Adrian Barich: John Worsfold’s wisdom was lost on me at the time, but I still remember it a decade on

I’m loathe to admit this but I think I’m definitely a deadline-driven person.

If you want me to do something, give me a time frame and an end date and I’m there.

Otherwise, I’m the absolute king of procrastination.

Given a choice between starting a project early and playing with the dog my response will always be: “who’s daddy’s good boy then, who wants to go walkies”.

Maybe that’s why I’m not a multimillionaire. From what I’ve seen the mega-wealthy are willing to sacrifice time to achieve their goals. They are also very organised and into efficient time management.

One of my good friends, who could be counted amongst WA’s richest men, has even adopted a policy of not saying no to any great opportunity that comes his way.

For example, if I was to say, “let’s run the Berlin Marathon next year”, he would be immediately on board and have planned to start training the next day. His personal assistant would have already jumped online to order him a pair of Nike Alphafly 3’s, size 11.

Now as a TV reporter I’m accustomed to working under pressure as the nightly 6pm deadline looms large every single night of the year. So maybe that’s it, when your job involves beating deadlines and being able to produce a story in a short space of time you really don’t need stress in other parts of your life.

Sometimes the sound of deadlines flying by can even be cathartic — almost enjoyable. I didn’t quite meet my deadline for this column, apologies to the editor.

But what I really wanted to write about today was John Worsfold. You may have heard of him. He’s a former Eagles player and coach who is undoubtedly one of the most significant figures in the history of that football club.

Woosha as he’s known (as in Woosh, the sound you hear when he runs past you in a footy match, and you know you just had a close encounter with death) has rejoined the West Coast Eagles as the new Head of Football.

Personally, I think it’s a brilliant appointment and allows me to recount my favourite Woosha story.

It involves a pre-season trip to Lancelin and some stunning wisdom that was imparted to me from Worsfold which I failed to understand until about a decade later (by which time it was all too late to help my AFL career).

We were running together on a very hot January day and suddenly about half an hour out of Lancelin, John started surging UP the hills in the road.

Now I may not be a rocket scientist, but I did know that however far we ran away from Lancelin (in 40 degrees no less) we would have to run back so I was getting deeply concerned for our welfare. So turning to Woosha I said, and I paraphrase and clean up the comment: “what the hell are you doing Woosha!?”

His response. “Barra, the blokes I play this year, they may be running as far, it may even be as hot, but they won’t be f...ing surging up the hills”.

The wisdom of that, as I’ve said already, was lost on me at the time, given I just wanted to survive the run and sadly it wasn’t until about a decade later that I realised what he was talking about.

It was only when an influential businessman took a few of us footballers to Yallingup to check out some property that the wisdom began to make sense. This was in the 80s and I can still remember the fella saying to us, “you guys should all buy some land on this hill (that being Yallingup Hill), it’s gonna be worth it in the future”.

Of course, being young cocky whippersnappers some of us thought that $20,000 was way too much to pay for the land on this sparsely occupied hill and we’ve been regretting it ever since.

John Worsfold’s words of wisdom to me came not long after that. And if I’d understood what he was talking about and done something about it I reckon I could have played 200 games (or at least 100).

When you train you should train as if you are training against an imaginary opponent and seek to get an advantage over them. Do something that they wouldn’t be doing, because when you face them in battle, you would be better prepared than them (or some such wisdom like that).

That’s sporting genius right there and that’s why Woosha played in two premierships and coached another at West Coast, and I’m just recounting the story here for you.