Phil Walsh was just "a scrawny little kid" when the man who would become his early mentor, Paul Cranage, first saw him play football.
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It was, however, all the break he needed – Cranage saw in young Phil Walsh an energy and an intelligence that would take the boy to the ranks of Australian Football League royalty.
It was the mid-1970s at Monivae College, a boarding school at Hamilton in Victoria's south-west.
All these years later, no less than the prime minister came to Phil Walsh's old hometown and spoke of a "dreadful, dreadful, dreadful tragedy".
It was Friday, and Walsh's brilliant career was over: he had been allegedly murdered in Adelaide by his own son.
There were plenty mourning the Adelaide coach's death, but Paul Cranage – once an AFL star himself – wanted to talk about the scrawny kid who transformed into a great player, coach and something of a Renaissance man who found beauty and inspiration in Van Gogh's art, learned to speak Japanese and still called himself, self-deprecatingly, a "Hamilton bogan".
Monivae College had quite a football heritage. In the late 1960s, when Cranage was playing for the school, Lou Richards called the place "the football factory".
Cranage was just one of a crop of players who had gone straight from the country college into what was then the VFL, and most of them went to Collingwood: Hugh and Mick Delahunty and Billy Picken among them, with Barry Grinter heading to Essendon and Sebastian Rioli heading west.
Cranage played across the half back for Collingwood from 1972 to 1975 and then took up a job teaching physical education and biology at Monivae, where he coached the First 18. And there he watched young Phil Walsh start to bloom.
Walsh was a day boy from the town. His father, Bill, was the proprietor of Thompson's Department Store, a much-loved Hamilton institution.
There were seven children in the family, and Phil was the youngest. He shone, became vice-captain of Monivae, and played basketball and football with the best of them.
When he left school at the end of 1977, he went off to Ballarat to train as a physical education teacher. He returned, bulked up and strong, to the Western District to teach at Portland.
Cranage phoned him and told him if he wanted to play in the AFL, he better play for Hamilton. Hamilton had two teams those days: Hamilton and Hamilton Imperials.
Phil Walsh drove back and forth from Portland to play with Hamilton.
One of his school mates, Keven Quinn, who owns a sports store in the town and played for the Imperials, remembers there were willing matches between the two teams, and Walsh always gave as good as he got.
Cranage contacted Collingwood's coach Don Cahill and told him there was a star in the making in Hamilton, and he better recruit him fast. "He'll play the first game of the year," he predicted.
And Phil Walsh did. He and Tony Shaw, a future captain, were the only two players who went on the field for Collingwood for all 22 matches in 1983.
But late in the season, Walsh confided Collingwood hadn't given him a contract. Cranage phoned the club and said they better do something about it.
Richmond got wind of it. By the time Cranage had persuaded Collingwood to do a deal, it was too late. He phoned Walsh one night and said Collingwood had a brown paper bag ready for him: a sign up payment.
"How much is in the paper bag," Walsh wanted to know.
"Forty thousand dollars," he was told.
"Well, Richmond's is bigger. It's got $60,000 in it."
The scrawny kid had grown up fast. His career was on the way. He played three seasons with Richmond before moving on to the Brisbane Bears, where he won the club's inaugural best and fairest in 1987.
He never forgot where he came from. Keven Quinn remembers Phil Walsh regularly returning to Hamilton to visit family and friends, and to attend huge Christmas lunches with brothers and sisters and dozens of nieces and nephews in Port Fairy.
