couldn’t happen if he remained at Melbourne.

“He agonised [over leaving],” Lalor said.

“He jumped from one position to the other a number of times, but this was an opportunity to be a coach and be his own man — to come out from under Norm Smith’s wings.”

Barassi’s departure led to suspicions amongst Melbourne’s board about Smith’s motives.

He was sacked midway through the following year, only to be hastily reinstated just a few days later, but the damage was done, and he left for good a few years later.

Melbourne hasn’t won a premiership since — some call it Norm Smith’s curse.

It took until 1968 for Carlton to win a premiership under Barassi — a year in which he started as a player but retired because of injury mid-way through the year to focus on coaching.

Then, in 1970, he coached Carlton to the most famous premiership in the VFL/AFL’s history, with his side coming from 44 points down against Collingwood at half-time to win by 10.

Barassi famously told his team at half-time to “handball, handball, handball” and play on at all costs, prompting the myth that this game was the birth of modern football.

It’s a wonderful story, but not one borne out by the facts. While Carlton had 16 handballs at half time, they only produced 24 in the second half for a measly total of 40. Modern sides often rack-up that many in a quarter.

But there is truth in the notion that Barassi was fascinated with developing a faster, more flowing style of game — a style that some visionary coaches were already adopting in the 1960s.

It came to fruition in the early 1970s when he took the job as coach of North Melbourne.

Under Barassi, the team played in five consecutive premierships between 1974-78, winning two in 1975 and 1977.

With an aggressive recruiting policy, he landed a number of key position players and some exquisitely gifted stars — Malcolm Blight from South Australia and Western Australia’s handballing wizard Barry Cable, to augment some of the game’s best runners, Keith Greig and Wayne Schimmelbusch.

He encouraged his skilful players to look for free targets, to switch play and adopt a mindset that it was the responsibility of the entire team to either defend or attack.

Barassi returned to coach Melbourne from 1981 to 1985 and although he didn’t have any success with the team, he did lay the groundwork for their achievements later in the decade, including their grand final appearance in 1988 — a 96 point belting at the hands of Hawthorn.

The Demons’ next and last grand final appearance in 2000 was another thrashing by 60 points at the hands of Essendon.

This year, the Demons have clearly been one of the best two sides of the season and are in imperious form.

Could this be the year the Dees finally break the Norm Smith curse and add another premiership after a 57-year wait?

Ron Barassi is 85 and not in the best of health, but Parkin says he’s well aware of his beloved Demons’ progression to this year’s Grand Final.

“He understands the significance and as much as he can he’s thoroughly enjoying what’s happened,” Parkin said.

“You can see the joy on his face.”

It’s a joy that will be amplified in thousands of red and the blue hearts if Melbourne’s “eternal son” sees his grand old flag flying high.

Source: AFL NEWS ABC