Lou Richards and John Kennedy first met more than 60 footy seasons ago, as captains of Collingwood and Hawthorn respectively.
Between the magisterial Kennedy and the scamp-ish Richards and their clubs, little love was lost. At half-time, Richards would sidle up to Kennedy and ask: "Want a fiver on this?" Usually, the then imperious Magpies were well in front. When Richards led Collingwood to its 12th premiership in 1953, Hawthorn still had not won one.
Post-football, both wore many hats. Kennedy's were more heavy duty: premiership coach, sage, rising to chairman of the AFL Commission. Richards, whose retirement coincided with the arrival of television in Australia, became a pioneer of sports media.
There was a time when he was Eddie McGuire, Sam Newman and, say, Rex Hunt rolled into one, and his profile was at least as high as any of theirs. He opened all the doors through which McGuire, foremost among many, has chirpily charged.
His style was irreverent, mischievous, calculatedly maladroit. He would figure to lose outrageous bets about games, so at various times submitting himself to cutting Ted Whitten's lawn with nail clippers, piggybacking gargantuan North Melbourne ruckman Mick Nolan down Arden St, being wheeled in a barrow down Lygon St by Carlton's Warren "Wow" Jones, and having a bowl of spaghetti tipped over his head by Mario Bortolotto.
Recalled with a guffaw by McGuire on Thursday, Richards once said of a hard-but-fair player: "He painted iodine on his boots so that the would not infect you when he kicked you.'' It was one line of thousands.
AFL Commission chairman (and then nervous Carlton captain) Mike Fitzpatrick dryly remembered Richards' antics on Thursday as "colourful stunts and wagers". Kennedy was best known for stern visage, but admitted on Thursday that even he would chuckle behind closed doors at Richards on League Teams on Thursday and World of Sport on Sunday - sometimes.
"If we lost the day before, I probably wouldn't even have been watching. If we'd won, I'd laugh at anything," he said. "He was marvellous at it. He was genuinely funny. With Jack Dyer and Bob Davis, they were unique as a trio."
As one of Richards' newspaper ghost writers, I was in awe of his always brimming enthusiasm for football, as if every day was his first in the game all over again. He embodied the Zeitgeist then, not just football's, but Melbourne's. It lasted more than 50 years.
Fitzpatrick said he had "a profound influence on our code". But it was not officially legendary. Though a Hall of Famer, he did not meet the criteria to be made into a Legend with a capital L. A bungled attempt to invest him with a substitute honour in 2009 hurt him and did not proceed.
But McGuire, bursting with Collingwoodness, would not leave it at that. Because of his drive, and abetted by private sponsorship money on a scale only Collingwood can attract, a classic bronze Louis Lamen statue of Richards was unveiled at the Westpac Centre on Thursday to sit alongside one of Bob Rose.
Richards is 91 now, wheelchair-bound and not given to nearly so much lip, but he was there to witness this immortalisation. There to hail him were former teammates, former rivals, many fans, four generations of family and the entire contemporary Collingwood list.
The twist was delivered by Fitzpatrick, who announced Richards as the winner of the inaugural lifetime achievement award, to recognise "outstanding contribution" to the game in various ways other than playing exploits. Richards did not speak, and yet you could hear his reply anyway, in and from the echoes of time: "Well, golly gosh."
The award was named for Kennedy, who was there to present it to Richards in the Magpies' inner sanctum, a place he once could not have imagined breaching.
But a lot of water has passed beneath the bridge, also much of a thicker substance. Eleven Hawthorn premierships, all with Kennedy's stamp on them, meant that he and Richards and their clubs met again on Thursday as mutually respectful equals, with only this much trace of feeling between them, evinced by Kennedy: "There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then - but you want to keep it going, just the same. Just in case."
It is a sentiment so age-old it could be, if not sculpted in bronze, set in stone.
