In retrospect, are you amazed at the commitment and focus you held throughout your career?
Because you’re sort of doing it every day, I don’t think you fully comprehend what that means. I actually think now, being a full-time business guy, there’s an amazing level of commitment required to be a successful business person, in terms of the hours that you’ve got to put in and the hard yards you have to do. In the sporting field we revere it because it’s in its purest form and we’re sitting and seeing it right in front of us.

On a down day, does the stockpile of football memories and experiences give you a lift?
I think they help in terms of being able to drag yourself out of it. When you’re having a down day you constantly think, “Poor me, what’s going on with me?” The challenge is always to get out of the way of yourself. Sort of say, “Look, I’m having a bad day; what can I do about it?” rather than going, “I’m having a bad day; I’ll just have a bad day.”

Were you taken aback at the resistance to the prospect of you walking into a senior coaching position without an “apprenticeship”?
No, I wasn’t. It’s interesting when something’s been ingrained and a pathway has been established. Everyone says, “You’ve gotta be an assistant coach (first).” I’m not saying that’s not the right pathway; what I’m saying is, “Should we treat everyone the same?” Because I broke the mould of what everyone else thought, all of a sudden people are going, “You can’t do that!” So that’s where you get the resistance, because you’re challenging people’s beliefs.

So it wasn’t the hue and cry that prompted you to withdraw from the coaching market?
I didn’t feel like I was mentally ready to take it on. At the end of my career I was mentally exhausted and I wasn’t satisfied that, less than 12 months after I finished, I’d got through that.

The AFL has announced plans for a second Queensland team by 2011. Is there a big enough commercial and fan base on the Gold Coast to support another AFL team?
I definitely think so. The most important thing is they get the infrastructure and give themselves a couple of years lead-in to it. If they had to look at a model to work off, I’d be getting an interview with the (NRL’s) Titans as quickly as possible because the way they did it, the way they introduced themselves to the competition, was just first-class. They were professional, they had a great lead-in, they generated support, they got the parochialism going and they’re doing very, very well.

Do you think the game has made a rod for its back by testing for so-called non-performance enhancing drugs? Isn’t that a matter for the police and courts?
I’m a big believer that the whole of society has to go through a big drug rehabilitation process. If sport’s the starting point and if AFL’s the one that cops the hit over it, but they lead the charge and then everyone starts to adopt it, I say it’s been a fantastic thing. Part of the education is being able to get people at the high end to say, “No, this is not acceptable. We don’t want it in our game. It’s not healthy.”

Once all the sporting bodies embrace it, it will slowly get to a point where it’s not accepted in society, whereas in the past it probably has been because it’s seen as a social thing. I mean, we call them recreational drugs for Christ’s sake.

Fellow greats James Hird, Anthony Koutoufides and Mark Ricciuto all put out books recently. When is yours coming out?
I got an approach last year to do it and I turned it down. I’ve always looked at books as something you do later in your life. I don’t know where it fits in my life at the moment, so, if I’m not passionate about it, I just won’t do it.

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