It was 10 years ago yesterday that Garry Lyon stepped back from presenting The AFL Footy Show on Australia’s Nine Network for one week only.
It was a few days after Jim Stynes, his former Melbourne teammate and friend of more than 27 years, had died and a few days before the Dubliner was to be afforded a state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne.
Lyon would still leave his mark on that particular edition of the show, however, in the shape of a touching five-minute long monologue on Stynes to open the broadcast.
“It was my way of paying tribute to him without having to sit up there and do the show because the show was very light-hearted, fun, and I wasn’t in that mood so that was the way I thought best to pay tribute,” he explains.
“I had a few mates that passed at young ages and one of the best ways I found to deal with your grief was to sit down and write and put some things down on paper.
“You have a lot of thoughts swirling around your head and your heart and sometimes the best thing to do is to get it out and put it down and to write about it, so that’s how that came about.”
What followed was an astonishing tribute during which Lyon plotted out how their relationship had evolved, from early suspicions of Stynes to the Irishman eventually commanding hero status.
“What I now know to be true,” he told viewers, “is that my doubts were less about Jim and more about myself, and I say that not self-consciously but with some degree of pride because it means that I’ve truly come to appreciate the man that Jim Stynes was and if that paints me in a lesser light then I’m fine with that because there are few, if any, that can compare to him."
As it happens, a decade later, Melbourne is reeling from the death of another sporting and cultural icon following the sudden passing of cricket legend Shane Warne earlier this month. To rank just how beloved Stynes was in his adopted city and beyond Lyon says that, apart from the abruptness of Warne’s death compared to Stynes’s drawn out and well documented battle with cancer, the level of public grief was broadly similar.
“Jimmy’s state funeral and Shane the same, they were both very public, they were loved universally.
“Often, people play for a team or a side and that group of supporters love them but the others cannot so much embrace them.
“Didn’t matter who you bagged for with Jim or with Warney for that matter - everyone loved them .
“We had a function on Thursday at the MCG for Jim for Reach, which is the youth organisation that him and another man founded, and then I went to catch up with the whole Stynes family on Sunday night and had a beautiful dinner and just sat down with friends and immediate family and remembered him, so his legacy lives on really, really strongly and it’s great to see.”
Stynes’s footballing exploits are well documented having arrived in Australia after starring for the Dublin minor team that won the 1984 All-Ireland.
“Played his first senior game in ‘87 and four or five years later he’s the best player in the country. That is the greatest footy story of all time. No one will convince me there’s a better story than that.”
In 1994, three years after he had won the Brownlow Medal as Player of the Year, Stynes and Paul Currie founded Reach, a foundation with the objective “to inspire young people to believe in themselves and get the most out of life” according to its website.
It’s been an extraordinary success and elevated Stynes beyond the status of that of a sporting hero.
“To a level of sainthood, if you like,” says Lyon. “He was a great Catholic man and we’re living through challenging times in terms of sexism in sport, we’re dealing with that constantly here, recognising and respecting everyone’s right to choose, all of these issues which back in the day, 20 years ago, Jim was so far ahead of his time with that stuff.
“He was the first to acknowledge that we were all different, there was no race, there was no religion, there was no sexual preference that should discriminate between people and they’re the issues that modern day corporate world and sporting world are still wrestling with today.
“He was 20 years ahead of that curve and he opened my eyes to all of that for the first time. I was never as progressive as him but I’m thankful that I’ve got him as a bit of a moral compass for what is a difficult time.”
Having served Melbourne with distinction as a player, Stynes moved into administration when taking over as president in 2008, shortly before his cancer diagnosis, with the club in a sorry state.
They won the Grand Final for the first time since 1964 last year and ex-captain Lyon got to present the trophy, an honour that he believes Stynes would have been chosen for had he been alive.
“When he took over the presidency we were not insolvent but we weren’t far away and he drove a really aggressive fundraising campaign. We didn’t enjoy great on-field success while he was the president but that wasn’t his fault.
“He was there at the time when there was great upheaval at the footy club and he was able to get us together and knock off debt and allowed us to continue to be a viable footy club that eventually got that Premiership. So he was an enormous part of what took place last September.”
Lyon completed his tribute of a decade ago by referencing a photograph of the two men holding hands on one of the last occasions that they got to share time together.
“It will serve as a constant reminder of him - what he stood for and how profound an impact he had on me and just how right he got his 45 years. The photo will sit on my wall at home and every time I look at it I will think of the man he was and the one I can only ever hope to be.”
Ten years later, he still draws inspiration from it.
“All the time, yeah. It’s a deeply personal reminder of who he was and it’s a deeply personal photo for me. We don’t always live perfect lives but you can aspire to and that’s the motivation for it.”
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