Essendon great James Hird has left the door ajar for a return to senior coaching, going into extensive detail about the mental health battles that almost cost him his life in the wake of the supplements saga.
Hird returned to the AFL coaching ranks this season, helping former teammate Mark McVeigh at Greater Western Sydney and ending a football hiatus of seven years.
Speaking on the podcast The Howie Games, the 49-year-old said his coaching aspirations remained in play, but would have to be thoroughly considered.
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“There’s a lot of elements about it. I was asked by a CEO of a footy club six weeks ago would I like to coach again, not his club but would I like to coach again,” Hird said.
“My honest answer was, there’s some elements about it I really like, I’d have to have some family considerations to do it. I love the fact that you get in deeply and you work with young people to create something really, really special and you create a great team environment.
“But I’ve worked very hard over the last six years to create another sort of business arm.
“I’m 50 – at 40 when it happened I could actually transition and go – at 50 you go down that then that’s almost it. You have to think very carefully about the path that I take and there has to be an opportunity too.”
Hird coached the Bombers between 2011 and 2013 and then returned in 2015 before ultimately parting ways with the club, which was fractured in the wake of the supplements saga.
He admitted he “should have been over more of the detail” and was devastated for those around him who suffered.
“We had two people there who were bad people who, I don’t think they cheated but that’s debatable, I still don’t think players took the wrong thing,” he said.
“But the players were put in a very compromised position, which they shouldn’t have been put in. The thing that is the most upsetting is that there’s 34 players who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong and their families and them have suffered hugely for it and the Essendon supporters.
“These people have been the most loyal supporters of all time, they’ve paid their membership, they’ve gone through ASADA, they’ve gone through COVID and now all you want to do is just get a bit of success and go to the footy and win a few games, because there is no group of supporters who have been through more, or maybe Fitzroy supporters, that’s been through more over the last 15 years.”
Hird suffered significant mental health challenges as a result of the saga.
“It weighed heavily on me because of what happened with players and the support. But ultimately, what weighs most heavily is how your family gets affected, and my family was affected,” he said.
“The kids are super resilient, they’re great kids and Tania is an incredible person, she’s resilient, but it had a huge effect on all of us. It was embarrassment not to the public but it was embarrassment to my family that I was putting them through that. I mean, there was no normality for two years … it just drags on and on.
“I used to have this thing in my head saying ‘What am I doing? What am I doing my family here? What are they going through? What have I done? What have I done to my family?’ That took forever to work through.
“You’re not even dealing with your own your own stuff, it’s sort of the guilt that comes on you because of how you’ve affected players, staff, supporters, but ultimately, your own family was very, very difficult.”
At his lowest point, Hird was admitted to a psychiatric facility in early 2017 after overdosing on sleeping tablets.
“I ended up in a psychiatric ward for five weeks. I overdosed on sleeping tablets, ended up waking up in Cabrini hospital, my wife next to me, you know, what, where am I? You know, this is where you got to go. So it was very, very dire,” he said.
“It was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. But it was a necessary part of the journey in terms of where I am now … I’m not proud of what happened but I am proud of the resilience that I have to actually get to where I am because there’s been a number of points where you can go that way or you can go that way.”
Hird played 253 games for Essendon and was a two-time premiership player and five-time All-Australian, but said his exploits on the football field were far different to those off it.
“The courage on the footy field doesn’t even come close to what the last six, seven years were. Not now, but that really hard time,” he said.
“The courage of Tanya, the courage of my children as well and my Mum and her Mum and family and the courage that they’ve shown as well around me and around everything that’s happened in our family because that just didn’t happen to me, it happened to your extended family as well.
“That’s what I’m most proud of, that resilience and courage to just keep fronting up, because I didn’t front up for a while, I didn’t face life. I didn’t go and say I don’t care who’s in the room I’m just gonna go and front up and if they say stuff they say stuff but I know who I am underneath it all, I know what my values are.”
If you or someone you know needs help, contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or Lifeline on 13 11 14. RUOK? is a suicide prevention charity that aims to start life-changing conversations
