A 250-game Collingwood premiership captain and, later, a football media giant for more than 50 years, Richards received his award at the Westpac Centre this morning from the man in whose honour it has been struck, John Kennedy Senior, and AFL commission chairman, Mike Fitzpatrick.
Flanked by family, former team-mates and media colleagues, among others, the 91 year-old Richards heard Fitzpatrick speak of him as one of the most important and unique figures the game has known.
“Lou Richards has had a profound and enduring influence on our code, both with a football in his hands and also, at the end of his playing career, with a microphone and a pen,” Fitzpatrick said.
Collingwood President, Eddie McGuire, having earlier unveiled a bronze statue of Richards on the grounds of the club’s Olympic Park training base, asked: “Has any man in football history done more for the game?
“A champion on the field, Lou Richards became a superstar off it. He helped make football one of the most popular and successful forms of entertainment. His unprecedented career in the football media as a commentator, entertainer and journalist has had a remarkable impact on the growth and success of the game in this country.
“No one person can claim to have done more for the game, or for Collingwood, than Lou Richards.”
The John Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award has been struck to recognise individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the game across multiple fields, as Kennedy did as a Hawthorn player, premiership coach and AFL commission chairman.
The award criteria reads: “The John Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented periodically to an individual who has made an extraordinary and positive contribution to the AFL competition and/or the game of Australian Football as an administrator, media representative, player, coach or field umpire, or any combination thereof.”
Richards was Collingwood royalty by the time he retired as a player in 1955. He was the local boy who lived the dream thousands of others in the tough working class suburb dreamt, the grandson of Charlie Pannam who grew up behind the Collingwood Town Hall, attended Collingwood Tech and, ultimately, led the Magpies to a premiership in 1953.
This was a triumph shared with his brother, Ron, who starred against Geelong in the grand final. Across the decades, six members of the Richards/Pannam clan played 930 matches in Collingwood black and white. Better, they shared in eight premierships.
The regard and affection for Richards the footballer quickly spread beyond the streets of Melbourne’s inner-north, though, once his humour and passion for football found expression in print, radio and the then fledgling television industry.
As a media performer he was quick-witted, irreverent and full of lip – some would say much like he was as a player - hence the moniker ‘Louie the Lip’ he carried down the years.
He was playfully mischievous and a wonderful comic who worked brilliantly across a range of shows and mediums but never better than when he was in the company of his ‘League Teams’ and ‘World of Sport’ sidekicks ‘Captain Blood’ Jack Dyer and Bob ‘Woofa’ Davis.
As McGuire has often noted, every person making a living out of the football media today owes a debt to Richards for his trailblazing work as a pundit, columnist, spruiker, entertainer and terrible ‘Kiss of Death’ tipping.
“He invented football as entertainment,” McGuire said.
“Millions of fans, for more than 50 years, loved and laughed about their football because of him.”
Richards was inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame in 1996 and the Collingwood Hall of Fame in 2004.
The statue of Richards was created by Louis Laumen, one of Australia’s most respected sculptors, and underwritten by passionate Collingwood fans Tony Sells and Damian Lister, whose company getwinesdirect.com has also produced a commemorative Shiraz and Sauvignon Blanc, selling by the name of ‘Louie the Lip’.
Laumen has sculpted a number of the statues that grace the MCG including those of Leigh Matthews, Shane Warne, Dennis Lillee, Bill Ponsford, Hayden Bunton and Keith Miller.
