Lockhart Road
Cultural Attache
- Mar 26, 2013
- 5,494
- 28,350
- AFL Club
- Port Adelaide
- Other Teams
- Port Adelaide Magpies
Camperdown, Victoria, circa 1900. Trainee Kenneth Hinkley age twelve, at far right.
He knew, way back then, more about what made a great coach than he does now.
Opinion:
OUR DAY IN KANGAROO COURT -
THE REAL ALBERTON FAITHFUL 1870-2012 vs. KEN BLOODY HINKLEY 2013-2023…2025?
& HIS ENABLERS
The accused: Ken Bloody Hinkley -
wearing the Dickensian scowl of a
villain, a Fagin, on his way to pick
the pockets of the ‘little ol’ football
club from Alberton’ that provides
him with sanctuary.
THE INDICTMENT
——————————
Port Adelaide Football Club became One Club years ago.
But then, in the aftermath of our post-siren 2017 elimination final defeat, a rift, a fault line, opened up deep inside the Club. Consequent to that insane Saturday night, 9 September 2017, something parasitical got to work, gnawing away at its host from inside the rift. Disguised as our senior coach, it has become the Club gremlin. Worse, it became our Achilles heel. It is our weakest link.
It hasn’t done this by itself. It’s had help. Inside help.
The process was energised by a lunatic harange by an enraged and out-of-control chairman in the distraught atmosphere of the change-rooms immediately after that elimination final in 2017.
His own voice filled his ears, blocked out everything else. His vision was clouded red with rage. So deep into his own manic zone was he that he missed the message in Hinkley’s eye, he didn’t detect the sonic boom of the fatal fault line cracking open.
This chairman had no right to be enraged and out of control. He had no entitlement to feel insulted by a Port Adelaide team who had given their all, many of them more than their all, yet had been marginally outpointed after a second final siren due to a free kick awarded in the last few seconds close to goal. The free went to a West Coast perpetrator of the illegal action of throwing up his ‘free’ arm in the tackle to create high contact upon himself. The rule book states that if a player contributes to such high contact he is not to be rewarded. If the tackled player opts to use up his ‘prior opportunity’ by retaining possession of the ball during the act of conning the umpire that his tackler has gone high unaided, he shall be penalised ‘holding the ball’.
The umpires got it wrong, and they subsequently owned up that they had got it wrong.
Our chairman also got it wrong, in his own nauseous style. And we are still nauseating over it.
The rooms after that elimination final were a vulnerable place to be. There was emotion in the air thick as fog. There were tears as wet as rain. There was abject disbelief. There was remorse. There was shock.
But anger there was not. Not at first.
And there should’ve been anger, hot as hell. In the Club’s golden age the anger would’ve been stripping the paint off the walls. It would‘ve been radiating from the senior coach like a blast from a nuclear device. It would’ve been absorbed by the players, filling their lungs and their hearts and dessicating their throats with a thirst for revenge. What had just taken place on Adelaide Oval was never going to be allowed to take place again. Never! Next season the senior coach and his players would turn their anger into goals, into their opponents’ cold sweat … into their opponents’ blood on the grass.
That anger would ensure that next season Port Adelaide would win another flag … cheating umpires or no cheating umpires.
But the only anger that materialised in those rooms that night emanated not from the senior coach, not from his players whom he coached never to get angry.
It made its unscheduled entrance with the chairman. He was ropeable not because Port Adelaide in their last match of the year had lost badly - as they would in the 2021 preliminary final. He was not even ropeable because they had lost. He was ropeable because, as he saw it, they had caused him an insufferable personal embarrassment.
How was the camera going to portray him on national breakfast TV as the sun rose in the east on Monday morning having overseen Port Adelaide (fifth on the ladder) go down by the barest of margins to West Coast (eighth) in an elimination final … after he had promised everyone within earshot, everyone in every TV room across the land, that they would win?
How was he going to handle such loss of face? Would he ever recover the viewer respect and the fragile TV ratings he’d just had taken off him, thanks to twenty-two young men wearing black, white, silver and teal blue, who by the chairman’s parameters are there solely to make him look good?
How could this kind of chairman be the chairman of the high and mighty Port Adelaide Football Club?
How could this kind of senior coach - who does not take losing seriously enough to get angry, who regards anger as a form of trespass, who fosters emotion in his players but only if it comes with the salty teardrops of the conquered not the dry hard determination to exact retribution and never come second ever again - be the senior coach of Port Adelaide Football Club?
Four seasons have gone by. That kind of chairman and that kind of senior coach remain exactly where they were that night, Saturday, 9 September 2017.
Yes, the Alberton Frankenstein’s monster is still with us, being passively cultivated in its host board room.
Its name is Ken Bloody Hinkley, and it will in 2022 be serving the tenth of eleven years as senior coach via four consecutive contracts.
Why?
How?
Here follows the story. It has no happy ending. Not yet.
LONGEST-SERVING SINGLE-CLUB AFL/VFL SENIOR COACH GRAND-FINAL VIRGIN
From Dickens to Looney Tunes. Meet another caricature: Wile E. Coyote - whose 100% losing game plan
is seemingly modelled on that of the senior coach of Port Adelaide.
Why does our Club behold itself as possessing such low esteem that it accepts there exists no alternative to acknowledging, honouring and extending the contract of Ken Bloody Hinkley … as he steps off the cliff-edge of football history in the making - a dead cert to qualify in 2022 as the longest-serving single-club AFL/VFL senior coach grand-final virgin?
How has he got away with it?
WORLD-CLASS LOSER
“I got a greyhound with a limp given
to me that I need a syndicate for to
cover the costs. Who’s mug enough
on the playing list to fall for this?”
The prevailing scenario has me recollecting when Red China first decided to rub noses with the West. No, not 1978-1979 when Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai’s protege, made the barnstorming commonsense business play he called the Open Door - when pragmatism became fashionable and black cats were deemed equal to white cats on the condition they all caught mice. I’m referring to a prior item of history: February 1972, when Tricky Dicky Nixon ventured into China to learn a new trick or two from Zhou.
The West, foremost the Yanks, fascinated by the China mystery, saw no deeper than a ‘market with a billion customers’. They rushed in like spendthrifts who’d been queuing up all week waiting for Macey’s to throw open their doors for the Xmas sale. But this wasn’t Macey’s it was China … and not just China but Red China - red as in raw, as in underdone. It had nothing of substance to sell, and its ‘billion customers’ had no currency with which to buy anything off anyone. Any trading had to start from the start. Any dealing, for the fortunate, might follow, or not.
Bereft of due diligence, Americans, to boot, had neither the patience nor the necessary nous for a reality like that. They did, instead, have a mule-headed stubbornness and a determination not to risk losing their dubious status as the superior foreign power - as LBJ had demonstrated towards Vietnam, at diabolical human cost. Ten-plus years later many of them were still in China, unable to bail out.
They were stuck.
They hadn’t dug up a single bargain in all that time. The Chinese had left them to drip dry, with no option but to toss in more and more good money after bad … or be seen to go home, bankrupt and forlorn.
So it is, today, with too many of the ultimate decision-makers at our Club.
These ultimate decision-makers have thus far invested nine tiresome years in Ken Bloody Hinkley … without one grand final appearance.
In metaphor-speak, or simile-speak, the Hinkley 2013-onwards money pit is the Club’s 1972-onwards Red China sucker-born-every-minute decade.
What the Yanks eventually had to accept was that the Chinese had seen them coming, had them sussed-out from the get-go. Our Club ‘leaders’, on the other hand, still refuse, despite Hinkley somehow surviving into his tenth year, to recognise that the stubborn, pessimistic, negative, born-to-be-just-an-assistant coach they keep on punting on in the premiership race - whose use-by date caught up with him at Alberton when the clock ran down on his two-year honeymoon period - is a world-class loser.
HINKS THE JINX
Ken Hinkley has perfected the stunt of coming from out in front to run second, at the critical end of the football season in particular, thereby falling from finals favouritism to out of contention at the eleventh hour. He’s made it into a sad form of voodoo. There must be somewhere a doll in his undesirable likeness being stuck all over with pins by somebody who has it in for him. Maybe more than one doll. Maybe a thousand. Or more.
This, note, has been going on throughout his entire career in senior football. Examine his record. It’s a rap sheet, not a record. 1) Failed forward at Fitzroy - saved by Blight who gifted him with the most straightforward position on the field: half-back. 2) Cats vice-captain - sacked by Ayers after the 1995 grand final thumping by Carlton. 3) Runner-up in the Brownlow, his points tally padded by abandoning his opponent to be manned up by Steve Hocking so he could wander downfield in search of easy possessions and the umpires’ eye. 4) Player for Geelong - three times coming second on the MCG in grand finals. 5) Senior coaching wannabe - three times a selection panel reject. And now 6) as the senior coach of Port Adelaide, appointed minus any selection panel vetting - a three-time loser in preliminary finals.
Incapable of winning when it really counts. It’s in the genes. There are racehorses similarly afflicted - pathologically not equipped to tear their noses away from the rump of the animal in front. No doubt there are greyhounds like that, too. It’s not just you, Ken.
A couple of years ago I theorised that this joker was jinxed. He’s come up with zero evidence that I was incorrect. Ken Hinkley remains … for PAFC, for we Alberton Faithful, the Real ones … Hinks the Jinx.
THE WRONG ‘LOOK’
Forty years after Nixon had tagged along, tracing the footprints of Whitlam and Kissinger into the China wilderness, the economic geo-balance had flipped upside-down. By October 2012, when the Koch & Hinkley version of the Odd Couple reported for duty at Alberton, China had become the place to go for ready money, provided circumstances permitted. In other words, nothing was impossible. Another plus was that even though China was still an unexhausted market it was blessed with limited competition. The story has been told elsewhere (e.g.: the thread ‘We Drive to the World Stage in an MG’) how a ‘ridiculously passionate’ few in Hong Kong sat down together in 2013-14 and broke new ground, visualising Port Adelaide Football Club as an international brand. To make it happen we set out to advise and assist the Club as much as we could to develop an international product that would not look out of place on the world stage.
Starting from modern-day China.
A product such as that required the right packaging, the right ‘look’ … a vital component of which was, still is, the senior coach. We’ve failed at this component, miserably. We went with the wrong ‘look’. Ken Hinkley thought to make no effort to change or even hide a body language that broadcast discomfort, disinterest and an aloofness born of culture shock on landing among the hyper-active hyper-metropolis that is Shanghai - where I first met him in late 2016. I seized on the opportunity to check out this senior coach of ours, intent on determining for myself if, in October 2012, he had been last man standing, right man standing, something in between, or none of the above.
Sitting next to him, right shoulder to left shoulder, on a bench throughout a two-hour dinner in a crowded Sichuanese restaurant contributed to the study. Not once did he try to force a smile. No conversation did he initiate; any attempt to start one with him was met with monosyllabic deflection. He ate not a grain of rice, nor a morsel of anything else, in spite of the knife and fork that had been placed in juxtaposition with the chopsticks in front of him. He deigned not to sip a token drop of Chinese tea. As a paid Club ambassador - a role I would expect any senior coach of Port Adelaide to play enthusiastically, no matter where in the world he might be sitting, no matter what was on the table before him - Hinkley would’ve benefitted Port Adelaide Football Club‘s mission to be seen as an international product by not being there.
Now, five years later, Ken Hinkley looks no less out of place at Alberton than he did in Shanghai.
And he still hasn’t sipped a single drop of Chinese tea, choosing instead to chuck it holus bolus over his shoulder.
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Writing about Hinkley’s indifference to foreign surroundings in late 2016 in that Sichuanese restaurant in
Shanghai reminds me of a similar sort of performance in Xian in 1986 put on by the CEO of a telecoms
equipment manufacturer from Kent, England, who, having co-signed a technology-transfer agreement
with a factory in Xian, was guest of honour at a different dinner. As his agent, I sat next to him on the
plane ride of my life from Beijing to Xian aboard an antiquated Antonov turbo-prop. These aircraft had
been imported from the USSR for military, administrative and political service until local production got
started, in Xian, circa 1974. I’m certain ours was a leftover from the Soviet era. I also reckon it was on
loan, or was a reject, from the PLA Air Force.
The aircraft had metaphorically been towed out of the airport museum to help with a backlog of delayed
departures after three days of fog. There it sat and waited, growing larger in the misty distance, growing
more ominous in the fading light of late afternoon, at the far end of a row of twenty or so parked CAAC
jetliners of various makes and models, while our bus trundled past them, one after the other.
”Oh no,” I sighed, as it became clear, then clearer, then ultimately obvious, to all riding the now deathly
silent bus that this Antonov was ours to fly in, ours perchance to die in.
The flight turned into time-travel in addition to air travel. And it was something unforgettable, destined
to be an anecdote I value every chance to re-tell … an experience worth reliving.
On board, the Chinese tea was poured out of a pot kept at the simmer by a naked flame that danced on
a hob upon a trolley being pushed by two female cabin crew up and down the aisle, colliding with every
seat. On the trolley’s bottom shelf an LPG gas cylinder rocked and rolled. All the seats were in need of
repair. The seat-backs were disjointed; they flopped all the way forward to hit the seat in front, and then
they flopped all the way back to hit the seat behind. Seat belts? Can’t recall any. In-flight entertainment?
Don’t ask. Looking back, none was needed.
That Antonov was entertainment enough.
The three-hour flight westward, travelling with the fall of night above a rumpled carpet of nimbus laid out
from horizon to horizon, was itself uneventful … until after landing in Xian when the door was hauled open
and whatever lighting there was outside, struggling to have an effect through mist and drizzle, revealed
a tarmac that was under water all the way from the foot of the mobile steps to the terminal. It wasn’t
possible in the darkness to tell how deep it was, causing the first disembarking passenger to hesitate on
the bottom step. A member of the groundstaff interpreted the problem and came splashing through the
flood, carrying a plain wooden plank. He positioned it across the foot of the steps, waved the passengers
to proceed and stepped back. Then, wearing a wry comical expression, he, and all those still waiting on
the steps, watched the plank take on a mind of its own and float off into the night.
The traditional dish of Xian is stewed camel’s tendon. It is a legacy of the Silk Road which terminated at
Sian (Xian), ancient capital of the Middle Kingdom. It was served at our dinner as main course by a bevy
of the tallest girls I’ve ever seen anywhere in China, each six feet plus. When the guest of honour, this
CEO from Kent, asked about and was told what it was he was expected to eat, he abruptly, quite rudely,
refused to play his part. In a bid to recover some face for foreign guests all over the Middle Kingdom, I
called for a second helping.
The stewed camel’s tendon tasted just fine.
Thereafter I was the prime target of endless toasts in the provincial mou tai, firewater in excess of 40%
proof. I’d arrived in Beijing after a week in Shanghai with a bad case of November ‘flu, which I carried to
Xian. Next morning I awoke from my coma with a head as clear as the light-blue sky outside. Gone was
the killjoy nimbus ceiling, gone was the November ‘flu, killed off by traditional Silk Road camel’s tendon
stewed twice, the second time in the local 40% proof medicinal alcohol.
That morning brought one of the great wonders of my life, when I gazed down in awe at the Terracotta
Army, meticulously assembled underground to guard forever the still unlocated tomb of the Qin Emperor
- a spectacle of the quality that our senior coach, weighted by a hermit mentality and an apathy towards
the extraordinary, is doomed never to experience.
More mug him.
To be acknowledged as a great man, a man has to have what it takes to lead others along new
and untrodden pathways to greatness.
There is to be no Terracotta Army, no state funeral, no love lost, for Ken Bloody Hinkley.
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THE SCIENCE OF NEGATIVE VICTORY … SOMEONE’S GOTTA LOSE, WHY NOT US?
Hinkley’s negativity, his pessimism, had taken no time to manifest itself. We all know it was revealed at halftime in the semi-final vs. Geelong in 2013, when he instructed the players to start looking over their shoulders. He later came clean, admitted he’d made a blue, spent the whole summer sitting by the pool running it through his mind, promising himself he would never again give an opportunity like that the flick, he would never again snatch defeat out of the arms of victory. Of course, he lied to himself. Halfway through the very next season, 2014, he did it again … proving that his negativity is instinctive and no amount of self-coaching can suppress it. We were, you’ll recall, clear at the top of the ladder, 11 wins 2 losses and headed for a grand final. Hinkley negativity put a crack in his players’ firewall of confidence, determination and expectancy. He told them they were the ‘hunters’ no longer; with the second half of the season to come, they had become the ‘hunted’. Consequently, to avoid being jumped, brought down and eaten alive, they had to get back quick smart to looking over their shoulders - a proven recipe for defeat that Hinkley had invented and had already discounted … one that was not just wrong but also the symptom of a chronic loser.
Digging back into 2013 and 2014, and tracing with a flashlight Ken Hinkley’s trail through his two-year Port Adelaide honeymoon period, exposes and illuminates the dark root of his problem: the incurable personal weakness he tries to keep hidden deep down inside. Hinkley has never believed in something fundamental, something any capable senior coach would automatically believe in. Ken Hinkley has never, ever believed in himself. Never has he believed in achieving anything that would identify him as a capable coach, such as guiding his players into a grand final … let alone winning an AFL flag. Fos Williams, Geof Motley, Jack Cahill, even Russell Ebert … they all believed in everything. They believed they could make anything happen.
By a wholly natural process and with a natural coaching and leadership ability they transmitted their belief to their players … and so their players believed, too. They ran down the race and across the white line instilled with invincibity. They ran out on the field convinced they were stronger and better than their enemy. And they won their football matches. Ken Bloody Hinkley is too busy finding credit to give to his enemy - a fault he brought with him to Alberton and has exaggerated under Koch who thinks such a weakness equates to sportsmanship - a frailty designed to recruit happy clappers as Club members by the millions … as you might expect from an inhabitant of the unreal world of TV land. KBH and Koch are too busy thinking about ways to come second. Hinkley himself is too deep in his own negativity, too entertained by, make that obsessed by, his own compulsive self-fulfilling pessimistic prophesies.
The transmission of negativity can be blatant, as in the above two Hinkley instances, or it can be subtle, camouflaged by a lack of awareness, an absence of feel, on the part of the transmitter as to what is negative in the first place. Hinkley gives out negativity like a broken radio gives out static. Take as a prime example our game versus GWS at Mandura that godforsaken Sunday in April 2016. Gray and Wingard were returning from injury, and Hinkley told his team in his pre-match address: “Don’t youse dare leave it all to Robbie and Chad!” Which of course they did … collectively deciding what a good idea it was, one that never would’ve occurred to them unprompted. Robbie and Chad, meanwhile, left everything to the other twenty Port Adelaide guernseys. Result: 86-point thrashing to welcome KT - who had busted his gut getting to Canberra to join in, having signed a few days earlier in Shanghai the MoU with Gui, witnessed by the PM and AFL CEO … then in Hong Kong on the Friday night missing his connecting flight to Adelaide and losing 24 hours.
NECK-DEEP IN UNAWARENESS
Excited to receive KT’s email out of the blue, I attended a fill-in lunch on the Saturday with him, accompanied by Norts and Rucci in their Kowloon hotel. It was my second lunch with the CEO in HK in 2016. The first had been one-on-one for two hours in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club at the end of February to discuss, among other topics, the smart method to manage Mr Gui from Alberton. In the process Hinkley and his grump act at Albury the previous pre-season came up. KT admitted Hinkley could be ‘stubborn’, to which I advanced my observation that his problem went deeper, that Hinkley had ‘a pessimistic streak running through him as wide as he was tall’. At the later 2016 lunch I could read the whirlpool of emotions inside KT. There was pride. There was satisfaction. And there was terror. Would Hinkley be able to transmit to the players the greatness of what had just taken place in Shanghai? Would he be able to convey to them, to share with them, the onus of not letting the Club down?
In my own mind was curiosity, make that doubt, as to whether the senior coach himself grasped what had happened, let alone use it to inspire the players - humans whom Jack Cahill famously referred to as ‘bricks with ears’ and yet still made them into champion footballers. In my gut the uncertainty grew. GWS, with Hinkley’s help, with Hinkley’s lack of grasp for any occasion other than routine, were going to jump us, bring us down, eat us alive. And, I’ll be damned, my uncertainty prevailed. I’d done a Ken Bloody Hinkley on myself! In a stroke our China Strategy forfeited the gloss, the marketability bonus, the identity boost it could’ve, it damn-well should’ve, loaded upon our Club all through that April 2016 weekend and the week that followed … after international sports history had been set up and enacted in Shanghai with the staging, signing and VIP witnessing of that mighty MoU.
“Who‘s Emma Yu?”
Koch had missed the Shanghai ceremony. The gods had kept him stuck for hours to the tarmac in Hong Kong whilst the heavens dumped a tropical thunderstorm upon his airplane and quarantined him for five or so hours, years before such a practice became globally fashionable. Koch wasn’t missed for one magic moment in Shanghai. The loud demanding Koch monotone and the loud demeaning Koch penchant for constant repetition would’ve cracked, like a mirror in Dame Nelly Melba’s favourite bathroom, the harmonious atmosphere in that vintage function room in the vintage hotel that had been in a vintage era owned by Jewish magnate Sir Victor Sassoon on the corner of Nanjing Road and the Bund (and managed until 1949 by the company that had hired me on spec in Hong Kong in 1971). KT took over, signed on behalf of the Club, posed with PM Turnbull, Gui Guojie and AFL CEO McLachlan, and made a terrific substitute. Andrew Hunter told me about the tangible relief that rippled across the room when word arrived that Koch was stranded in HK and couldn’t make it. As compensation for KT it was immaterial. Looking back on that Thursday morning in April 2016 and all that it set in motion, he deserved so much more. Hinkley, neck-deep in unawareness, made sure that, on the Sunday three days later, upon the AFL field in Australia’s Capital Territory - a setting that would’ve hooked nicely into a national media feel-good news story, considering the role the PM had played so happily and so well the previous Thursday in Shanghai - KT’s immediate self-satisfaction with his bold and unhesitating venture in China was stabbed in the guts.
THE NAME OF THE GAME: UNNECESSARY UNDESERVED PREMATURE CONTRACT EXTENSION (NOW THREE, GOING ON FOUR)
Today, KT is not one of our decision-makers. Those who are have contracted our Club to invest another two teeth-grinding years, 2022 and 2023, sitting up in the dress circle and watching the KBH misadventure unfold further. This additional 24 months of damage to the Club is going to be consequential to the style in which the most recent call on Hinkley was made - stealthily, even sneakily - in January 2021. One voice made that call, from the top of the table. No counter option, no alternative candidate, not so much as a healthy argumentative commentary, was hunted from outside the walls of the board room, in a corner of which Big Bob McLean’s power chair sits in no-nonsense Big Bob judgement. Even if any such rare item of corporate governance had been forthcoming, it would’ve rated not a flicker of interest.
January 2021. No glowering through blacked-out sunnies this time; no arms-folded, sitting-off-by-oneself-in-the-shade drama … unlike pre-season 2015, when contract extension # 1 took place.
No Koch claymores backfiring in the change-rooms and on stage this time, no extra east-west frequent-flyer panic points earned cleaning up the carnage a claymore leaves behind; nor any strident kitchen-table four-letter trauma … unlike post-elimination final 2017, when contract extension # 2 was extorted.
No drama and no trauma and no media guessing game: What happen Power?
Not this time, never again.
The pose that is a cert to occupy the cover of Hinkley’s inevitable autobiography: ‘You Don’t Have
To Be Seen To Win To Win’.
While Hinkley was sitting in that chair, detached and seemingly doing nothing, Koch and Cardone
were in a panic. What was he up to? That pair of media schemers had just recruited Voss off the
set of Cardone’s TV production for McGuire Media of ’The Recruit’ … without thinking to check what
the senior coach thought about it.
Hinkley, with only his first two honeymoon seasons under his belt at Alberton, had then pulled his
first stunt; he’d delegated his responsibilities, stepped aside, sat down and crossed his arms, and
sent Koch and Cardone a message. ‘Show that you love me.’
Nicks, having coached the pre-season squad to a win over West Coast at the Parade, was in Albury
overseeing a resounding defeat by Richmond, as Hinkley looked on in aggravated disinterest.
Today, seven years later, Nicks is KBH’s equal as senior coach of our arch enemy, while Hinkley is
still our senior coach - with Koch and Cardone squirming like worms under his thumb.
You don’t have to be seen to win to win.
Hinkley had been impressed with his first contract extension. It had been so easy. All he had to do was look disgruntled. All he needed to come up with was the pose (see caption above): plant arse in chair, fiercely cross arms, maintain 1,000-yard glare from behind super-dark sunglasses - a Tony Soprano sort of pose just before he whacked somebody. Hinkley practised it every chance he got. I caught him at it in Shanghai in 2016, the day after the Sichuanese restaurant episode. Location: Century Park across the Huangpu River in Pudong, the big white Power Footy marquee, inside which the Club was processing groups of Chinese students (2,000 in all) from half a dozen schools, and outside which the SAASTA lads on their second tour of China were in contest versus the Flying Boomerangs, twelve per side, across two soccer pitches. Hinkley was sitting at the far end of the tent - as far from the action as he could get - right next to the fast food table, in exactly the same type of outdoor white plastic chair that he’d sat in at Albury. But there was one thing missing.
“Hey, Ken, where’re the sunnies?”
“Huh!?” No grin, no chuckle, no sense of humour, just touchiness galore.
“Oops, sorry,” said I as I backpedalled, palms up and open in surrender, not keen to get whacked that day.
It was the extra moment, the extra impression, after the night before, that convinced me.
‘This is not the man for us.’ It had been said before, by three other AFL clubs. One had put it in writing early in their selection panel interview, had passed the note to each other under the table.
Ken Bloody Hinkley was not the man for Port Adelaide - not right, not last, not standing, not sitting, not any-bloody-thing, not any-bloody-time, not any-bloody-where.
WHEN KOCHIE REALLY MET KENNY
Contract extension # 2 was, by comparison, a blood bath.
Some chairmen are slow learners, but most learn eventually. In the case of our own chairman the lesson he learned, on that lunatic Saturday night and subsequent week in September 2017, had him taking the TKO count in a neutral corner - from which, chastened on matters senior coach, he’s backed Hinkley ever since on everything from co-captains to coke zero to prelim final capitulation.
Our chairman, too knee-jerkingly mad, too blindly motivated to do anything properly let alone start a fracas with the senior coach via his visibly distressed players that Saturday night in September 2017 … then with his head too far up himself (a common critique from those around him) to be able to recognise what he’d started - then too street-shy to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, even to duck - got himself rudely counter-punched. So hard was Koch walloped that, after he came back to reality in Sydney a day or so later, shaken up by a call from a distraught KT, he discovered he’d been panel-beaten into the shape of Hinkley’s yes-man marionette. He’d fought with his mouth not his brain, had bitten off more than he could chew, and it hadn’t occurred to him for so much as an instant that anything out of the ordinary had taken place. A bigshot career in TV, detached from and high above the real world, can do that. It seems.
Koch had two choices:
1) do nothing, and let the Hinkleys take off for the sunshine, leaving him publicly looking like an absolute fool, as Tony Cochrane’s laughter rang in his ears; or
2) bend over the kitchen table at Hinkley Hollow and give the senior coach everything he wanted, if he would only stay put at Alberton … while Donna recorded the show for posterity and to keep Koch honest … while Donna called the plays from the bench, e.g: “David, shut the f@ck up!“ That cut was the deepest. Nobody could speak to David Koch that way and get away with it. Donna did. Complete was the self-engineered surprise surprise fall from grace of our club president / chairman: professional breakfast bullshitter non-pareil, the king of breakfast TV ratings.
What was it to be, 1) or 2)? The second option would’ve sounded like unbearable torture to the average victim. But on any chart of averages David Koch goes over the top. Option 2) would indeed make him feel like an even bigger fool - but only privately; he would, in compensation, look less of a fool publicly, thus preserving his TV ratings, his bubble-headed overpaid job at Channel 7. Best of all … he would be able to carry home Cochrane’s flaming chagrin to keep warm his palatial mansion spread out upon 1,460 square metres of cliff-top looking down on secluded, secure, idyllic Bungan Beach - way north of metro Sydney, half a continent east of, and a stratosphere above, his ‘little blue-collar battler footy club’ at Alberton, Adelaide, South Australia, est. 1870.
Never before, not in a century and a half, has a Port Adelaide president resided in such luxury so far away from his club; been so distant physically and mentally from his club’s faithful, his club’s believers; been so out of touch physically and mentally from the real world of Australian football, preferring the fantasy land of TV ratings, professional bullshit and pseudo worthiness. Highly inflammable errors of judgement fed by such disparity and detachment are inevitable.
Koch chose Option 2). Of course he did.
Kochie had finally met Kenny. Kochie had finally met the real Kenny, the Kenny that doesn’t suffer a chairman such as Koch gladly. Hinkley had been hankering for the chance, for an opening, to reveal his insufferance ever since post-season 2014, ever since the recruitment of Voss behind his back, ever since round 2 in 2015 … when Koch had encroached upon the sacred Adelaide Oval turf, as NTUA was into its final seconds and our players were bracing for an all-in against the Swans. All Koch had in mind was doing a clown impression in the goalsquare for the VIP Farriss brothers and a confused, unimpressed goal umpire … as the siren blew in the background. We were behind from the opening bounce, lost by eight goals to go 0 and 2, en route to an eventual 9th place. We won the next three to be 3 and 2, then were 3 and 5, followed by 6 and 9. 2015 was the unfortunate year Koch and Cardone ‘took over’ the Club, all of it including the football dept. These two carried on like kids who’d found a football club under their Xmas tree; they played games with their new toy such as media roadshows in AFL House that went on for half a week, and unloaded pressure that was neither needed nor welcome on the players and the coaches, on the senior coach in particular. On-field Port Adelaide duly went south. 2016 was a replay, more of the same.
Come September 2017 our chairman had copped his ultimate come-uppance. He had come off beaten, bowed, second-best … less of a man than the senior coach he had blatantly, self-destructively and so vocally disrespected.
2018 - APRIL FOOLS’ DAY
Cocky Ken Hinkley. He’d conquered the chairman, and right after the siren sounded on round 2 in 2018 he let the CEO know about it, with a snide belittlement of the bloke who’d not only gifted him his job back in 2012, had also steered him clear of a fourth ‘this is not the man for us’ interview panel. “Now p’raps,” growled KBH in KT’s ear, “you’ll be able to find that other JMS fer us.” This was, take note, April Fools’ Day.
Port had beaten the Swans at the SCG again. The year before, we’d done it with the PM of the hour and the Premier of China looking on. Now we’d done it again, this time with China again foremost in KT’s mind after another of his business treks to Beijing a fortnight previously with Andrew Hunter. In a seriously imposing room with a vast slab of wood called a conference table, inside a seriously imposing building, KT and AH had gleaned some information, some outstanding news considering the political realities of the moment … which was strictly confidential.
JMS? Joint Major Sponsor. We only had one. That made it an oxymoron. Our single ‘joint’ major sponsor was Oak. That wasn’t oke. As of 2014 we had two: Renault and EnergyAustralia, their logos livening up our livery on match-day, their business complimenting the image we aimed to project. Power. Now we only had Oak. Flavoured milk. Give me a break. But KT, come April Fools’ Day 2018, had a card up his sleeve that once revealed would make KBH look exceedingly small and his spiteful tongue hard-bitten. Or so KT thought, based on what he had brought home from Beijing.
State Grid Corporation of China, the largest power company in existence with over 1,500,000 employees spread across the globe, second in Fortune 500 listing and a 46% majority owner of SA’s UHV electrical grid, having studied drawings laid out on their gigantic table and computer images on their screens, had indicated they were agreeable to granting the Club, as a PR exercise, A$20,000,000 to rebuild the Alberton Oval Precinct. Or so KT hoped. And so did I. But fifty years of China have taught me that China on any given day can become a different China from any day thereafter. The Chinese conveniently think of it as their equivalent to pragmatism - deal with life as it is, not how it was. The CEO deserved so much better. Geopolitics was what got him. Ugly cross-Pacific populism was what took him down. Who woulda thought.
He’d done a remarkable job with State Grid, had KT, subsequent to an introduction being set up by Andrew Day after that breakfast meeting in the Melbourne CBD in February 2015. That was the day, too, of Cos Cardone, his and Koch’s over the top media roadshow at AFL House, the cold cup of coffee in front of me and a cold quick line of chat that revealed to my HK colleague and me that this individual, too, was no good for the Club. No need to go into that again here. Andrew Day now sits on the Club’s board of directors. That’s an asset. But so does Cardone, still. That’s a liability.
SO DAMN SACKABLE
As it was to turn out, 2018 was a disastrous year off-field … and on-field, too. It would’ve been Hinkley’s last year per the contract that had been extended for the first time prior to season 2015. If he hadn’t been extended again by Koch as a coerced peace offering to settle their puerile ego wrestle at the end of season 2017, the senior coach would’ve been sacked by any board of directors led by any chairman of any club, the sacking given the rubber stamp of any AFL House at the end of season 2018 - Hinkley’s performance was so damn … sackable. But the Club wrapped itself in the phoney security blanket of not being in a position to afford an early payout. It wasn’t just that such payout would be extortionate, after Koch had extended KBH’s arse all the way to Camperdown. There was, or wasn’t, the revenue from that missing JMS, the one Hinkley had teased KT about.
Worse, there was the upshot of Koch proving himself incapable of pulling off, with any sponsor, partner or benefactor, any sort of deal involving enough alternative revenue to ‘save’ the Club. We had a chairman who, it was said, had a contact in every board room in Australia. Too many convenient memories credit either Koch or Hinkley or both for ‘saving’ the Club in 2013. Yet there we were at the end of 2018, six seasons of that pair in partnership having been completed, prevented from sacking an incompetent senior coach because the entire Club was still in need of ‘saving’. Obviously Koch’s contacts in every board room in Australia were not contacts at all, or were not picking up the phone, or were backers of the Crows, or of Collingwood as per Director Cardone’s day job conflict of interest.
Boy oh boy. The three-ring circus was in town; but Ken Bloody Hinkley was the only one laughing. The horror show was rocking, but Hinkley was the only one not screaming.
In 2018 Koch had stopped laughing and started screaming soon after round 16. We’d been 11 and 4, equal second on the ladder. Koch had picked up his metaphoric megaphone to shout to the heavens what a clever club chairman he was, how his TV ratings were on fire, how he had identified Hinkley as a ‘superstar’ and been proved right. It was tempting fate, deja vu, all over again. KBH embarrassed him again. Together they lost six of the last seven, lost the last four rounds in a row, and oversaw a precipitous fall down the ladder out of the finals to 10th spot. Those last four consecutive losses were diabolical - a showdown by a couple of points, West Coast at home by a few points, followed by Collingwood at the MCG by a lot, then Essendon at home by too much. The Bombers enjoyed their no-contest vs. a wholly disinterested Port Adelaide, who had not shown up and were scoreless until the last minute of the first quarter - when a decent win may have edged us back into the top eight and into the finals.
“The longest march starts with … me, of course!”
At quarter-time, Koch, deep inside his signature winter beige mohair cum alpaca cum Chairman Moi overcoat, was in emergency consultation with Cardone and KT. They were caught on TV with their heads together, faces like hangmen, or dead men; the visuals alternated from one to the other. Superstar no longer, Hinkley, after masquerading as senior coach through seven weeks of what the stock market calls technical correction, was all of a sudden an anti-superhero unworthy of any sort of epithet except Loser.
2019 - KEY INTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS IN A HIGHLY SOPHISTICATED & CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENT
The senior coach himself wore a worried look … not because he went through life with such a look, not because he’d proved yet again that he was nothing, but because he knew he had to come up with something. Something original. It was not a word he knew much about. He needed a stunt, another one, something to divert focus from his traumatic 2018 coaching exhibition in time for 2019. Original stunts were not his forte, not when circumstances required him to think one up in advance. In Hinkley world, stunts just happened, by accident, or as a reaction born of stubborn or pessimistic or just generally negative thinking or non thinking. So he worried his way into the mental jungle of off-season 2018-2019, thinking in stunt mode so negatively and so hard it positively hurt.
Then somebody suggested co-captains. Not original. Hell yeah - not original and thus risk free, according to Hinkley logic. Co-captains was the solution to Boaky having stepped down and forced a decision on the senior coach. Such a thing was revolutionary at Port Adelaide. Hinkley hadn’t a clue this was so, that there was never any revolution at Alberton, there was only Tradition - which meant nothing to him as he came from Camperdown, and meant nothing to Koch as he was interested only in TV ratings. The media promptly ceased all mention of 11 and 4 and equal second place on the ladder becoming 12 and 10 and no finals. All they wanted to hang out for public attention for 2019 was co-captains. Whether it was a good idea or not didn’t matter. Whether it was workable or not didn’t matter. Whether Koch and Hinkley heard or not the marching feet of real revolution growing louder outside of their private cocoons, the start of a revolution brewing among the Alberton Faithful and True Believers … didn’t matter.
In an insincere and unconvincing statement laden with customary disrespect for his audience, Chairman Moi revealed how, as he compliantly saw it, co-captains were the key to Port Adelaide catching up to the rest of the national competition: “The club’s Board had no hesitation in ratifying the recommendation from all our key internal stakeholders. We strongly believe this model … is best for our club to achieve sustained success moving forward (and) we are in unanimous agreement that co-captains will serve our club best in this highly sophisticated and challenging environment that we currently face.”
’Key internal stakeholders’ was a buzzword or, to be precise, a buzzphrase, unnecessarily made up to sound more than it was, aimed to confuse, to obfuscate, to hide the hurtful truth from the dirty unwashed, the hoi poloi, the proletariat, the non-key internal stakeholders, the Alberton Faithful and True Believers. Who the hell were these upper-crust anonymous ‘key’ internal stakeholders? Give ‘em names for god sake! Meanwhile a reverse example of the ‘highly sophisticated and challenging environment’ of which Koch also spoke in aimless fashion was propping up the rear wall at the 2019 AGM: the senior coach himself, emulating a one-man Secret Service, arms characteristically clamped across his chest, wearing his Camperdown Ken scowl, silently daring the room full of ’stakeholders’ who contributed to his salary and the survival of his family to give any indication of dissent, to even ask a question. His co-conspirator and meal ticket, David Koch, had yet again filled the air with the professional bullshit that he uses to impress only himself. It had stretched to the point where nothing that this man said, that these two men said, was to be believed. The immediate future would render such a truth to be self-evident, to employ the verbiage of a truly honest leader of men called Abe Lincoln.
Predictably 2019 proved no better than 2018. 11 and 11 and 10th again. Co-captains did for Hinkley’s dilemma on-field what a triple-decker ham & cheese toastie does for his constipation. In 2019 there was no crash from equal 2nd after round 16; we had been stuck at 8th/9th spot all season. There had been not a flicker of improvement - discounting the senior coach’s desperately and comically overstated ‘best win’ ever versus Melbourne at the MCG in round 1. With two rounds to go 8th was where he was, with lowly North, coming off a thrashing, to come next. We all know what happened. Hinkley still doesn’t.
That night, straight after the humiliation, KT jumped on a plane and flew off to Shanghai again, to talk to Gui for a week. The CEO, not long after his return, announced he would not be staying at the Club beyond the conclusion of his contract in 2020. Very strange that. If only Hinkley would do something as strange.
DON’T MENTION THE ‘PREMIERSHIP‘ - A WORD TOO FAR
Andrew Hunter, who also would leave the Club in 2020, earlier than KT, wrote of that appalling exhibition at Docklands in the penultimate round of 2019, on page 146 of his inside story ‘Port Adelaide to Shanghai’: Confidence in our leaders was diminishing. The club was perceived to be equivocating. Winning premierships was part of our mission statement, yet between November 2018 and the end of our season in August 2019, the word ‘premiership’ was not used in any public statement by our Chairman, our CEO, or our coach. Words are important. They are related to intent. Did we really exist to win premierships?
Later in his book AH tells the story of how the Club secured its JMS partnership with MG, since my childhood an iconic and beloved automobile brand, nowadays owned by Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, truncated to SAIC Corp., the biggest car maker in China. Negotiations had begun in Shanghai, where it had been recommended to SAIC by the locally appointed event manager for the three AFL matches at Jiangwan Stadium that they would be much better served in their Australian venture by an AFL club ‘bigger’ than Port Adelaide.
Now hear this, David Koch. This is what happens when you persist, in spite of being told to desist by your own executive and board, with regularly mouthing off dumb and destructive derogations like ‘little blue-collar battler footy club from Alberton’. This is how, Mr Koch, you personally fall short in making the sort of direct or indirect financial contribution to the Club expected from you by us, the Alberton Faithful and True Believers. This is how you make everybody else’s job so much harder, and push the Club’s ambitions to grow bigger and prosperous out of reach. This is the perfect example of why you have not been needed by Port Adelaide Football Club since the end of season 2014.
The deal-making with SAIC struggled through 2019. Success versus Essendon, Collingwood and the South Sydney Rabbitohs, erstwhile favourites, came via a timely and clever twist of fate and marketing awareness involving Darren Cahill and Simona Halep, who were in town for the annual international tennis tournaments including the Open. We landed MG just in time for season 2020. At the launch of the partnership in Adelaide, Peter Ciao, SAIC’s Sydney-based CEO (whose intro was aided by Andrew Day) asked when we were expecting to win our next flag. He waited, couldn’t work out why nobody seemed to want to try to give him an answer. Here again, ‘premiership’ was a word too far, a word too fearful for our leaders, the enablers of Ken Bloody Hinkley, to dare utter out loud.
THE CULTURAL ATTACHE FOR CAMPERDOWN
The infamous Hinkley Ham & Cheese Toastie.
2019 had been death by a thousand cuts for Hinkley stunts. In addition to co-captains, he introduced single-handedly the Hinkley Ham & Cheese Toastie to Shanghai as a substitute for, and a downgrade on, the local cuisine. In the same vein he followed up on blatant pre-match international TV chucking Chinese cha over his shoulder, not sipping it as per local custom - having decided it was more important to look like a cave-man comedian in front of his Camperdown cobbers than it was to be seen by the rest of the world, in particular by priority-target viewers in the Club’s and the AFL’s host nation, China, as taking seriously his supplementary role as an ambassador, an image-projector, for not just Port Adelaide Football Club and the AFL but also his non-Camperdown countrymen all across the broad Commonwealth of Australia.
He grinned, again on TV, like an idiot at Clarkson after losing to him in Tassie, and then he set up a whole-team terrorism operation on Brownlow Medal favourite Lachie Neale while the other 21 Lions players lined up to kick goals unopposed … in front of our home crowd, note, on whom Hinkley piled extra justification not to like him … a reality that occurred to him strongly enough for it to be acknowledged in one of his own event speeches.
Putting 2018 and 2019 side-by-side was to compare a season that took off then ran out of gas with one that was out of gas from go to whoa. 2019 was a seamless continuation of 2018, despite those bloody co-captains … each season with the same ending: tenth position. Each season didn’t end until it was over, as at the final round, within touch of making finals depending on wins and margins. It was as if the players didn’t want to play finals in 2018 and 2019 … as if they, themselves, had been terrorised by what they had experienced in 2017, both during and after the loss to West Coast. It was, in 2018 / 2019, as if they‘d had their end-of-season travel arrangements locked in for quite some time. What an indictment on the senior coach it all was.
Hinkley would subsequently send the players from the rooms on to the field burdened with an identical sort of mindset for the preliminary final in 2021.
THE EXPERIMENT WAS A TRAGEDY, BUT THE GUINEA PIGS THRIVED
The Club website opened year 2020, our 150th anniversary, with this 180-degree contradiction of the nonsense that had gone down twelve months earlier: PORT ADELAIDE chairman David Koch says the entire football club is united in the decision to return to the sole captaincy model for season 2020.
Hinkley’s enabler-in-chief was in more unbelievable form than ever.
After listening to Port Adelaide’s key stakeholders - of which there are many - Mr Koch said it was important to bring back the famous number 1 guernsey. “We have always been a club that listens to our members. Listens to our people,” Mr Koch said at a packed press conference at Alberton Oval on Friday afternoon. “The people of the Port Adelaide Football Club are incredibly engaged. Incredibly passionate. And for that we really thank them. We have heard loud and clear after going to a joint captaincy model last year, that the number 1 guernsey is one of those iconic traditions that is a really important part of this club.”
Hard act to follow, that. Nevertheless, Ken Hinkley got stuck in. There are laws against parliamentarians lying to parliament, congressmen misleading Congress, witnesses not telling the truth under oath in court. Perjury, it’s called. There ought to be an equivalent law protecting stakeholders at the AGM of an AFL club, starting with ours.
… Hinkley echoed Mr Koch’s sentiments about co-captaincy last season, and believes the three leaders (including Hamish Hartlett) are better prepared to take on the role in the club’s 150th year. “It was something we wanted to have a go at and something we thought was absolutely right for the football program,” Hinkley said. “It worked really well because we sit here with three young people … who are better prepared to do (sic) the opportunities that they’ve got now in front of them.”
In other words, the experiment had been a tragedy but the guinea pigs thrived.
In Ollie’s case, this would actually turn out to be true.
2020 - BEATING THE KRYPTONITE EFFECT OF HOME CROWDS, WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM COVID
Commonsense, logic, waving the white flag and surrendering to tradition, and having all engines at full ahead on 150 Gala Night … these were key indicators to what the anniversary season would deliver. Koch had his speech that Night written for him by someone whose orders to the chairman were for him to adhere strictly to the prepared script. Strictly! Not one unscripted word was permitted to trespass on the Night. It was Koch’s best speech by a country mile, all previous ones not putting up much of a fight as he is the most boring, repetitious and distanced-from-his-audience speaker I’ve ever tried to listen to. I’m still not sure if Cardone was invited, was there or not; one way or the other, he was sidelined. 150 Gala Night was a triumph. The executive responsible for it - for writing Koch’s speech and the oversight of its delivery, for the invites, and for the emotive poem delivered by Rupert McCall at the commencement - would become, later in Year 150, our new CEO.
“I told you not to tuck the Bars
inside your shorts. You look like
a bag o’ shit.”
Nobody on that Night looked more out of place, more non Port Adelaide, more temporary, than the senior coach. Koch wasn’t far behind. A lack of any progressive contribution to the 150 years of our Club, on-field or off it, by these two was obvious even in such a big room chock-a-block with well over a thousand people milling about. So many of those who were there had made worthy contributions, so many of the many having made a legendary contribution. Sadly, so sadly, some are no longer with us, yet they remain legends and will forever. That’s what legends do.
Also gone in season 2020, in addition to co-captains, was the phenomenon called Adelaide Oval home ground crowds. Hinkley hated ‘em. They possessed en masse for him a sort of kryptonite effect. Too often he found he could not coach in front of one. Ask West Coast. The fewer home ground crowds the better for Ken Hinkley from Camperdown. And 2020 proved it.
DUCK’S BUTT
In January 2021, when KBH’s third extension was sprung on us by the Club, the mediocre-minded shrugged, made either mediocre noises or none at all, and took it on the chin, willingly. In 2020 we had collected some consolation silverware: a mundane trophy, the best of mediocrity, named after a Dr. McClelland. We also made it to a preliminary final. By proper Port Adelaide tradition, however, consolation prizes and preliminary final losses have never counted for a duck’s butt. They have at no prior stage of Club history qualified for exceptional treatment of the senior coach. Until January 2021.
It gets worse. Sneek a peak into the near future.
“I’m going to make you into a ten-year coach … if it takes me ten years of unnecessary undeserved
premature contract extensions to do it. Ken, you never have to worry that I, David Koch, Co-Host of
Sunrise, will sack you. Never have I sacked anybody in my life. I’m not cut out for the strong-arm
stuff. Pinstripe Media is a family business and I just can’t sack members of my own family. A stable
business looks like a successful business, even when it isn’t, right? Just so you know I have cojones,
I tell you I did sack that aggravating Vietnam veteran in Hong Kong who posts fake news on BigFooty
about me ‘n’ you ‘n’ Cos, and insists he discovered China when we all know it was me who did that.
In fact I got KT to sack him. I do that, Ken, I pass the bu— I delegate. That’s the sort of chairman
I am. If there’s anybody going to sack you, Ken, it won’t be me. It’ll be Tredders … during a radio
interview. You’ll say: ‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’ And he’ll say: ‘For f#ck sake you’re sacked.’”
You see, if form be our guide, by the time KBH’s existing contract drags us into, ostensibly, its final year, it will be, as it always has been, extended in advance - next time latest pre-season 2023. This has been the modus operandi of the Club under Koch - aimed at heading off at the pass the rebel forces of the Ken-hate Cult (which exists only in certain denialist minds, a bit like antifa), and pre-empting the fearsome indignity of Ken Poor Baby Hinkley whose overdone insecurity and fragility are not only legend but also legendary weaponry vs. a chairman as ratings-conscious yet imperceptive as ours.
Should Hinkley ever be identified by the media as a ‘final-year’ this or a ‘last-year’ that, such adjectives would also equate to kryptonite. They would render the senior coach into a vegetable, very likely a spud - though detecting any difference won’t be easy.
2023 thus threatens to be Hinkley’s FOURTH unnecessary, undeserved, premature extension. Which then drags us, the Alberton Faithful and True Believers, kicking and screaming to end of season 2025. How many of us will be alive to witness no-luck Ken’s 13th year? Those who haven’t expired from premature natural causes will likely have opted for an alternative solution to their chronic discomfiture. Something called euthanasia or some similar process. Soylent Green, perhaps.
FRIGID BEDFELLOWS
No orphan, this one. The end of 2025 will parallel the Chasing Greatness (est. 2021) five-year timetable in search of 1) three flags, 2) 100,000 members, 3) zero debt.
Except that, performance dictates - and despite the advent of an AFLW contribution to compensate for not yet defined China negatives - Chasing Greatness will require by then its own extension. Greatness and Ken Hinkley do not travel arm-in-arm nor side-by-side, nor in any sort of similar direction. These two are frigid bedfellows, like a pair of pandas on honeymoon. They are polar opposites.
When Chasing Greatness was conceived by our new CEO - with indeed the very best of intent and the potential for a lengthy shelf-life - it was not scanned for a virus. A particular virus. A trojan, in fact. Ken B. Hinkley.
Chasing Greatness was born without proper appraisal being conducted of the essential instrument in the chase, indeed the essential tool in the achievement of its goal.
The goal, obviously, is Greatness. The essential tool in its achievement is on-field excellence. Not ordinary on-field excellence. Excellence without parallel. On-field excellence that we have never seen before. Well, not for a long, long time, at least. Not, in fact, since the Club’s golden era.
Greatness is the Great Man, Russell Ebert.
Greatness is Jack Cahill and Fos Williams and Geof Motley.
Greatness is Bob Quinn M.M.
Greatness will be our enduring memory of them all.
Greatness is not Ken Bloody Hinkley … whom I am thoroughly impatient to forget forever.
So don’t think about one AFL flag, let alone three. Don’t think about a hundred thousand members.
Unless Hinkley is gone, disappeared, vanished, nowhere to be found. Unless we have filled the vacuum that is Hinkley with a genuine, fair dinkum, senior coach. Unless we have a natural-born Port Adelaide breed of winner breathing the oxygen Hinkley is thieving.
ZERO DEBT?
And zero debt? Hinkley makes the third challenge of Chasing Greatness - taken up by our commercial and marketing personnel, clever folk and honest triers each and every one of them - all the more difficult. Like his enabler-in-chief, David Koch, he sabotages the work of others, without thinking, without awareness, and thus with neither apology nor remorse.
Chairman Moi: Expert on other people’s household debt, no-hoper on ours.
How essential is zero debt? Koch doesn’t rate it; it’s too arcane, too much hard work minus TV ratings for him. I’ve read some BF posters suggest it isn’t essential at all, that clubs float along on the tide in spite of being in debt and still win premierships, as we did ourselves in 2004. My pitch is that there is no way that the Club will generate the sort of respect we need today in AFL House, no way we will be taken seriously, treated by other clubs as an equal contender in such quests as the regular donning on field of the Bars in home Showdowns and ANZAC round, while we persevere at being a club in debt - a liability AFL club. I again jab my finger of responsibility in Koch‘s chest for this. Supposedly a financial genius, a maker of deals, he should’ve cleared the Club’s debt, every scrap of it, every sniff of it, inside his first three years of FIFO chairmanship … yet he has made zero impact on zero debt apart from a card trick here and there with the restructure of, and reclassifications in, the annual accounts.
Going into ten years of Koch, we still carry a debt which, though calculated at millions of dollars, is beer money to the George Soros image of himself Koch loves to see promoted. Methinks his self-declared prowess with money is, to use his own verbiage, more professional bullshit. Come on, Mr. Chairman, get off your arse and help. Or come clean. You are no more a financial wizard than you are a qualified accountant. Yes, qualified accountant, the sort of sleeves-up hands-dirty School-of-Mines-by-night professional your dad made himself into; he played footy, too, for Port Adelaide, did the late Dean Koch, RIP. As a boy I studied his name in the Footy Budget and tried to work out how it should be pronounced; I watched him ruck, in curtain-raisers before the seniors coached by winners like Williams and Motley - when the Club was run by real Port men, real businessmen, like McLean and Darwent and Harvey - took to the field. There is no way that Dean Koch, had he ever been president or chairman, would tolerate Port Adelaide Football Club lingering in fiscal debt the way his son idly does.
In our mission to eliminate debt, the product being promoted, the product being marketed, the product being sold, by the Club - namely, the Club itself - is not only being minimised by David Koch, it is being corrupted by his co-star, our so-called senior coach … by his unmarketable presence, by his dissuasive silhouette, by his erosive longevity.
Ken Bloody Hinkley is the forever high tide, bringing with it assorted rubbish and wearing away the rock upon which our Club is built.
Close your eyes. Open wide your mind. Picture the confident professional countenance of a Buckley or a Clarkson front and centre and in focus on the glossy cover of a Chasing Greatness Fund marketing brochure.
Now open your eyes and look at reality. What do you see occupying the square-centimetres best served by a Buckley smile or a Clarkson wink.
A morbid mugshot of Ken Bloody Hinkley.
Try not to throw up.
“Noice of ‘em to put this comfy Sherrin ‘ere fer me to rest me chins on.”
HURRY UP AND WAIT
Why are we confronted with this persistent atmosphere of hurry up and wait whenever there’s any hint of sacking Hinkley? Because the big bad AFL won’t let an SA-based club dismiss its senior coach ever again? Oh gimme a break. That’s an excuse for an excuse.
Truth is, it’s easier to do nothing, just let another extension happen.
Our ultimate decision-makers are too chary to call a halt and call for an audit … which would, on condition that it’s honest, prove that they’ve thrown, year after year, more and more good Club money after bad - both directly at Hinkley, into his bank account as salary … plus indirectly into propping him up with probably the most adept support staff and system that exists in the AFL.
And what does Hinkley do with this bespoke support network, assembled and maintained in tip-top working order just for him? Unimaginably for a used-car salesman, he knows not how to drive it. He knows not how to derive from it the compensating benefits that it provides, just for him. He sits, instead, comatose and incommunicado in his coaching box sucking robot-like on coke zero, waiting for the game to go his way yet doing SFA to make it so.
And so, he carries on doing what he’s best at - losing … at the pointy end of the season, at the crunch, in particular.
Meanwhile so do they, these ultimate decision-makers of ours … carry on making the same mistake, hoping against hope for a different type of on-field result, hoping for an on-field revival that might persevere, for once, through an entire season. Hoping for Hinkley to do whatever might turn his ‘game plan’ magically into Port Adelaide football - a major miracle for which they might claim their share of credit.
“Loser? I’m a sixty per cent winner in minor rounds. I’m a minor miracle.”
BUZZWORD BAND-AID
It seems our ultimate decision-makers have invented a new buzzword to stick a band-aid over what is in reality a deep bleeding gash in need of layers of stitches. Make that amputation.
This time the buzzword is ‘incremental improvement’. It came out of the board room straight after the 2021 prelim final debacle … as did Koch’s endorsement of KBH, on radio on the Monday morning … thirty-six hours after the final siren blew and the faithful sat transfixed in mournful shock, all around the Oval, all around town and country, all around the world. A tad suspicious, that buzzword, that endorsement. As if it was all rehearsed ahead of the final siren. The endorsement certainly was.
Considering that these ultimate decision-makers are looking at a losing margin of 71, plus 74 plus 1 equals 146 points worth of doing better next year in order to make it past the Demons in a GF, according to the parameters of 2021 … that’s a helluva lot of ‘incremental’ improvement required. On the proviso, please note, that Melbourne plateau in 2022 and only remain as brilliant as they were in Perth. If they improve, that stratospheric 146-point benchmark falls correspondingly short.
Methinks the buzzword band-aid for 2022 is already a bust.
The 2021 preliminary final brought to us, swept up by and carried upon its odiferous slipstream, a second buzzword.
“ABOMINATION!”
In Imperial China, to commit an ‘abomination’ was a crime against society punishable
by a term on public display with the accused’s neck, at a minimum, clamped in the
stocks. This victim (above) has kindly co-operated by adopting Hinkley’s characteristic
coaching-box pose and death-row expression. Chairman Moi would instead suggest the
criminal depicted here in the stocks is not the Club’s senior coach but our GM Football,
George Costanza, as he it was who uttered the word: “Abomination!” in front of the
press a few days after the 2021 preliminary final.
George was the only Club executive to make any genuine comment at the time … and
still is, months later. Hinkley, having been ordered to present himself at the studio, was
reluctantly interviewed by Tredrea on radio on the Friday evening after George’s honesty
rang out like a warning bell through the storm and shone like a lighthouse above the
rocks. All Hinkley could offer at the interview, six days after his pathologically inept post-
match presser, was: “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
I first met George in Shanghai in late 2016. In fact he was sitting on the other side of
Ken Hinkley at the Sichuanese dinner that I have described earlier in this OP. In the same
time that it has taken me to recognise Hinkley for the rotten apple in our shaky barrel that
he is, I have determined that George is the opposite, KBH’s alter-ego - a bright shiny rosy
red apple prepared to seek out advice and receive input and to never take observations
personally. How George has tolerated Ken Bloody Hinkley for as long as he has is beyond
me. Perhaps he is serving a penance for something he did in a previous life.
One thing on which I can vouch for brave, honest, intelligent George Costanza in
this life is that, if he calls a coaching performance an ABOMINATION … it’s an
abomination.
The Accused … looking small in the dock.
”It’s a tough competition. Someone’s gotta lose,“ he testified. “I’ve always said that.
I’ve always lost … except when it really don’t matter … and when I’m up against Kochie.
I always win those. They’s the important wins. I ain’t ‘ere to win premierships. Never
gonna happen. Youse‘ve worked that out be now, aincha.”
Poster’s notes:
a) The vintage photo circa 1900 at the top of this OP was indeed taken in Camperdown, Victoria. Check Google images. Apologies to the child in the picture, who I hope had a successful career in coach-building of the wheeled, horse-drawn variety, and a wonderful life. He (or she) was, so far as I know, not really called Kenneth Hinkley.
b) KBH = Ken Bloody Hinkley. If you hadn’t worked that out, get help.
c) BigFooty anti-Hinkley thread history :
Part 1 of ‘I’ve lost my faith in Ken Hinkley’ opened on 12 June 2015.
Part 2 of - ditto - opened on 16 September 2017.
Part 3 of - ditto - opened on 19 April 2019.
Part 1 of ‘Sack Hinkley’ opened on 25 May 2019 - 400 pages.
Part 2 of ‘Sack Hinkley’ opened on 30 July 2019 - 400 pages.
Part 3 of ‘Sack Hinkley’ opened on 24 November 2019 - 400 pages.
Part 4 of ‘Sack Hinkley’ opened on 13 June 2021 - 300 pages & counting.
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