It might sound a bit odd given that he was reported 15 times - and spent more than a full year of his playing life out of the game - but Barry Hall has probably done more than any other individual over the past 10 years to help expand the national code.
If you take your kids along to Auskick in Sydney, or talk to any Swans fans, the one constant which drives their love of the game, the person they associate most readily and passionately with the club, is not Brett Kirk or Leo Barry or Adam Goodes or Paul Roos, but the phenomenal, flawed, big, bad, bustling Barry Hall.
Now that he has quit Aussie Rules, the greatest hits packages will tonight run for several minutes as his contribution to the game is seen first and, sadly, foremost, through his many high-impact brain snaps, such as this textbook left-hook on West Coast’s Brent Staker which cost him seven weeks.
“I can tell you the look on Brett Staker’s eyes is not going to do Barry Hall any good,” Tim Lane said as the Eagles’ eyeballs rolled around inside his skull in a sickening slo-mo. Lane was right, it didn’t, and for many, this image will become the defining moment of Hall’s career, the shorthand story of a man who was nothing other than a hot-head and a hard-man.
It’s simply not true. The mysterious feature of Hall’s aggression is that it was in no way a permanent feature of his game - he could play for months without incident - but sure enough, Bad Barry would eventually flare again, and he’d be rubbed out after another king-hit.
Hall was a physical player, who with his size and strength had a dominant presence on the park, but he was not some park footy psycho who would approach every game with a view to dropping opponents behind the play.
Often his aggression was born out of frustration at two things - being double-teamed or even triple-teamed by defenders, and being ignored by the umpires, who seemed to covertly conclude several years ago that Hall should never get another free, as this recent string of absurd 50m penalties against Hawthorn demonstrated.
Two of the best games Hall ever played involved St Kilda - the first of them was when he still played for them, losing to Adelaide in 1997, where he could have rightly beaten Adelaide’s Andrew McLeod for the Norm Smith best on ground medal, such were his heroics for the Saints. The second was against the Saints for Sydney in the 2005 preliminary final, where aside from kicking four goals, one of them against the run of play in the third term to defuse a St Kilda surge, Hall was also reported for giving what we in the Sydney news media conspired to describe as a “love pat’ to the stomach of St Kilda’s Matt Maguire.
The stakes could not have been any higher for Hall - given his record, he was looking at a two-week suspension, meaning he would miss the Grand Final the following week against West Coast.
The media’s lobbying effort on behalf of Barry - dubbed And Justice For Hall - represented a shift in the Harbour City’s appreciation and understanding of the game. People who had never taken an interest in Aussie Rules before joined the campaign to let Hally play. Even the then Premier Morris Iemma joined the chorus. When he was cleared by the tribunal The Tele’s front page pictured Hall with a smile from ear to ear, as he brushed politely past the media pack, and read: I’d love to talk folks but…I’M OFF TO THE GRAND FINAL.” Sydney’s victory the following week gave the club, in its Sydney incarnation, its first bit of silverware. To the AFL, it represented what Andrew Demetriou had called “the jewel in the crown” for the national game - a premiership-winning club in every AFL state.
One year later, Hall’s poor performance in the 2006 Grand Final - and his subsequent rage at the media after he vanished for a couple of weeks and reporters rightly tried to track him down - may have been the first sign he was losing his passion for the game. At a post-match club dinner at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre on the Saturday Night, the players were all gutted, having lost by less than a kick to their West Coast nemesis, but Brett Kirk spoke passionately urging them to hold their heads high. And all of them did, except for Barry Hall, who stood with his head bowed, staring at his feet, obviously so utterly ashamed of his own efforts that he did not want to face the club’s most rusted-on fans.
That episode shed a bit of light on a guy who has obviously struggled to be at some kind of peace with himself, perhaps because he expects too much, and is unable to deal with his own frustration when he doesn’t perform well.
Indeed all his brain-snaps have generally come at a time when the run of play is against him or the club, when the umpires have been giving him a raw deal, and when despite several months of peace, Bad Barry will suddenly re-emerge and someone will wind up having a bit of an extended lie-down.
But for these momenets, footy is still the richer for his contribution, the Swans are more popular than they would otherwise have been, and the AFL is more entrenched as a code in Sydney than it was 10 years ago. Our thoughts now should probably be with the first mug boxer who comes up against him at his debut fight.
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