His playing days finished in 1991, and in 1996 he took the reins of the Western Bulldogs, a post he held until 2002. In 2005, he took over at Richmond and remains the senior coach, having guided the team in 97 matches.
Richmondfc.com.au’s Mic Cullen caught up with Wallace for a quick trip down memory lane.
Five hundred games of football at the senior level, Terry – that’s an awful lot of football.
Five hundred is a journey – this week is just another game of footy to be won. As a player, the higher milestones are incredibly hard to reach – 200 is hard enough, then 250, and the really big one is 300. To get that far is phenomenal.
I guess once I’ve finished in the game I’ll have a cup of coffee and look back and think about it, but as I said, this week is about getting out there and winning a game of football.
Media-friendliness – you really changed the whole coach-media dynamic, didn’t you?
Well, I was a bit different to a lot of the old-style coaches – they were very suspicious of the media, and the people they trained learned the same things, so nothing really changed, But I had worked for several years at Channel 9, and so I approached it from a different viewpoint.
I had to be media-friendly, and take it to a new level, both for the game and the club (Western Bulldogs). I believe that as custodians of the game that while we have to win games, of course, it also has to be a game that people want to watch, to come and see, so the better you sell it, the better it works.
When I went to the Bulldogs we had no profile at all – nobody knew the club, nobody knew any of our players. I was there during the making of ‘Year of the Dog’ documentary and that really helped put us in the spotlight and get people to take notice of us.
But we had to do it to survive.
What about doing warm-ups on the ground rather than in the rooms?
That came about because I went to Jacksonville in Florida in the summer, and it’s like the Crows over there, they have these huge tailgate parties and there’s nobody in the ground 30 minutes before it starts. So I was there and the Jaguars ran out to do their warm-up in front of empty stands, and I thought ‘what a great idea! Why don’t we do this? Surely it’ll help us avoid hamstring problems and so on if we do a proper warm-up, rather than shuffling around in a room about as big as your lounge room.’
So I got back from the States and at the start of the season I rang Collo (Ian Collins, now running Docklands), who was footy ops manager at the AFL at the time, and told him what I wanted to do, and he wasn’t that excited – because the reserves played back then before the main game, they’d have to bring the reserves game forward by half an hour, which would mean paying the lolly boys and record sellers and turnstile staff and everyone for an extra half an hour. So he said no.
But I wasn’t willing to let a good idea go, so I rang him back the next day and told him that we were definitely doing our warm-up – and given that Princes Park was our home ground back then, I told him we’d do it on the No. 1 ground outside. And then everyone would see us warming up 30 minutes before the game, so the crowd would be watching us, and he’d have enormous issues getting everyone back into the ground before the match started, complaints would follow about the struggle to get in, and so on.
So he decided to move it, and now everyone does it as a matter of course. It just makes sense.
And giving away balls after the game?
I had a couple of years out of the game where I did media, and I noticed that unless it was a tight game, the crowd was leaving midway through the last term, and the atmosphere was pretty flat. I tried to think of a way to get the crowd to stay, and we all know that parents usually end up doing what the kids want, so giving footies away to the little ones seemed like a really good idea. So at Richmond we got a heap of really cheap balls and started signing them and giving them away, and it worked like a charm. Not only did it get people stay, but it gave the fans the chance to interact with the players when they went to the fence. Now you see them ringing the fence, waiting – it’s great. And I know a lot of people who have one of those balls have got them up on the mantelpiece or where-ever - it's a treasured possession because it's been a gift from a player.
Your biggest influence?
It’s a long journey over 30 years, and at various times you have a variety of influences. But if I have to pick one – and this is going to come as no surprise to anyone – it would be Leigh Matthews. To have played alongside him, to have coached against him, to see how he went about things, to see just how amazingly tough he was – yeah, it’d have to be Leigh.
Football truths?
There’s a lot you learn, but the main thing I‘ve learned is that the blokes who work the hardest, not those who are the most talented, get the rewards. It’s a ladder, the AFL, and you’ve got to climb and crawl up it any way you can, and there are always the other players trying to climb past you, push you back down, kick you off it. People get to the AFL and think they’ve made it, and they’ve got no idea how incredibly difficult it is. But it’s hard work that does it, and I’ll guarantee that the most talented that make it are also the hardest-working – you ask people at Brisbane and they’ll talk about Michael Voss’s work ethic, talk to people at Collingwood about how hard Nathan Buckley worked. At our club it’s Nathan Foley, Brett Deledio – hard work makes the talented obvious.
Your proudest achievement in footy?
It would have to be being best and fairest in a premiership year (Hawks, 1983). All the other awards are nice, I suppose, but to be voted the best player in the team that won the flag – by the people at the club - can’t be topped.
And your lowest moments?
The game is about winning grand finals, so two games stick out for me – being four goals up at three quarter time gives you a reasonable expectation of winning, and the Dogs managed that in the preliminary in 1997 against Adelaide, and they turned it on to win it and deny us a grand final after we hadn’t been there for so long.
As a player, the 1984 grand final against Essendon – we led by that four goals at the last change, and they kicked nine goals to two in the last to beat us. That was shattering as well.
How do you feel about not winning a flag as a coach?
There's no doubt that it's a case of being in the right place at the right time. I have a winning record against several premiership coaches so I am confident in my abilities.
The two clubs I have taken over were 15th or 16th so I never received an armchair ride like some have been fortunate enough to get.
