One of Australia’s famous faces. One of Australia’s famous faces. Images: Getty Images

You’ve always had enormous self-belief. Do you believe in something outside yourself? Do you believe in God, for example?  

No. I can’t convince myself there is a God. I’m very suspicious of religion. I think about it quite a bit. Where did God come from? The Big Bang theory, I don’t go along with that at all. You can’t have an explosion out of nothing. Where did the first tiny atom of matter come from? Huge questions, those things. I’m not a believer in God, and I certainly don’t believe you go to heaven or hell. But we might get to meet the Great Man, or Great Woman ... we don’t know.

You always seemed to have a bit of a scientific and mathematical mind ...

The best influences I could have had were Norm and Len Smith. I’ll give you one example of Len’s mind. He said, “Ron!” as I was going past his office one day. He was in charge of the engineering department of this big firm. I said “What’s up, Len?” He said, “What’s the quickest goal you think we could kick?” I said “Nine, ten seconds, I suppose.” He said, “Let’s go through it. The time starts when the umpire’s bounce hits the deck. It goes up, comes down. What if a guy was hitting it with his hand, and taps it, right along the centre

line so we’re not losing distance, and the receiver takes it cleanly at full pace, and as soon as he knows he’s got it cleanly, which is probably a millisecond before he grabs it, he puts all his concentration into kicking the ball long, forward and to the square? The bloke doesn’t take a mark, but taps it to a bloke going past who kicks a goal.”

I’m following this. He said, “I reckon that would take even as low as six seconds.” I said “Yeah, so what?” He said, “That means we could score ten goals a minute!” He laughed, of course. He wanted the game to speed up. He was the first man to say, “I don’t want any U-turns. I don’t want blokes going toward defence, having to turn around and kick it back up to the forward line. So I’ve got to have blokes going past for handballs.” So that was a basic rule. No U-turns. It made runners on either side go past, calling for the ball. We used to have quite a few discussions. Norm was pretty intelligent, too. They were enquiring, not just the scientific side, but the human side as well.

 So is it fair to say that emotionally and spiritually, Norm Smith was an influence, but in terms of football thinking, Len was a greater influence?  

Len never coached a great side himself, but I reckon he’d have been a better coach of a poorer side, and Norm would have been a better coach of a better side. The factor that comes in there is that you have to keep their heads under control. But for me to be in the middle of all that, that was just a fluke.

Have the attributes a player needs to succeed changed as the game has changed? 

Reading a game isn’t as big a factor. But you’ve got to be more of an athlete. You’ve got to like training, because you’re full-time. Occasionally I came across guys who didn’t like training in those days, but that was nothing compared to today. If you’ve read that book of mine, you’d know who they were. Brent Crosswell! Jesus! Unbelievable! He could have been anything. He was just lazy. But he could play. But a lot of changes have been for the better, too. The kicking for goal today, snap shots, the banana kicks, the ground kicking. Amazing.