Burn Notice, Season 1, Episode 5

In some ways this one wrong footed me at the start.

Michael in his apartment studying his burn notice isn't surprising, that he gets a call from Nate, asking him to help is.

I hadn't expected them to go back to the character of Nate quite so soon. I knew he'd pop in and out, but at this stage they had me wondering if they were trying to add him as a sidekick.

He had once again represented himself as something he wasn't and when things get nasty calls on his big brother for help.

This time he'd offered to help someone working as the security manager at a private airport being used by a family of Israeli gun runners. Before even seeing them Michael knows from the description of the patriarch that he's ex Mossad, not because he's encountered him before, but just from the gun he favours and the manner in which he acts.

This was the first time I remember seeing Fiona slip into her vacuous lady of means persona and taking a tour out to the airport and using her looks and the character she's playing to get a good look around, trying to work out what's going on. A quick look is all she needs to determine that the family are running guns and that the youngest son is the weak link.

He's the one Michael goes to work on and this time they don't even need to get all that rough before they have the family running scared and getting out of Miami. There was a nice C4 explosion, though.

A sort of secondary story centred around the car that Michael's father supposedly left him. Nate contends that as he had to put u with 'years of Dad's crap' after Michael left then the car should be his. Michael tells Nate that his father left it to him and there had to be a reason for that. Personally I think he's overthinking that. Maddie TOLD him that his father wanted him to have it, there's nothing in writing, it's just the sort of thing she'd do to try and force Michael to acknowledge that he has more than unhidden contempt for his father.

While working on the car Fiona and Michael do find a bug Sam put there. Fiona makes a very catty comment about bugging the young gun runner's car to Sam. It puts Sam's character and how serious he is about his FBI contacts and giving them information on Michael into question. Sam explains that he is under heavy heat and he was obvious about the bug because he knew Michael would find it. Michael then arranges for Sam to find the copy of his burn notice which he passes onto the feds, with Michael's knowledge and blessing. It gets kicked upstairs and gets those agents off the case, which means out of Sam and Michael's hair, but what if they get replaced by something worse?

Oh yes, Audrey Landers appeared briefly at the end of the episode as Sam's potential new 'lady'. I remembered Audrey Landers from the late 70's and early 80's when she was on a lot of shows as a 'pretty blonde'. Given that the first season of Burn Notice was made in 2007 she's held her looks well and definitely fits what Sam is looking for when he identifies a 'target;.

Almost a holding pattern of an episode in a way. They're definitely cycling through the threats in Miami; drugs, illegal prostitution, gun running.

Burn Notice, Season 1, Episode 4

There's really about 3 stories going on in this episode.

Just after having a run in with a Czech assassin (story 1) Michael receives a call from his mother for assistance with her garbage disposal, at her house he meets up with his younger brother Nate (story 2). Nate has a job lined up for him, trying to track down the teenage daughter of an old high school classmate of Michael's (story 3).

The Czech assassin storyline tied into Michael's burning and he does get some information that he pissed off some very bad people, that's why he was burned and why an internationally renowned assassin is now trying to kill him. Having got what he wanted he delivers the assassin to his FBI tail via Sam.

Viewers had heard about Nate and they knew that Michael didn't have a lot of regard for him, but not exactly why. Nate's more like his father than Michael is. He doesn't seem to have uncontrollable temper or the alcoholic tendencies, but he is unreliable, he does let down those who trust and love him and he's a compulsive gambler. He basically sets a job up for Michael, and takes money for it without consulting his brother and he does it to try and pay off some people he owes money. At the urging of his mother Michael agrees to take the job and help his brother out, but he's clearly not happy about it. I had the feeling this was not the last we'd see of Nate and I was right.

The actual motw was what happened to the daughter of Michael's former school friend, although Michael asserts that he wasn't actually a friend. Michael worked for his father. It also transpires that Michael left Miami even before graduation and joined the army. Shades of John Cusack's assassin Martin Blank in Grosse Pointe Blank there.

The daughter has been 'procured' by brothers, who publicly are names in the fashion industry, but make most of their money by acting as pimps, and have a sideline in transporting innocent girls to Dubai and auctioning them off to the highest bidder. I was reminded of Taken, although the brothers were smarter and the girl's father wasn't Liam Neeson.

Using his resources and Nate, Michael gets the girl back by kidnapping one of the brothers and doing an exchange. I wondered if the brothers were going to cause a problem later on or whether they'd learned not to tangle with Michael Westen.

The first 3 episodes dealt largely in the seamier side of Miami, this one concentrating on the fashion industry was all South Beach hotels and resorts. It was quite bright and easy on the eye.

Mostly it existed to introduce Nate and show us Michael's relationship with him and further establish how much his family really does mean to him and what he'll do when they're threatened.

Burn Notice, Season 1, Episode 3

Like the second episode this one too is largely an motw episode, although it does significantly advance Michael's efforts to find out who burned him. As with episode 2, episode 3 also attempts to highlight what a nice guy Michael can be, despite his past.

That was one thing that always struck me as a slightly weak point in the show. To pull off the moves he does in an effort to bring con artists and thugs and the like to justice, Michael and his team, have to outlay a significant amount of money with very little chance of return. Apparently Fiona does jobs on the side, but I don't think she spends her money on Michael's white knight for hire efforts. In episode 2 he took $300 for his efforts, he would have spent two to three times that amount. Initially he did ask for $500, but a filthy look from his mother bargained him down to $300. I assume Oleg (his landlord), who hires him in episode 3, pays him better, but it isn't covered.

Oleg has an employee; Carol, who is scared and being heavier by a local drug lord who she saw up to no good and is planning to testify. So, although it's not totally explained I think Oleg foots the bill. Michael does mutter to Carol at one stage words to that effect.

The meeting with the drug lord highlights something about Michael. He can look very menacing when he wants to, but he generally doesn't. He can however fight and some of the drug lord's underlings find this out to their regret.

We get to see Fiona improvising with Molotov cocktails and Michael turns his mother's garage into a safe house for Carol and her teenage daughter.

It's interaction with said daughter when she runs off to attend a dance at school with a boy she likes who prompts Michael to open up about how he had to leave Fiona in Dublin and never find out what might have been.

In fact the relationship between Michael and Fiona is a secondary theme in this episode. Fiona is officially Michael's ex-girlfriend and business associate as far as he is concerned, but as far as the lady herself is concerned, she wants to be back in a relationship, she even openly wonders if she should help him with his burn notice, because if he can crack that he'll be out of Miami and they'll be off again.

Another theme is Michael's abusive past with his father. Jeffrey Donovan has a small scar beneath one eye. Michael claims his father gave it to him. His father also used to force him to do things like fake seizures in public so he could steal things, it all gave Michael a strong sense of independence and made him a survivor. Where his father is concerned Maddie certainly seems to wear rose coloured glasses, or maybe she just needs to deny the truth to herself. Michael does wind up getting a pretty distinctive and high powered Charger out of it, though. He did need a vehicle, because stealing one all the time was going to become tedious.

There's something this show does that I find quite clever. It has a fairly large cast of characters every episode and, aside from the principals and recurring characters like Oleg and Barry the money launderer, they only appear once and are gone, but we the viewers still need to know who they are. So when they first enter the story a name flashes up on the screen, most of them say something like: Carol, the client or Oleg, the landlord, but occasionally get h a funny one along the lines of: Boris, wannabe Russian warlord, Quentin, small time con artist or Hector, local drug lord.

I believe this episode also marked the first appearance of blueberry yoghurt, which is a staple of Michael and Fiona's diet, although in this it's first appearance Sam is eating it, it's about the only time he ever did. It's also the first time we see Sam use the alias of Charles/Chuck Finley. It was pretty much his go to name. It was just the way he spoke and dressed when using it that changed.

The episode ends with Michael, having blackmailed an Egyptian diplomat/spy, receiving a copy of his notice and coming one step closer to finding out who issued it and why.

Burn Notice, Season 1, Episode 2

After having who Michael Westen was and why he came to be where he currently is in the pilot episode, this one opens with a voice over briefly covering that. This would be the start of the show over the next 7 seasons. They only changed it after season 4 when a new character became a regular, and even then the little out cuts introducing Fiona, Sam and Maddie remained the same, so we got some of Fiona's Irish accent right throughout.

There was a little bit about the season long arc of Michael trying to find out who burned him, but this was largely a mystery of the week (motw) show.

Michael wanted information from his mother about the guys who had questioned her as to his whereabouts and bugged her house, she refused to give it to him until he agreed to help a neighbour of hers who had been ripped off.

I knew from the opening credits that Mark Pellegrino was going to be the bad guy. Honestly, has he ever played a good guy? The basic scheme that he (he played a con artist called Quentin) and his two cohorts ran was to get little old ladies like Madeline's neighbour to hand over their bank details and then steal from them. That he found it necessary to rough up this lady ensured that Fiona was going to be on board if he required back up.

Sam moved in briefly with Michael as he seemed to be between 'sugar Mommies' and this was when Fiona and Sam renewed acquaintances. Despite keeping up the fiction that they actually disliked each other intensely for some time, they got along fine and worked well together. A personal highlight was when they posed as Detective Cagney and Detective Lacey to heavy Quentin's young accomplices. The in joke with the names was that Sharon Gless (Madeline Westen) played Christine Cagney (her accomplice Mary Beth Lacey was played by Tyne Daly) in the TV cop drama Cagney & Lacey.

Gabrielle Anwar also showed some nice comic timing when she played Michael's doting girlfriend the first time she met Maddie face to face. I did enjoy her clearing the table as Michael's still desperately grabbing food from his plate.

One thing I did notice that differed from later episodes in this one was that as a group they were nowhere near as slick and well practised as they later became. They made more than a few mistakes here and that was to take down someone who was strictly small time.

Another thing that altered was Fiona's accent. She had dropped the Irish accent, they explained it away as her actual accent would make her stick out too much in Miami, so at least they did acknowledge it and that they probably made a bit of a mistake in the pilot.

This may crop up again later (I can't remember), but in the pilot they highlighted some downsides to where Michael chooses to live. He regularly has to make his way through crowds of nightclubbers when trying to get to the gate in the fence that leads to his warehouse and he also gets the lights, music and noise filtering through to late into the night. That wasn't present this time, although I am sure it will crop up later as the show were relatively good about most continuity things.

Despite them taking on various aliases they rarely use elaborate disguises. Mostly it's done through clothes, glasses, maybe a little facial hair or hairstyle. Jeffrey Donovan does a few voices that he cycles through depending on what persona he wants to project.

This one ended up almost HEA. Quentin went to jail, his young accomplices escaped on his boat, Maddie's neighbour got her life savings back and Michael got the information he wanted. I found the pilot stronger, but this was solid and a good example of what to expect, it kept me watching.

Burn Notice Season 1, Episode 1

I first started rewatching TV series that I enjoyed first time around early this year with Veronica Mars. I chose that show for a few reasons.

1) I really enjoyed it and always wanted to rewatch it.
2) I wanted to do a complete rewatch it before the film came out.
3) I like following Mark Oshiro's Mark Watches site and he did Veronica Mars so I wanted to go along with him on that.

After I finished Veronica Mars I did all 5 seasons of Eureka. I still wanted to keep doing it, and Burn Notice recently aired it's final episode (yeah, we're a bit behind down here), so I picked it.

Unlike Veronica Mars, which I began watching when it first screened here, and Eureka the first season of which I actually saw on DVD from an import copy a friend had before it was shown down here, I was not an early adopter with Burn Notice.

There was something about the way it was advertised that just didn't appeal to me, it more than likely also clashed with something else I was watching. It wasn't until it started being shown from the beginning on one of the cable networks that I tuned in to it.

Once I started watching, I kicked myself for not picking it up earlier.

The premise is simple, but effective and I can't remember having seen it done quite this way before.
The title of the show refers to the practice in the espionage industry of black listing or 'burning' personnel. This is generally done when someone has crossed a line or considered to have become unreliable. It leaves the 'burned' operative with no cash or influence, according to the show's voice over they have no work history, no money, no support network, they are in essence a 'non person'. That this happens to the show's main character Michael Westen, when he's about to offer a Nigerian based Russian warlord/terrorist $750,000 to stop blowing up American oil refineries in the region makes things rather difficult for him.

The opening of the show is in Southern Nigeria and it's rather reminiscent of the pre credit sequence in Casino Royale. Given that the film came out in 2006 and the show in 2007, it's possible that this was borrowed to an extent.

Once he's been burned Michael finds himself back at his town of origin, Miami, and his only friend is his ex girlfriend Fiona Glenanne. Both her accent and name indicate that she's Irish, although she and Michael were once a couple they aren't anymore, although he had her listed as his emergency contact and she's still willing to run point for him to allow him to slip his FBI tail.

While Michael has lost his job and his back up he does still have a very specific skill set and is not without allies in Miami, they consist of ex spy Lucy, who I don't think we ever saw after the first episode and former Navy SEAL Sam Axe, who is sponging off any 'sugar Mommy' he can find and drinking heavily, while informing on Michael to the FBI in order to keep his Navy pension

There is also his mother; Madeline, but at this stage of the series she's more of a hindrance than a help and does provide some comedy relief as well as some background for Michael about an abusive childhood at the hands of his now deceased father and a deadbeat younger brother.

Looking at the show seven seasons later you can see changes, not just physical, within the cast. Michael doesn't change a lot, although he was sleazier at the start and became more comfortable with the role as he continued in it. Fiona lost her accent after the first episode, although Gabrielle Anwar does a passable Irish accent, it did kind of grate on me, and possibly the people behind the show thought so too, she also developed a somewhat maternal instinct. If you want Fiona to go after someone then just hint that they are either wife beaters or child abusers. It wasn't mentioned that Fiona was an ex IRA operative, but her familiarity with explosives and guns coupled with her background and the accent kind of hinted at that anyway without spelling it out. Sam was far more bitter and on the very edge of alcoholism. Maddie herself was less sympathetic than she later became and far less savvy.

In the show's first episode Michael's various allies didn't interact much and were barely aware of each other. The original meeting between Sam and Fiona was quite amusing as they struck sparks off each other and snarked all the time. Fiona and Sam did actually know each other before, but that wasn't made clear in the opening episode. Fiona and Maddie know about each other as they have spoken on the phone, but they had never met in person.

A lot of the show is narrated by Michael as he explains the ins and outs of the spy business, talks about some old cases and things like how you can rig explosive devices from cheap and easily obtainable objects.

Michael's motivation is finding out who burned him so he can get out of Miami and back in the saddle. While I was watching it I became aware of a couple of things. He hates Miami, he doesn't even like the region, that's why he preferred working in places like Eastern Europe. It's probably got a lot to do with despite being intelligent enough to master a number of languages and living in a community that have Spanish as a second language, he never learned it.

In the meantime he has to make ends meet so he rents a warehouse apartment next to a nightclub owned by a former Georgian politician and has a drug dealer as his downstairs neighbour. It's cheap and the Georgian is well aware of Michael's reputation amongst the intelligence communities of Eastern Europe, he is a dangerous man. He also takes on PI jobs, things that other people won't do. n doing this he and his team become white knights of a sort, it's rather reminiscent of Angel Investigations in the Joss Whedon Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin off Angel.

I wondered why I liked Burn Notice as much as I did and it hit me part way through watching the opening episode. It's largely about capers, heists and cons and I love that sort of stuff. There are definite similarities in many ways between Michael and his team and what they do to one of my all time favourite books, Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora.

Things change

I read a lot, at any one time I'm generally reading multiple books. Usually it's two. I have one for general reading and one that sits on the bedside table and I read a chapter or two of it at night just before turning the light out.

At present it's four. They are, in no particular order:

Sworn in Steel by Douglas Hulick. This is the sequel to Hulick's debut Among Thieves. It follows the fortunes of Drothe, a member of Ildrecca's criminal underclass. It's similar in tone and theme to Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards series which is largely about a different thief in a different setting, but has stylistic and thematic similarities. I was a huge fan of Lynch's Locke Lamora, which is why I picked up Among Thieves and I liked it enough to try the sequel, more on that later.

Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire. This is kind of a reread for me. Rose Marshall is a pretty little dead girl who died in 1953 while on the way to her prom. She became a ghost and seems destined to wander the highways and byways of the continental United States both in this world and the afterlife. Rose saves who she can and guides who she can't through to another world. Twelve of the stories in Sparrow Hill Road were initially published online on the site Edge of Propinquity. That was where I first read them, but always thought they'd make a great collection all put together. Clearly I wasn't alone there. Seanan edited them, prettied them up and strung them together with a narrative, she also added a brand new story to make it a baker's dozen. I'm enjoying the renewal of my friendship with Rose.

I've got Gaie Sebold's Shanghai Sparrow because I really liked her Babylon Steel duology. I haven't read that far into Shanghai Sparrow, but it seems to have more in common with Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist than it does with Babylon Steel. I did kind of know that going in, so I don't mind and I do like exploring this new steampunk Victorian world that she's created for her light fingered protagonist to play in.

What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton isn't a book as such, it's a collection of blog posts that the author wrote for website Tor.com between July 2008 and February 2011. They're reviews of a sort, but unlike most reviews that you find about the interwebz and on blogs they're not about the newest shiniest release or the newest shiniest thing that the blog owner has just discovered, they're about classics mostly, sometimes quite obscure books as well and as Jo Walton is a committed rereader she's often read the books multiple times. I actually kind of like her take as a reader and rereader on the books and she approaches them from the point of view as a reader, not a reviewer or critic. It is a skill I wish I had.

It's Jo Walton's collection of posts and my feelings about the first book on the list that occasioned this post.

You may have noticed that the four books are all quite different. Sworn in Steel is a very typical example of what used to be called high or epic fantasy, and seems to have morphed into something many people now refer to as grim dark.

Sparrow Hill Road is an urban fantasy about an urban legend written in the style of Raymond Chandler by way of Joss Whedon. In fact Rose's narration often puts me in mind of Chuck Wendig's Miriam Black from that series, although Rose's mouth is far cleaner than Miriam's.

Shanghai Sparrow is one of the new breed of steam punk, and although I don't think it's been marketed this way, it has a curious YA feel to it.

What Makes This Book So Great is a non fiction series of essays musing on the genre, and focussing mostly on science fiction.

Before going into What Makes This Book So Great I knew it would be mostly about science fiction. One, my wife had read it and told me so, and two, Jo Walton wrote the highly acclaimed and multi award winning Among Others, which is largely about one person's love affair with classic science fiction. In fact I do wonder if some of Among Others was inspired by the author writing the posts for Tor.com.

I probably haven't mentioned it here, in fact I'm sure I haven't, but science fiction and I don't play well together. It just doesn't connect with me a lot of the time. I do have science fiction books that I have read and loved, but given the choice between a sci-fi and BFF (Big Fat Fantasy, not best friends forever), I'll go the BFF every time.

At least I used to. Now I'd probably look for an urban fantasy or something that is a bit different, maybe one of those things that agents, publishers and book sellers hate, because they can't fit into a nice neat label and aren't sure how to sell it or where to display it.

I used to run another blog (http://travelethroughiest.blogspot.com) that started as a reread of Dave Sim's ground breaking independent graphic novel Cerebus and morphed into a review blog. I wound it up about 18 months ago, because I felt I was talking to crickets (I got very little traffic. Kind of like this place really, but I shall not complain) and I felt under pressure every time I read something and put it up on the site to say things about it.

However I found that when I started reviewing books, even if most of my reviews weren't read by anyone other than me, that I started to think and assess what I was reading more carefully and work out what was good or bad about the books and why I liked or didn't like them.

I thought the changing of my tastes was a new thing, but to be honest I don't think it is. I used to read a lot of high fantasy. I went from Tolkien to Brooks to Eddings to Feist to Jordan to Martin to Abercrombie to Lynch. Note: I didn't mention either Donaldson or Goodkind because for some reason I just couldn't get into either writer. I've read Lord Foul's Bane three times and I've never liked it or been able to see in it what others could. Wizard's First Rule was so badly written that I never made it past the first half of it before it turned into a wall banger (that's a book that you dislike so much you hurl it across the room, where it hits the wall and falls to the floor, hopefully to rot). I must confess that the TV show based on Goodkind's work was a guilty pleasure. Don't get me wrong, it was truly awful, but it was so bad that it was fun to watch. Of the cast only Bruce Spence ever seemed to really get the joke and played his role with his tongue jammed firmly in his cheek. I probably should also throw Steven Erikson in there, too. I tried to read Malazan, but got halfway through Memories of Ice (the 3rd book), before I said to myself 'I really don't care about any of these people or what happens to them.' so gave up on the series.

Sometime in 2010 I started to venture out of the high fantasy sub genre and look at other things. Things that were different or stretched the boundaries or were hard to classify. Some of this was due to disenchantment with the prevalence of grim dark, which unless it was superlative (Abercrombie and Lynch) began to bore me. There's only so many morally ambiguous, or completely bankrupt, anti heroes that one can take before they all begin to blur into each other. It was almost like the authors made this pact with each other to try and one up one another on that front. My BMF is worse than your BMF.

I don't read much of what classifies as grim dark now. I still read new work by Abercrombie and Lynch and Martin, on the rare occasions when he actually finishes a book, and I don't think I could ever fall out of love with Locke Lamora, and Joe Abercrombie does what he can to push the boundaries of what we regard as the new sub genre.

I guess this brings me to a question which some people may ask. How do you read 4 things, all different, at once? Well, as I said earlier one of them is the bedside book (at present that's What Makes This Book So Great) and I alternate between the others during the day when I read.

It's generally only 3 books, but I couldn't not read Sparrow Hill Road, however to do that I had to put one aside, and this time it was Sworn in Steel, now while I'm about 200 pages into a 500 page book there, and I waited for nearly 3 years to read it, it isn't really grabbing me that much that I can't put it aside. It's one of these grim dark things and while I find it better than most my tastes seems to have moved on from those now.

What I wrote went much the same way. I spent years writing a big epic fantasy and then when that just wasn't working I tried to morph it into a grim dark. That didn't work either. I found my niche with Realmspace, apparently portal fantasy is anathema to the world outside, so I may have wasted my time writing it, but I did enjoy myself and whole lot more than I was when I was working fruitlessly on the others. I've also recently written the first book of what I hope to make into an urban fantasy series and that's called The Foxwood Chronicles. So, yes things do change, with writers and readers.

Vale Tommy Hafey

Yesterday at the age of 82, Tommy Hafey passed away after a short battle with cancer.

I never met Tommy Hafey, but he had a profound effect on my life. As I've explained elsewhere I was born into a family that passionately supported the Richmond Tigers Australian Rules football club. Tommy's first year as coach of Richmond was the year I was born. Tommy led the team to a Premiership the year after. While Richmond had been coming for a couple of years before that flag, but for a lot of the previous decade they were cellar dwellers and not considered much good.

I have a lot of memories of Tommy as coach. He was about the same age as my parents. He left the club at the end of the 1976 season and went on to coach first Collingwood, he took them from the bottom of the ladder the year before to within a whisker of winning the Grand Final. They drew the first one against North Melbourne and lost the replay a week later.

After Collingwood he coached Geelong and Sydney. He didn't enjoy a great deal of success at the Cattery, but did get the Swans into the finals for the first time since they left South Melbourne and moved to the harbour city.

I have indelible football memories that are attached to Tommy Hafey, not one person has ever said a bad word about him and he was just a wonderful positive example. Even when he left Richmond I still wanted him to personally succeed, even though I bore Collingwood no good will at all.

After he finished at the Swans, Tommy didn't coach again. Although he coached elsewhere and had enduring friendships with the non Richmond players he coached, Tommy's heart never left Punt Road. The picture above is relatively recent, and while a man in his late 70's or early 80's has no business filling out a football guernsey so well, Tommy Hafey did it. He was a regular fixture at Tigerland and gave the young players coming through a lot of inspiration and heart.

Tommy Hafey was a fitness fanatic. When he came to Tigerland as a coach (he played 67 games for the club in the 50's) he made his team the fittest in the league, that and his uncomplicated game plan of kicking the ball long to his dominant forward line, had a lot to do with those 4 flags and it was also something that got Collingwood into Grand Finals in his time there, even though they weren't able to win one.

His commitment to physical fitness didn't become apparent to all and sundry until he was at Collingwood. Prior to that, like most coaches of the time, he wore a suit to the games. At Collingwood he started to appear in the media and at the games in a t-shirt, which showed off his hard won physique. Former Collingwood player and commentator Lou Richards took to calling him 'T-shirt Tommy' and the name stuck for many years.

Hafey's daily fitness regime included an 8 kilometre run, 250 pushups and a swim in the bay no matter the weather. This was something he maintained for most of his life and even into his 80's. He was quite remarkable in that respect.

A lot of Richmond supporters over the years have met Tommy or had a story to tell about him. I'm no exception. I never met him personally. My mother did. Back then he was coaching Richmond and also working as a sales rep (very few people could make a living coaching or playing football then). Mum asked him for his autograph for me and Tommy asked if I had an autograph book, she said that I did. He told her to bring it in, he'd take it to the club and get the entire team to sign it. He was true to his word too, you couldn't do that now. As a kid I also wrote him a letter. He took the time to reply personally with a handwritten letter back. I can't imagine that happening now either.

When I heard the news yesterday I felt like a member of my family had just passed away, he touched me that much and my memories of him and what he did for my club and the game in general mean that much to me.

RIP Tommy Hafey. You will be missed.