Holding out tape measures and onto clipboards literal miles away from where his footy journey had originated in Launceston, Leigh Barnes was left shaking his head in sheer disbelief over how he arrived at this point.
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There he was in Los Angeles, a city better known for making a mark than taking one.
Standing in the thick of the action at the 2014 US combine and in his sights among clamouring faces was one Mason Cox.
The unknown 2.11m basketball convert struck up a conversation to get a few tips on the subtle nuances of this foreign game.
“What really got me was these guys at the combine had never held a footy, let alone played a game and yet here they were trying out for a sizable contract to play in Australia,” Barnes vividly recalls.
“There were no real skill sessions at this tryout, which really annoyed some of the scouts, but Mason’s figures for most of the metrics that they use for evaluation were pretty good as I remember.”
So good that he had been seriously eyed up and down by at least four interested suitors Collingwood, North Melbourne, Richmond and Port Adelaide – and by the time the Texan had arrived in Melbourne the next month for further drills, Sydney and Fremantle also took a passing interest.
All this before he knew how to kick a ball.
But Barnes knew something else.
He had insight that left a once knockabout Tassie footballer totally gobsmacked.
Collingwood recruiting guru Derek Hines had flown to LA to set about the AFL club’s intention of pulling out a unique athlete.
He left assured enough to give Barnes a nod and a wink about Cox’s prospects.
“He was very impressed with Mason from the start and more so after his test scores,” Barnes explains. “I caught up with Derek in San Francisco a few days later and he told me that no matter what I might hear, the Pies were going to go after Mason.
“His only real concern was how would an American adapt to the physicality of our great game and I think Mason has well and truly answered that question.”
He may have fallen behind delisted five-game St Kilda ruckman Jason Holmes from Chicago as the first American-raised player to debut in the AFL, but Cox’s 43rd match in the 2018 preliminary final win over minor premiers Richmond silenced the doubters.
The tallest forward the game has seen pulled down 11 towering marks and kicked three second-term goals to the chants of U-S-A, U-S-A echoing around the MCG.
No one was happier to watch Cox in the grand final the next week in front of 100,022 than the self-confessed Collingwood tragic.
But not just because of Barnes’s allegiance to the black and white army.
“I do remember him taking the time to talk to my son, which made an impression on him, so we have been big Mason fans ever since,” Barnes says.
“I’ve called into Collingwood over the past few years to have a chat and he was recently in Racine [in Wisconsin] for our nationals.
“He is a really good kid and I am not surprised about what he has achieved in our game in such a short time.
“You can't teach height as Harry Madden once said and Mason has that in spades.”
But Barnes contribution in the States has been more than one giddy volunteer at the heart of another AFL cultural experiment.
For more than 20 years, the man who grew up a torpedo punt from old York Park has been the face of footy in San Francisco.
He’s played, he’s coached, he’s umpired, he was once league president where even marking the boundary or inserting goal posts wasn’t too much for the 59-year-old.
The crowning masterpiece might well be how he turned around the San Franciscan’s understandable flagging interest to travel a round-trip of more than 1200 kilometres between LA to play games in the California Australian Football League to somehow form a Golden Gate competition and to boost playing numbers to new record highs.
Such commitment to fostering Aussie Rules that still has local onlookers curiously scratching their heads earned Barnes one of only 19 USAFL life memberships.
“To me, it means recognition to all of the hard work and countless hours that we all put into in the first place forming the GGAFL and then to see where it is now,” a humbled Barnes says while measuring his words.
“It is an individual award, but it really is a reflection of the GGAFL as a whole and I am super proud of that.”
Barnes could well rip off a small part of the certificate and give it to ex-Sydney and Fitzroy cult hero John Ironmonger.
He speaks glowingly of the gentle giant, in which the non-drinker once told Barnes in a popular San Francisco watering hole that his time with the Golden Gate AFL had been the best association he has had in footy that included 88 games at the highest level.
“John is an absolute great guy and is one of my dearest friends,” Barnes says.
“He took a little, not a lot of convincing to being my assistant coach of the Freedom for the 2014 and 2017 campaigns.
“He arrived in San Jose in 1996 to be part of a start-up company in the tech world and done really well out of it. He’s in Denver now and catch up at tournaments when we can.
“His passion in the early days would be tempered by calm reasoning, which enabled him to reel me in when I had dreams of building the MCG on a gopher field.”
That was not far from the truth.
Playing on suburban parks full of holes was back when footy was a dirty word.
No clubrooms even for players to get changed into their gear.
This alternative game was a pariah even in a city known for its hippie counterculture.
“Early on, getting grounds was the biggest problem,” Barnes says.
“No cities wanted us as we had no history with them and we needed two to even three baseball fields or soccer fields to make it work for us. But over time, we now have tenure and the councils love us, so we now get to set our own schedule.”
This came after Barnes had attempted to organise a new competition from scratch off just 14 players remaining from trips to LA.
His Santa Cruz Roos had nowhere to play.
The Australian game could have just as easily died in the San Francisco-Bay Area.
”When we got together after the 2001 season, the CAFL had folded and people asked what do we do now,” Barnes says.
“I said let’s start our own league and not for the first time in my life, most of the group said that I was a bloody idiot.
“But the truth of the matter was nobody had a better idea, so we just ran with it.”
Numbers grew to the hundreds as the league expanded from one team to five.
Not just that, but in addition three female teams have joined in for good measure.
That alone has been going strong for more than a decade. It extends to a female now running the league like Barnes once did.
With team names like the Iron Maidens, it’s hip for females to muscle up well before the AFLW popularised women’s footy.
But with some homebred US players now trying their luck at clubs in Australia, Barnes predicts it won’t be long before one will play in the burgeoning national competition.
“The last few years have seen significant rise in numbers and then the advent of the AFLW really got interest going,” Barnes adds.
“The women had been added to the International Cup in 2011, so that opened up a pathway to representative footy that was previously only open to the men.”
No one knows that better than Barnes.
The popular Aussie figure boasts that the Golden Gate AFL is the only all-American female competition throughout the nation.
Their patriotism hits a new level under Barnes’s direction of the US Freedom back in his homeland every three years.
“The coaching position came available in 2011 just after I had stepped down as president of the GGAFL and I had taken on coaching the new combined Sacramento/San Francisco women’s team,” Barnes says.
“I was asked by the USAFL to take on the reins of the Freedom; it was one of the most enjoyable chapters of my footy journey.
“We started out with 21 players at the 2011 training camp and a few years later we had built the program up to a level of being able to have a second – developmental – team, which was added to the International Cup 2014 tournament and had a standalone tour of playing teams in Melbourne in 2017 alongside the International Cup.”
Bursting full of pride for his work with women’s football in the States, it’s quite easy to forget what Barnes had achieved back in his early Tasmanian days.
Growing up in Launceston’s northern suburbs, he established a more than tidy senior football career that started out at nearby North Launceston from 1976 until 1978 that included a NTFA premiership.
The dangerous forward moved onto the then-Burnie Tigers in the NWFU for the next three seasons where he won the 1980 club best and fairest award in his second year.
Later Barnes followed the fashionable extradition of southerners up north, moving to Queensland to play for Sherwood.
But his early beginnings, Barnes grew up idolising Longford’s stars of the day.
So desperate to play for the beloved Tigers that he went to all lengths to do so. Kind of.
”This is how bad I was as kid,” Barnes tells.
“We lived in Invermay, but I was an absolute Longford fan.
“Dad wrote Tiger Talk for Longford each week when I played for the Tigers in little league and we won the title in 1969.
“But in 1970, they brought in zoning, and yes, even for little league and I then had to play for North Launceston.
“I made my Dad drive to the Longford game, so I could run out before the seniors, head over to where North were playing to play in little league at half-time and then go back to Longford for the rest of the game.”