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.
Read more about this topic: Tom Hafey
Famous quotes containing the words plenty of, plenty, life and/or football:
“Y’know plenty of people, in their right mind, thought they saw things that didn’t exist, y’know, like flying saucers. The light was just right, and the angle and the imagination. Oh boy, if that’s what it is, then this is just an ordinary night. You and I are going to go home and go to sleep and tomorrow when we get up that sun’s gonna shine. Just like yesterday. Good ol’ yesterday.”
—Theodore Simonson. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.. Steve Andrews (Steven McQueen)
“As the creative adult needs to toy with ideas, the child, to form his ideas, needs toys—and plenty of leisure and scope to play with them as he likes, and not just the way adults think proper. This is why he must be given this freedom for his play to be successful and truly serve him well.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)