Few AFL coaches have delivered more in 12 senior games than the half-season Philip Walsh contributed to the sport he so adored.
Few football love affairs have been so passionate, no coaching career cut short so tragically and yet Walsh's contribution to Australian Rules football will be measured over decades and across several generations of young men.
Although it was one of the AFL's longer apprenticeships, once Walsh finally achieved the Adelaide coaching job he seemed born to it. And it is not a cliche to say he was a genuine one-off. The last time I spoke to him was four weeks ago exactly, in a public forum, immediately before Adelaide took on Carlton at the MCG. Not one to gild the lily, Walsh admitted he had failed to stick to a number of resolutions to which he had loosely committed over his first pre-season as senior coach.
He told the 3AW pre-game team that his hope of riding his bike to work even occasionally had failed to eventuate and that he was back driving his dreaded car.
But he had eschewed green tea having learned of its caffeine intake having previously taken it up in place of coffee. Now, said Walsh, he drank only herbal tea and the occasional hot chocolate. Alcohol had long ceased to play any role.
It is so sad to consider now all the life-affirming and life-lengthening practices that Walsh adopted after his pivotal near-death experience in Peru back in 2008. That bus accident was almost fatal and subsequent dramatic recover saw him reflect deeply upon his mortality.
It is so sad to re-read all Walsh's public references to Cy since he was appointed Adelaide's senior coach, all the regrets and hopes for atonement. Some senior coaches seeking to exist long-term in the job or simply just survive it go to great lengths keep their private lives just that.
But while Walsh might not have detailed the worst of his familial regrets he knew no other way than brutal honesty. Having admitted publicly that he had been a neglectful parent due to his obsession with his beloved Australian Rules and that Cy in particular had suffered during the years leading up to Port's first flag; Walsh spoke with hope for the future of that crucial father son relationship.
When he granted Fairfax Media an in-depth interview in February he told me how he had never quite succeeded in his long-term aim to stop transferring the intensity of his job from the football club to home. "I remember one year I snapped at my son over something and he said: 'Footy's started again has it Dad?'."
We had wandered from various rooms and offices around Westlakes, the Crows home base, looking for a suitable venue to talk before settling down in the middle of the Adelaide Football Club museum. Seated amid the trophies and the jumpers and the famous photographs and even the first mobile stretcher, Walsh was speaking just days after Brent Reilly's traumatic training collision that ultimately ended his career but could have proved so much worse.
Walsh said that what had eaten away at him was that "the old Phil Walsh" would have yelled at the prone Reilly to get up. But his new list of players were stunned at the time at how passionate and sympathetic Walsh was with the team and how personally affected he was by the Reilly head clash accident. After all most of the Crows' players first introduction to their new coach had come one year earlier when he was a keynote speaker at Dean Bailey's memorial service.
Adelaide star Rory Sloane said that Walsh's intensely moving eulogy had rocked him.
But Walsh had questions for me that day in February also. Not only did he ask for recommendations for a good brand of herbal tea but more crucially he asked for media advice.
Clearly immersed in and adoring his new job he still seriously doubted how he would cope with the fifth quarter, post-game press conferences. He needn't have worried. He was a superb media performer.
Certainly there was the odd misstep but those were rare and the truth is Walsh was a breath of fresh air among AFL coaches. He knew no other avenue but clarity and passion.
One of the game's great tacticians who played a major role in Port Adelaide's historic first AFL premiership and who returned to help plot that club's most recent rise, the game celebrated his ultimate promotion.
Making sense of his death and the tragic ramifications surrounding it was an impossible task on Friday even after the immediate and seemingly superfluous practicalities had been dealt with. To consider the circumstances of his beloved wife and daughter is almost unbearable. But what was brutally clear was that the game had lost a rare servant and that a potentially brilliant coaching career has been horrifically terminated. Even on that superficial level Philip Walsh's death is a terrible tragedy and a significant loss in the history of the game.
