tiger, tiger coffee bar

I query him about his half time address. "You can make a meal of sausages by frying them, currying them, puttin' apple sauce with them. But in the end, they're still sausages and you can't get away from them. It's different presentation of it, and how to get the point across. But you're not getting away from the fundamentals. It's much more enjoyable ‘cause you're getting your point across. That's why I tell the stories. Paying the price. Buying a pair of shoes? What's that got to do with the game? But how many times have you bought a cheap pair of pants or cheap suit or something and went, ‘ah shit, I wish I woulda had that better one...' And next Sunday, when you've lost by a bloody goal, jeez, we just could have done a little extra and paid the price."

When I propose to him that perhaps the sausages analogy is such a successful one because there was teams under him that were, say, more trim lamb and scotch fillet than sausages, he laughs.

"I had a heap of failures. Blokes gotta ask themselves did I achieve the things I should have achieved with the amount of ability I've been blessed with? Unless I can say yes, I'm a frustrated person ‘cause you finish around thirty-four years of age. And then for the rest of your life you go, ‘I wonder how good I really coulda been if I really put my head down.'" Jeans quietly mentions a bloke he coached before the player left for another club. "He'll never know how good a player he was." And hearing his words I can't but wonder how often he thought that about himself, a player cut down in his prime, after only a couple of dozen matches after being enticed from the bush. I warm up now, the '89 Grand Final Operation Tackle video ember to my curiosity. I put forward the notion of the fearless footballer.

"What people must understand about it, you've got a player with talent. You must have courage. Physical courage. Mental courage. But people don't understand mental courage. Fear is a natural mechanism in the body to protect us. It is not the absence of fear, it is a matter of mastering your fear. You walk into a dark room at night, and I'll tell you exactly what you're going to do: you're going to turn on a light, because you experience fear. You walk down a dark lane at night looking for somebody. You walk into a factory as a policeman looking for somebody in there and it's dark. You can't tell me that you don't experience fear. It's a matter of masking it.