Craig Bellamy is sitting alone in the AAMI Park dressing room an hour or so before the Storm play, having himself a Dennis Denuto moment.
Bellamy doesn’t enjoy game day as it is, the nerves drive him up the wall. On this day, his f–ing pen just won’t f–ing work.
One of the game’s greatest-ever coaches morphs into The Castle’s Denuto, a blue-collar solicitor just trying to fix a f–ing printer, whenever he collides with technology. Even a ballpoint pen.
The 50-odd four-letter f—s that Bellamy lets fly during the 87-minute Revealed: Craig Bellamy – Inside the Storm′ production are, realistically, what will drag most viewers in.
The insight to Bellamy’s spittle-sprayed genius runs far deeper.
Like the final few scenes of a year’s worth of filming by Andre “Doc” Mauger (the filmmaker behind Amazon’s The Test documentary series), when Bellamy makes his way down to ground level after Penrith’s 14-6 grand final triumph last October.
Melbourne Storm coach Craig Bellamy with granddaughter Billie (centre) in 2022.Credit: Getty
He’s met at the entrance to the field by his granddaughter and Storm ballgirl Billie. She’s been ever-present throughout the film, running amok with her younger brother in Bellamy’s office, accidentally breaking things and revelling in being a part of Melbourne’s inner sanctum.
After the 2024 grand final siren, she’s in tears and distraught. And in that moment, she is Bellamy’s overwhelming priority.
“Family comes first, footy comes second, and you work the rest out from there,” Bellamy says.
His son and now-Storm assistant coach Aaron recalls players requesting he bring his kids to the club to take the edge off a scathing post-loss review from their grandfather.
“The tranquillisers, they used to calm him down,” Ryan Hinchcliffe laughs.
The youngest Bellamys steal the show more than once. But grandfather Bellamy is the star and somewhat surprising subject of an all-access production that follows him into his home, car, coach’s box and rise from the country NSW, concreting town of Portland.
Surprising, not least to the man himself.
“I don’t know if I got bad information or whether I misinterpreted it. But I thought the doco was more about the club,” Bellamy tells this masthead.
Inside Craig Bellamy’s coaching box.Credit: Stan
“I thought it was about the Storm and that’s what got me started. There were a couple of times I would’ve liked to have pulled out of it with the cameraman on me the whole time.
“I never would’ve thought I’d have a doco being made about me.”
Between Bellamy’s “swearing to pause, swearing as a joining word, swearing to emphasise a point” (Hinchcliffe again) and doting on his grandkids, Mauger follows the three-time premiership-winner from before the sun comes up to well past sundown, with seemingly no subject off limits.
Bellamy’s players pull pranks on him and marvel at his ability to exist without an email.
Craig Bellamy and Cam Smith after the Melbourne Storm’s premiership in 2012.Credit: Jason South
Melbourne’s infamous pre-season boot camps feature alongside the 66-year-old running himself to a standstill on a treadmill.
He travels home to Portland, vividly recalling his father Norm’s death in a workplace accident when he was 20, playing reserve grade at Canberra and working at Queanbeyan Leagues Club.
“It was tough, without a doubt,” Bellamy says.
“My kids never got to meet [my father] and he was a really special fella. I know how hard it was for Mum, too. Dad used to always say, ‘hard workers get lucky. Sometimes you won’t get lucky as quickly as you’d like. But you keep working hard and you’ll get lucky’. They were really special people, Mum and Dad. I was so lucky to be in that family.”
Craig Bellamy during his playing career with Canberra.Credit: Fairfax Media
From the roll call of rugby league and sporting luminaries to offer their thoughts on Bellamy, Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou hits the mark as well as any.
Postecoglou’s own winding career saw he and Bellamy share AAMI Park headquarters when he preceded his four-year Socceroos tenure with two years in charge of the A-League’s Melbourne Victory.
He marvels at Bellamy’s 577-game tenure at Melbourne ahead of his 23rd season at the one club, noting the “discipline, clarity and energy” needed to regenerate a side like the Storm has done through multiple generations of players.
And then, Postecoglou offers: “As a coach, the job does everything in its power to change you. Whether it’s chasing success or dealing with failure, adulation or criticism. The ones who are the best, are the ones who don’t.”
Bellamy concurs: “I really agree with him.
“At times, if you want to, you can get carried away with yourself. And at times, you can get a bit down on yourself, too.
“I was one of those guys early in my career, I got a bit down on myself at times. I had to learn how to roll with the punches – that it’s not going to be beer and skittles all the time.
“But at the same time, when things aren’t going right, you’ve got to change momentum somehow. It’s a bit of a fine line. The biggest thing for me is if we’re all on the same page at the club, it’ll work out.”
The subject of Bellamy’s role in rugby league’s dark art of wrestling being dragged into the spotlight has the old coach bristling.
As 2005 footage of Cooper Cronk, Cameron Smith and Ryan Hoffman grappling and gripping teammates rolls, Bellamy notes that he first encountered the practice under Tim Sheens as a player in Canberra, and that Brisbane had a wrestling consultant when he was Wayne Bennett’s assistant in the late 1990s.
And when the beer truly flattens, the skittles are up-ended and the well-trodden tale of Melbourne’s 2010 salary cap scandal is revisited, an account as instructive as any emerges.
Craig Bellamy reads a statement in front of Melbourne players in April 2010 after the cap penalties were announced.Credit: Paul Rovere
“After about a month, Craig said, ‘I can’t continue this any more’,” long-time Storm manager Frank Ponissi recalled of the meaningless end to that season, when Melbourne had been stripped of two premierships, three minor premierships and were playing games for no competition points.
They had understandably throttled back on training sessions, reviews and general day-to-day NRL life as a result.
“‘What do you mean?’,” Ponissi asked.
“‘I can’t coach like this. This has got to stop. We’ve got to go back to training like a Melbourne Storm team does’.”
Bellamy takes up the story in the Storm dressing room when he put it back on his players.
“I remember thinking; ‘This is not me, what I’m about’. Whatever I do I want to try and do the best I can. This ain’t helping us be the best we can be. If you guys don’t want to do that, then I think it’s time for me to go.
“I gave them about 10 or 15 minutes, then Billy Slater came out. And Billy said, ‘I think it’s time for you to go, mate’. And then Cameron Smith started laughing, and the other blokes started laughing, so I knew they were joking. But my guts hit the ground when they first said it.”
Right here, throughout the entire production and Bellamy’s enduring career, emerges his ability to coach and connect with players now usually 40 years younger than him.
An ability to have the piss taken out of him. Care. And above all, work.
“Sometimes, you don’t get as lucky as you’d like,” Bellamy says. “But you keep working hard, and you’ll get lucky.”
The Stan original documentary Revealed: Craig Bellamy – Inside the Storm premieres Sunday, March 9, only on Stan.
