There are more than 300 men and women in the Australian Football Hall of Fame, and dozens of what could be loosely termed “rucks”. Of the 34 elevated to Legend status, six were ruckmen – Roy Cazaly, Jack Dyer, Merv McIntosh, John Kennedy Sr, Polly Farmer and John Nicholls.
There was a footballer running around on the weekend who is worthy of being spoken about in that company. On all the measures that matter, Max Gawn has legitimate claims as the greatest ruck in the history of the sport. He’s been the premier ruck in the competition for a decade now. In that time, his team has rebuilt, broken a curse, self-sabotaged, fallen away and spiked again. In that time, the league has implemented rule changes that have redefined the role of the ruck, and rendered several of them redundant. Every opposition coach targets him. Ken Hinkley’s Port Adelaide always sought to rough him up. Chris Scott’s Geelong seeks to circumnavigate him. Every year, there’s a new challenger to his status as the premier ruck in the country. Every year, it’s Gawn wearing the All Australian blazer.
Prior to Gawn, Simon Madden was widely considered the best ruck of the past half a century. “Having been a beneficiary of his ruckwork at ground level,” Tim Watson said recently, “the ball would land like a snowflake on the hot bonnet of a car.” The Essendon champion rucked against Rhodes scholars, Brownlow medallists, stark raving lunatics and his own brother. He beat them all. He played in an era where rucks kept winning Brownlow medals, parking themselves a kick behind the play, the beneficiaries of some less than sophisticated ball movement. With his athleticism, his craft, his goal kicking and his longevity, Madden is universally regarded as the best of the lot.
The other two contenders come from the generation before Madden. Many who saw Farmer play in Western Australia and Victoria regard him as the best footballer they’ve ever seen. He’d already won two Sandover medals (and would win a third retrospectively) and seven club best and fairests when he landed in Victoria. He won two more club champion awards at Geelong, and was voted by most newspaper writers as the best player in the 1963 grand final. His biographer Steve Hawke wrote that “his mastery of the art of football came through a combination of instinct, theory, and practice, practice, practice”.
Nicholls was playing a different sport to Gawn. He was the same height as Scott Pendlebury. The circumference of his thighs would rival most marine piles. Mike Brady wrote a song about his cold, blue eyes. He won five club champion awards in some crack Carlton sides, and was runner-up four times. John Schultz, who won a Brownlow and rucked against both, said Farmer was slightly superior to Nicholls. Sam Newman, whose thoughts on ruckwork carry more weight than all his other views combined, always insisted Farmer was the best and most influential footballer to play the game. Mike Sheahan was commissioned in 2008 to nominate the best 50 players of all time and had Nicholls at seven and Farmer at eight.
Gawn is a completely different footballer to those three, and not just because of how the role and the sport has evolved. There is a leisurely economy to his game. He doesn’t waste energy, doesn’t go to places he doesn’t need to be. He’s one of those footballers who grows into a game, who assesses the speed of the contest, probes for weaknesses, and then lands blow after blow – a pack mark, a thump forward, a sly sledge. He does so much work off the ball – running defensively, absorbing punishment, pushing forward, blocking space, getting to every contest possible.
When the moment calls for something agricultural, he’ll hoik the ball 30 metres. When his midfield is struggling, he’ll orchestrate a set play, carving out a five-metre space for them to run into, and palming the ball on a dime. When it’s a fast game, he’ll involve himself in possession chains. When a game needs to be slowed down or nullified, he’ll camp himself behind the ball. When the Gold Coast players looked up on the weekend, he was always in their eye line, lolling like a giant scarecrow. Indeed, that game called for his intervention a number of times – to thwart, to ignite, to settle, to plot, to thwack. When he was on the wrong end of one too many dubious free kicks, something switched, and he went into Angry Max mode.
Comparing footballers of different eras is fun but ultimately futile. With rucks, it’s especially fraught, given the rule changes, the unique demands of each era and the changes in heights, shapes, weights, roles, and even the way All Australian jackets are given out. I could weigh up the various accolades and arrive at a hot take. I’m confident that he’s surpassed Madden as the premier ruck of the last 50 years. I’m too squeamish and frankly too young to suggest he’s a better player than Farmer and Nicholls. But by any measure he is a giant of his craft, his position, his era and his sport.
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