Stephen Kernahan on David Parkin

“‘Parko’ - or ‘Coach’ as I’ve always called him - go back a long way, to the days when I was a 15 or 16 year-old. He used to head over to South Australia, catch up and say ‘Come to Carlton’. I knew he was a great man straight away – there was something about him - and while I was talking to a lot of other clubs at that time (including Kevin Sheedy who was driving me mad), it was always going to be Carlton as the first choice and ‘Parko’ got me over eventually.

My excuse for not coming to Carlton initially was that Glenelg first had to win a flag.  I was 22 when that happened, but about a week after I said ‘Yes, I’m coming to Melbourne’ David Parkin got evicted from the Carlton Football Club and Robert Walls became the new coach. It was unbelievable. I said to Dad ‘What do I do now?’ and he said ‘Son, you’ve got to go’. 

When ‘Parko’ came back after ‘Wallsy’ and ‘Jezza’, he had to restructure the list and find out who really wanted to be there, which ultimately led to the team that took out the ’95 Grand Final… and he was very good at what he did.

I’d had a long day at work when I got into match committee (meetings) after training at the Club, and I always got a say as captain. Parkin used to blow up a bit on match days but he was more gentle in there (match committee), he always worked well in there with Wes Lofts and Adrian Gallagher and I enjoyed being part of it. Sometimes selection was more difficult than others: it was a bit harder through ’91 and ’92 when he restructured, but it was a bit easier leading into the ’95 flag.

Everyone lived and died by how ‘Parko’ rated you. If you played all right you’d want to see his dossiers, but if you didn’t play well you wouldn’t, and that’s how meticulous ‘Parko’ was. He always kept a handle on who was in form, and that was the schoolteacher in him. His presence was a huge step up for me after South Australian footy in every way. He was ahead of the game, no doubt.

In terms of the ultimate success of 1995 he has always been very generous to us players. He’s always said that the ’95 premiership was player-led, but it wasn’t. It was a coach-led premiership, because nothing occurs without the coach giving of himself and being who he is – and he still ran the show, don’t worry about that.

The great thing about ‘Parko’ is that he always gives his time to everybody and he’s genuine. He had to handle a lot of different players through different eras – and he probably had a harder time of it with the 1981/’82 blokes because we were a bit gentler. There was no better person as an ambassador of the football club than him.

I can’t say that he’s Carlton through and through after his Hawthorn history, but he’s a Legend of Carlton, he’s still the same man I’ve always known, and we love him.”

Ken Hunter on David Parkin

“I came over from Western Australia as a new recruit with Peter Bosustow, and David Parkin had just been appointed as coach after a tumultuous year before. Everyone was a bit unsure of who David was and what he was about because the Carlton players at that time were known to party hard off the field . . . and David was a non-drinker. So while we were trying to work him out it’s fair to say he was also trying to work us out.

I remember playing in the first three or four practice matches of that year and we got absolutely thrashed. I thought ‘Perhaps I’ve come to the wrong club’ and I’m sure David did as well. But David was smart, it didn’t take him long to realise he had to work around these guys because he couldn’t beat them, and that’s what he did.

David was interesting. He had a lot of theories on how the game was played and he gave the players a lot of feedback not only about our performance, but also the team’s performance – these were things we had not seen before and pretty soon we came to respect him and he respected us as well.

We were probably favourites to win the flag in ’81, we had a great season and we got to play the arch enemy Collingwood in the Grand Final, and we beat them. 1982 came around and I really thought this was David’s finest year as coach. We really struggled to make the finals with injuries and suspensions, and when we got to the finals we also struggled. We played off for the premiership against Richmond, the then favourites, whose players had beaten us quite comfortably in the semi. But David, to his credit, had instilled in us a lot of belief, that if we made the Grand Final we’d beat the Tigers. Come Grand Final day, everything paid off. Every positional change he made worked, and to go back-to-back at that time was something that hadn’t happened often in football.

David and I did take an interest in Peter and I as players from WA. We were new, he was new, and for a while the other players thought that I was one of his favourites and would mow his lawn after training! That wasn’t quite true, but David wanted to understand you - he was genuine about that - and he always tried to get the best out of you.

He was ahead of the game by a long way, in terms of the coaches I played under anyway – just in the way he prepared us for the game, in the way he trained us, the way he talked to us individually and the way he brought us together on a Saturday night with our wives or partners win or lose. He instilled in us a lot of belief and confidence that we could beat anyone, and we were able to maintain that for quite some time.

He's always said that the players in the ’95 Carlton premiership team coached themselves and he’s taken a backward step, but you still need a leader. He obviously gave ownership to the players to be able to do that, and that was a credit to him. No one had done that before as a coach, which was quite different to how he coached us in the early 1980s, and it just goes to show how he continued to prove himself over a long period of time in footy.

David Parkin is a unique character – one of the more unique characters you’d ever want to meet in life. He gives so much of himself to so many people in all walks of life and he continue to do it. He still keeps in touch with his former players and that’s a credit to him.

David is not only now a Carlton Legend, which is well deserved, but he is also a national football treasure – and we love you ‘Parko’.”