Tom Hafey - Plenty of Life After Football

Plenty of Life After Football

Returning to Melbourne in 1989, Hafey was employed by ABC radio as a football commentator, a role he still fulfills. Although often mentioned as a possible candidate by the media whenever a coaching position fell vacant in the AFL, no job materialised – Hafey came to be seen as one of the "old school" coaches, unsuited to the tactically sophisticated era of the last fifteen years. In his radio commentary, he rarely employs the jargon of the modern coach and is prosaic in his attitude toward the game. Hafey believes that football is a simple game that has been over-complicated, that motivation comes from within and fitness is the basis for success.

Rather than take a specific coaching position, Hafey has fashioned a career as a self-styled "ambassador" for the game and a strident advocate for physical fitness in the wider society. He speaks regularly to many types of groups on football and/or fitness, and never fails to emphasise the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. Hafey is also available to sporting clubs and schools to help take training and give motivational lectures. A particular interest is the current plight of Australian football clubs in rural areas, who he believes have been neglected by the AFL since the competition was fully professionalised in the 1990s.

An inaugural inductee to the Australian Football Hall of Fame 1996, Hafey was named coach of Richmond's team of the century in 1998. In 2003, the Tigers set up the Tom Hafey club (a corporate networking group) in his honour.

In 2011 Hafey appeared in a TV commercial for Jeep Australia as part of their 70th Anniversary Campaign. Chosen because he is also aged in his 70's like the Jeep, the commercial shows him running and doing push-ups as part of his regular fitness routine that keeps him young at heart.

In July 2011 a book titled The Hafey Years - Reliving a golden era at Tigerland was published. It documents Hafey's involvement with Richmond as a player, and his run of success as a coach in the 1960s and 1970s. Hafey has resisted having a biography written about him, but author Elliot Cartledge "guesses the 80-year-old supported the project because The Hafey Years is not a biography but a chronicle of an era."

In AFL Grand Final week in 2011 Hafey was awarded with the Coaching Legend Award by the AFL Coaches Association.