Former AFL coach Michael Voss now has time to watch his son Casey, 13, play football. Picture: Adam Head Source: Adam Head / News Corp Australia
MICHAEL Voss lost his dream job as coach of the Brisbane Lions, but his kids gained a basketball court.
Ten-year-old Gemma Voss recently beamed when her dad told her he would be able to watch her play a tennis match when she had been expecting him to say he could not manage it.
It's amazing what a man can do with a little time on his hands.
And Voss has made lemonade from the sour lemons of his dismissal last August by the Australian Football club for which he played for 15 years and coached for five draining, challenging more years.
Voss, the triple premiership captain of the Lions, has now finished a summer without playing or coaching football.
"I liked the summer off so much, I want to have another one next summer,'' he says.
That was how Voss, 38, decided he will not chase a job in the AFL industry next year.
"We'd probably go on an extensive holiday if that happens,'' Voss says, four days after Brisbane played, and lost, their first match of the season under the coaching of his former clubmate Justin Leppitsch.
"I've really cherished the last four or five months. We had a summer where we went on day trips to the beach and did things I hadn't done with them so much.
Michael Voss with his children at the beach. Picture: News Corp Source: Supplied
"The job just sucks you in. There's no other way to describe it.''
Voss is aiming to keep his AFL knowledge current this year with media commentary for Foxtel and a Melbourne radio station, plus a three-month role in a television reality program shot in Melbourne. He will be the coach of 12 would-be AFL players in a "Big Brother'' house environment for Foxtel, "The Recruit'', with the last man standing to be given an AFL club contract.
"Being able to have some flexibility in your life is pretty bloody important,'' he says.
"We went away for 10 days and I said to my wife, `I just want to enjoy being home'. So I needed mini projects.''
Voss is the sort of home handyman with a track record of gung-ho misadventure, having once sliced his calf badly and also cut his finger to the bone when hitching a trailer to a car.
But he flattened out a grassed area in his backyard and had it concreted so 13-year-old twins Casey and Kayla and his youngest, Gemma, could play backyard basketball a little easier.
"It took him a good three weeks but he really enjoyed it,'' says Voss's wife Donna.
"For the kids to have six weeks off with their dad was great. He was there all day every day … he was never home that long, ever. It's been good for him and good for the kids.''
Michael Voss in the garden. Picture: News Corp Source: Supplied
Voss's eyes appear a little more crinkled around the edges than when he was named the youngest coach in the AFL, at 33, in late 2008.
But as the conversation goes on, it's apparent that is due mostly to the stress of a punishing get-fit session at a gym, another of the holiday projects Voss has attacked with relish.
Michael Voss is one man who has managed to avoid being totally annihilated by the demands of being an AFL head coach, a profession which allows in only 16 per year and can turn self-assured men into quivering wrecks.
Asked if he found he was not defined by his job when he lost it, Voss said: "I'd like to think not. You are pouring so much effort of your own into it it's hard not to. But you can't have that.''
As a player skilful and brave enough to become a Brownlow Medallist and a member of the AFL Hall of Fame, Voss was one of those rare breed of athletes able to bend matches to his will.
For instance, his back-pedalling, muscle-on-bone mark late in Brisbane's second grand final win, against Collingwood in 2002, remains a hackles-raising memory for Lions fans among their recollections of a now distant, golden era.
When he finally retired as a player in 2006, he devoted two years to the television industry before, after knocking back the chance to be head coach of two clubs, agreed to an assistant coach role with the West Coast.
Former Lions coach Michael Voss at boxing training at Coorparoo Boxing Gym. Picture: Adam Head Source: News Corp Australia
But he handed the Perth job back swiftly when his Lions premiership coach Leigh Matthews retired a few days after Brisbane's elimination in 2008.
It was nothing less than a sporting coronation and he took the Lions to the finals for the first time since 2004 in his first year in charge.
Voss effectively bet the farm by recruiting the mischief-prone but gifted Brendan Fevola to the Lions for 2010, necessitating a raft of player movements which annoyed many hardened Brisbane followers.
Fevola's Brisbane misadventures ended in rehab at a New Farm clinic.
He built gambling debts and a list of misdemeanours, including a visit to the police watch-house while the Brisbane media waited outside.
On his way back to Victoria, Fevola was paid out for the rest of his contract, impacting on the club's ability to pay players in the following year. He has not played for an AFL club since.
Voss, the coach, was unable to fight his way back from the consequences of his 2009 decisions, losing a rearguard action over his remaining three seasons, in which the Lions failed to make the finals.
"The first year, the work never stopped, because I'd bounce in — I was loving it — and clocked off late at night, working at the office at home,'' he recalls wistfully.
"When you are trying to improve 48 players and keep a culture sound, it's a big machine which has to operate and there's only so much you can get done.''
In the first two years of his coaching reign, the Voss family came to negotiate a "phone down'' policy on Michael.
Voss takes time out before fronting the media. Picture: Darren England Source: News Limited
"He was coming home and spending his first two hours on the phone,'' Donna says.
So a penalty jar was brought into play. Every time dad-the-coach took a work call at home, he had to put a $5 note in the jar.
"A fair bit was put in there. If it had been $2, it would have been, `throw the coin in and take the phone call','' Voss says, laughing.
"After the first year, it was about finding some way to discipline myself and I needed my kids to keep me accountable. They loved it.''
The first five months of the 2013 season, his fifth as coach, was played against a background of speculation over whether Voss would be offered another contract by a board harassed by a deteriorating financial position due to a levelling off of ticket sales and corporate support.
Lions players, or at least managers of Lions players, made it known outside the club that they were unsure about signing a new contract with Brisbane if Voss remained in charge.
The existing Lions board was, at around the same time, drawn into a dispute with a rival ticket, which resulted at the end of the season in chairman Angus Johnson's departure.
Asked if he was convinced he had kept the loyalty of all in the coaching staff, the football department (correct) and the players during this period, Voss says: "I don't know. The overwhelming feeling I had … was, 'who do I trust?'.
"I'm sitting here (without the Lions job) for a reason. I can't answer the question whether I had the coaches. I can't answer the question, did I have the players. I felt I had the players, but how do you know? I probably never will be able to tell you what scale (of support) it was.
"Clearly I didn't have the board. The board bought into a different idea.''
Voss in action as Brisbane coach. Picture: Getty Source: Getty Images
Donna Voss says she did not see 2013 as her husband's hardest year in the job, probably because he had decided that all he could do was concentrate on what he could control.
"It didn't end well, but 2011 was the most challenging year because they won four games,'' she says.
A victory over competition heavyweights Essendon in May and a miraculous win from a 51-point deficit over Geelong in June gave heft to Voss's contention that his mostly young team was making distinct progress.
It was widely reported a new contract would come his way in the days before a phone call came from then Lions chairman Johnson on August 13.
It was time to clean out his desk. The Lion king had lost his throne.
What was striking, and rare among the ranks of sacked football coaches, was that Voss sat at the press conference to announce his professional termination, alongside Johnson, the man who fired the metaphorical bullet.
"He handled it with a lot of class,'' Donna Voss remembers.
Voss explains: "I just thought it was important the members, who had followed me since I was 16 years of age, knew I loved my club and despite the fact it finished really badly, I love it and I always will.
"It's an integral part of me and that overrode really everything else.
"I wasn't too sure what had happened. I had an idea, but there wasn't a lot I could do. I didn't want to throw bombs.
"So I was saying to the club and the supporters, `I'm OK … I will push on and the end won't define me'. That's what I wanted to communicate.''
Former Lions AFL coach Michael Voss at boxing training for fitness at Coorparoo Boxing Gym. Pics Adam Head Source: News Corp Australia
In the months since, Voss has been asked many times how much he was hurting. He was not the first AFL coach to be left in the dark by a dissatisfied board of directors, but he was the first triple premiership coach to be cut adrift in such a fashion.
"The only thing I would have liked was a chat that they were thinking of something else,'' he says.
"Looking back, that's, it's my only disappointment, I guess, that I couldn't get a courtesy chat, that my own club couldn't have (it) with me. There might be a couple of individuals I was disappointed didn't do that.
"Eventually, for me it gets you back to, `Why sit there and wonder who it is and why did it happen? Why would you let something external drive what you feel and think during a day?' I don't let it affect me.''
One immediate way Voss renewed his association with the Lions was to share some thoughts on the club in a phone call with his triple premiership teammate and former assistant coach Leppitsch prior to Leppitsch's interview for the Brisbane head coach job.
A few weeks later, Voss and another ex-Lions teammate Craig McRae were at Leppitsch's house, outside Melbourne, when he fielded a call, letting him he would be the new coach.
Leppitsch and his wife Christie also caught up with Michael and Donna Voss soon after their arrival in Brisbane.
"He rang for a chat. I communicated where I thought the club was at and answered some of his questions,'' Voss says.
"He's the one who had to walk in and get the job and he's developed a strong skill set in his seven years as an assistant coach. I'm proud of him that he rose to the top and got the job.
"Justin is the beneficiary of my demise and that's sport, and he and Christie have been very good friends of mine for a long time. I hope he does a great job."
Towards the end of the conversation, I wanted to ask Voss when he had last spoken to Fevola, who turned out last year as a gun for hire for Victorian country clubs.
Did he try to keep in touch with you, I asked?
"No, not really. I haven't spoken to Fev for quite a while,'' Voss says.
How did he view Fevola's life since?
"I wouldn't know.''
It was the only time during the one-hour interview when I received an insight on what it might have been like to have stood between Michael Voss, the braveheart player, and his game's red football.
Voss might have to decide late this year if he wants to try to build his career back up again as a coaching prospect at a club other than Brisbane, first, probably, as an assistant coach.
"Three years, you probably have to make a decision if you want to get involved again,'' he says.
"I really don't know. It is hard for me to talk about clubland now. I don't see myself there.
"Our eldest are 13 so there is their schooling to consider.''
Michael and Donna Voss say that is a conversation they are yet to have.
"I've been able to put the head on the pillow and not worry about tomorrow. I've loved that,'' he says.
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