Garry Lyon: A Demon burns within

The seagulls are basking in the warm afternoon sunshine in the middle of Junction Oval, the training ground for the Melbourne Football Club.

Junction Oval is one of the prettier AFL training venues.

It has a handsome old grandstand painted in heritage cream and green, thick well-tended lawns and a white picket fence around the oval boundary.

The traffic is racing along the road a few hundred metres across the oval but it could be a million miles away.

Here on a mid-week afternoon, Junction Oval has a sense of peace, serenity.

It's a refuge from the city that surrounds it.

That wasn't quite the feeling within the Melbourne Football Club last year."It was just a disaster," Garry Lyon says.

The Melbourne skipper and all-round club inspiration is taking a break from training and not mincing words.

The 1997 season for Melbourne was one distinguished by injuries and poor performances leading to the sacking of coach Neil Balme and the team coming last in the competition.

"Hopes were pretty high at the start of the year. We won the first game and from then on it went downhill," Lyon says.

"We were rolled in the next couple of games and that took the wind out of our sails.

"Then we just had injury after injury after injury. Then Balme got the sack.

"It was a pretty low time for a while. He's just a great fellow."

Lyon was criticised in the press last year for being too close to Balme and through him allegedly having undue influence on the workings of the club.

After the trauma of last year's happenings, Lyon has certainly not abandoned Balme as a friend. He sees him often.

"He lives not far from me, he lives just around the corner.

"He was around for dinner just a couple of weeks ago. His wife and my wife are pretty close," Lyon says.

There has been a definite effort to rebuild Melbourne over the past few months, Lyons says.

The club secured the No. 1 draft choice, 17-year-old Dandenong Stingrays wingman Travis Johnstone. It also has plenty of other stars in the making, led by high-priced recruit Jeff White, the 21-year-old from Frankston who was reportedly lured away from the Fremantle Dockers with a three-year, $950,000 contract.

Melbourne is now a club that old-timers like Lyon might even have trouble recognising.

"We turned over a hell of a lot of players. I think we drafted 12 or 13 footy players, so we've got a lot of young kids here.

"We got a new coach, we got a new chief executive through the year, new reserves coach, new fitness people," Lyon says.

"Everyone's new, everyone's fresh, everyone's working hard and on edge a bit, which is, you know, a good thing."

So does the 30-year-old veteran feel removed from it all?

"No, no, not at all. I'm feel very much part of a new era," he says.

Does he believe Jeff White is worth $300,000 a season?

"I've got no idea and I don't really want to know.

"But I do know that he's a tall, talented footy player and he can play AFL footy for the next 10 years.

"I think it's hard to put a price on someone like that. He was the best player available and we were in a position to grab him so I think we had to do it, regardless of cost," Lyon says.

"I haven't heard one player talk about how much money he's getting.

"We have a bit of a joke about it at times but it's not an issue and he's a great kid. He works super-hard, he's really professional."

Lyon is wearing a T-shirt and shorts, his big, beefy, hairy legs stretched out in front of him as he sits back in his chair.

One of his calves is strapped but Lyon isn't making too much of the injury. It's a slight strain, he says.

"I told a reporter the other day it was old age and the next day there was a big headline "Garry Lyon Getting Old", Lyon says with a laugh.

It is a slightly strained laugh because Lyon was one of those Melbourne players battling injury last season.

Lyon submitted to surgery last year after struggling with a back injury for the previous two seasons.

The surgery has since been judged a success.

"I had an operation in about July which laid me up in bed for a month," he says.

"I had a bulge in a disc which was touching on the sciatic nerve, so they trim away a bit of the disc and make a bit of hollow in the vertebra to make a bit more room for the nerve."

Lyon's back drew a lot of attention. He had approaches from everyone from chiropractors to acupuncturists, wanting to help.

"I think if I'd chased up every offer I'd ever had I'd still be going," Lyons said.

"I think they had really good intentions but in the end you have to take a stand.

"I think a lot of the people I was dealing with might have got me to a stage where I was comfortable with day-to-day living but I hugely doubt whether they could have got me back to playing AFL footy."

Lyon, who has been captain since 1991, made his debut in 1986 after being recruited from Kyabram.

He is looking forward to his 12th year of league football.

"I've had a pretty good run. I've played a couple of hundred games.

"I've done most of the things I wanted to do in league footy," Lyon says.

"Now when it comes around, you think, `Jeez, maybe my footy is going to end.

"That's why I'm cherishing what could be my last year or my second-last year in footy.

"I'm just really appreciating being a part of Melbourne and playing league footy."Lyon has been married to Melissa for the past five years.

They met through Lyon's team-mate Brett Lovett, who is married to Melissa's sister.

The couple have three boys, Benjamin (4), Thomas (2) and baby Joshua, who was born last Wednesday.

Lyon has set up an impressive array of media commitments including contracts with Channel Nine, Radio 3AW and Optus Vision and is looking to the media for a post-footy career.

He's also worked for the AFL for the past six years in promotions and junior football development. Lyon harbours an ambition to coach, but it's clear that when footy is over his priority will be to spend more time with his young family.

"Everything comes into perspective when you have kids," he says.

"When you're young you think footy's the be-all and end-all and then you get married and you've got someone else to think about.

"And then when the kids come along, well, footy's good, but it's not that good."

Lyon was born in Devonport. "Not many people know that. It was the best three months of my life," he says with a laugh.

His dad Peter played for Hawthorn and during the 1960s coached the Devonport Football Club before returning to Victoria when Lyon was still an infant.

Lyon left the family home in country Victoria at the age of 16 to play VFL football.

"It was a shellshock to leave home and to come down here and juggle your HSC and under-19 footy, especially when we toured Ireland in the middle of the year," he says. "I boarded with a young couple, which was interesting.

"They were a terrific young couple but I left towards my exams because my room was close to the lounge and I couldn't study.

"So I went to live with some cousins and an aunty and uncle for the next three months and ended up staying seven or eight years."

Lyon says his introduction to career football was vastly different to the current recruits.

"Travis Johnstone is a 17-year-old kid who's come down this year and hasn't got the luxury of playing under 19s footy. He's gone straight into seniors, thrown straight into the cauldron," Lyon says.

"At the same time I think clubs are better equipped to deal with young kids and the demands of footy.

"Their job is to make sure the young blokes are looked after and do have a good place to stay and all that sort of thing."

Lyon says he is "a bit of a homebody".

He likes nothing better than coming home to relax and have a bit of a muck around with the kids.

Lyon also enjoys keeping an eye on the property market after buying two houses as investments.

Two of his favourite pastimes are reading and going to the movies. "I just find reading and movies are a great way to escape things, the pressures of work or whatever. I really enjoy two hours of sitting in the dark watching a movie," Lyon says.

"I don't read anything too heavy. I like to read biographies. I'm a big (Muhammad) Ali fan so anything about him is good.

"He was a great man, so inspiring. I loved the fact he was so cocky."