Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men by Anson Cameron

Book Description

Secondhand. Good Condition. Wear to book corners and edges, with front cover right tail corner now protected with book tape. Interior and binding are still very good.

The singular story of football's hardest man and sharpest mind.

This story begins in infamy. Everyone's first glimpse of the man is of ferocious blows struck in grand finals, his name splashed across the back pages of tabloids. It's the 1970s; it's Richmond: kill or be killed.

There was a time when almost every football watcher who heard Neil Balme's name would react with disapproval. The great paradox of Balme is the violence and the pacifism, the mayhem and the calm, the rough justice and the gentleness. He's a cold-blooded thug; he's a soft-hearted healer; he's a villain and a hero.

Balme is unique in having spent longer than anyone else in clubland. Richmond, Norwood, Melbourne, Collingwood, Geelong and Richmond again - over fifty years. He's seen and created limitless change in those decades. So how did Neil Balme go from being the infamous on-field enforcer of the 1970s to the avuncular guru the football world knows and loves today?

After eleven premierships, an aura surrounds the man. Get Balme to your club, and success will follow. What has he to tell us of football, of the high times and the low, of the champs and the egos? Of Royce and GR, of Diamond Joe, of Eddie and Mick, of Bomber, of Dimma? And of life and the human heart?

Balme's tale is, unsurprisingly, a mix of hard truth and unerring compassion. (back cover)