John Longmire will coach his 250th AFL this weekend when Sydney faces West Coast in Round 16. Peter Blucher writes this feature on the Swans' coach ahead of his milestone.

If you only knew John Longmire through a television screen you could be excused for thinking he was respectably slightly crazy. Prone to strong verbal outbursts, but smart enough and polite enough to know that if he’s going to scream down the phone he should hide his mouth behind his hand.

You might even think he doesn’t like assistant-coach Dean Cox, who sits beside him in the Swans coach’s box during games. Or the people on the other end of the phone charged with the responsibility of passing on his messages.

Wrong! Very wrong. That’s the in-battle persona of a man who lives in the combative world of AFL coaching. The man in charge of piloting the Sydney Swans through two hours of football each week knowing that everything he does and says will be scrutinised mercilessly.

It is an incredibly stressful job. Only people who have done it or been close to someone who has done it will fully understand and appreciate it.

Insiders at the club say Longmire is enormously hard on himself. That he blames himself when things don’t work out quite like he planned and is always thinking about what he could have done better.

What fans see on TV during games is not the real Longmire, they say. And nothing like the man who confronts his players during breaks in play and after games.

It’s his way of dealing with it all, according to people within the football operation. Shedding the stress and the pressure. And it’s only a miniscule part of the detailed planning and execution that goes on in the coach’s box after the first bounce.

When he interacts with the players during a game Longmire is calm and composed, fully aware of the importance of his words, their tone and the need to be clear with his message. And away from match day he genuinely cares about them as players and people. He wants nothing but the best for them and wants to help them be the best they can be.

The lot of an AFL coach is as full-time as it gets. It’s 24/7 and more. There is no escaping it.

But perhaps a little masochistically Longmire, who has coached the Swans more often than anyone else, loves it. So much so that on Sunday he will coach his 250^th game.

Among 368 AFL coaches all-time he will be just the 33^rd to reach this milestone.

More significantly, he will be only the 14^th person to coach 250 games in his first coaching job.

The list of those ahead of him in this category is a who’s who of AFL coaching. Jock McHale (713), Dick Reynolds (415), Alastair Clarkson (382), Reg Hickey (304), Mark Williams (273), Phonse Kyne (272), Damien Hardwick (266) and Chris Scott (250) got to 250 at their only club. And Kevin Sheedy (634), Allan Jeans (333), John Kennedy (299), John Worsfold (281) and Mark Thompson (260) did so before moving to another club.

This group are among the exceptions to the rule in a job in which job security is not exactly high.

In Longmire’s 10 years at the Swans helm there have been 63 different AFL coaching appointments. Sixteen times a club has changed coach mid-season, with only Geelong, Hawthorn, Richmond, Sydney and West Coast spared such turmoil.  Adelaide have had seven coaches, Essendon and Melbourne six, Carlton five, Brisbane, Fremantle, Gold Coast, North, St.Kilda and the Bulldogs four.

While Longmire has been 10 years and 250 games in his current job, it’s not even a third of his total AFL journey. He was also 12 years and 200 games as a champion full forward at North Melbourne from 1988-99, and nine years and 214 games as a Swans assistant-coach from 2002-2010.

That’s 31 years and 786 games of football split only by two years when he worked in the media and was an up-and-coming player manager, bound for big things until he decided coaching was his lasting passion.

But despite the fact that he’s lived more than half his life in Melbourne and Sydney, Longmire is a country boy at heart. And always will be.

Born in Corowa, on the Murray River and the border between Victoria and New South Wales, he grew up on the family’s 920-hectare property at Balldale, about 15km north-east. He and wife Shelly were childhood sweethearts, and, with his brother now running the farm, he still gets home as often as he can.

He had football in his blood. His grandfather Keith Williams played for Fitzroy in 1948 and his uncle Robert Longmire played at Collingwood in 1964 and was a successful country coach. His father Fred, later mayor of Corowa, was a local football stalwart who had a pre-season at South.

He kicked 82 goals for Corowa-Rutherglen in the Ovens & Murray League as a 16-year-old, and although technically zoned to the Swans found himself playing at North Melbourne.

It was the genius of North recruiting/administration pair Greg Miller and Ron Joseph, who had watched Longmire and Wagga boy Wayne Carey playing together for the NSW Under-12s.

Many years on Miller, a 52-game South Melbourne player from 1972-76, and Joseph, later a Swans CEO, would reveal to Glenn McFarlane of the Herald Sun how they sealed the deal to deny the Swans.

He said: “I remember Ron and I meeting up with John and his dad at the Corowa-Rutherglen Golf Club. I got a mate to drive another car up there and he parked it in the car park. We had dinner with Fred (Longmire) and John, and we walked outside and Fred said: ‘Aren’t you going to drive us back to the farm?’ I just threw the keys of a new Holden to John, and said, ‘That’s yours’. He was only 16. He used to drive it up and down the driveway at the farm for two years because he didn’t have his licence.”

It was at North that Longmire met Liam Pickering, a teammate turned opposition player turned house mate, close friend and manager.

Pickering was best man at Longmire’s wedding and vice-versa, and the pair have remained the best of buddies since then, even after Pickering left North to play at Geelong.

It was only when Longmire quit his job in player management to join the Swans in 2002 that Pickering, then selling carpet and coaching at the Western Jets in the TAC Cup, got into player management.

Twelve years on the pair were part of the biggest recruiting coup in football history. The move of Lance Franklin, managed by Pickering, from Hawthorn to Sydney. For 12 months they sat on a secret known by only a handful of people.

Not such a secret was the story of how Longmire got the nickname by which he is known across the football landscape … Horse.

“It was a footy camp under John Kennedy in 1988 … a survival of the fittest thing where we were climbing mountains and carrying sandbags,” Pickering explained.

“The first night was a smorgasbord dinner and we were eating in our teams. He (Longmire) piled more food onto his plate than I’ve ever seen and was back for seconds before anyone else had half finished. I think it was Peter German who said ‘you eat like a horse’. He’s been Horse ever since.”

There was also the time in 1990 when the North players had their end-of-season footy trip on the Longmire farm. They slept in the shed there and enjoyed the cooking of Longmire’s mum Christine.

Pickering, too, recounts a time after both had had been eliminated from the 1997 finals, he got a call from Longmire telling him he’d been offered a first-class trip to London to do some promotional work during the AFL grand final.

“He traded his first-class ticket for two premium economy tickets and off we went. We ended up doing commentary on B-Sky-B, or whatever it was called, and a cross to Channel 7 back home during the grand final.

“We had a holiday which included a trip to Paris on the train. It was a great trip, but we did get some funny looks ... two blokes carrying around video cameras sharing a room, with Horse’s feet hanging off the end of his single bed,” he said.

Pickering said he always thought Longmire would move back to the family farm as soon as he finished playing until one Good Friday late in his career. “We caught up for a coffee at Café Sienna in Chapel Street. Horse rocked up in a red BMW. He was living in South Yarra at the time and I thought ‘he’s a city boy now - he’s not going back to the farm’. And he never did.”

Throughout his time in Sydney Longmire and Pickering have had an annual ‘date’ at the SCG Test. A chance for blokes just to be blokes, enjoying a beer and a chat at the cricket. It was one of the coach’s favorite days until it had to be cancelled after Pickering found himself with commentary duties on the Big Bash.

Longmire, Coleman Medallist in 1990 and a premiership player with North in his last game in 1999 after he missed the ’96 flag due to a knee injury, settled nicely into life after football. He established a foothold in the player management game and was working for Channel 7 on their AFL coverage.

He’d bought what was supposed to be his ‘forever’ house in Melbourne, and, as the Herald Sun later reported, boxes were still stacked up in the hallway when he walked in and asked his soon-to-be wife Shelley “how would you feel about going to Sydney?”.

He was offered a job as assistant-coach under Swans senior coach Rodney Eade for the 2002 season alongside Paul Roos and Steve Malaxos and accepted it thinking it would be a two-year “adventure”.

In 2005 Longmire was a leading contender for the Hawthorn coaching position that eventually went to his good mate Alastair Clarkson, and in 2006 it was a similar story when Ross Lyon, then working with Longmire under Roos at the Swans, got the job at St.Kilda.

Longmire was weighing up his options when Roos offered him a new role as ‘coaching co-ordinator’ to help keep him in Sydney before ultimately stepping side to allow him to take the No.1 job.

On the eve of his coaching debut in Round 1 2011 Longmire told of his mother’s fight with cancer and identified a philosophy he adopted which has stood him in good stead.

''She has some challenging health issues that she's getting through,'' Longmire told The Sun-Herald. ''She's got great spirit, she's very tough and she's meeting this challenge head-on.

“Mum's whole philosophy is that you've just got to roll your sleeves up and get the job done. There's not much time to get emotional about things because there's work to do. It's a pretty sound philosophy, and I've always taken that on.''

And so it has been ever since.

Now a proud father of three, Longmire started his senior coaching career in unlikely circumstances. It was Round 1 2011 at the MCG against Melbourne, coached by Dean Bailey. The Swans led at every change but needed a snapped behind from best afield Ryan O’Keefe inside the last minute to grab a draw at 11.18 (84) apiece.

Sixteen games later Bailey was sacked as Melbourne coach. There was no doubting what Longmire had got himself into.

He has coached against 43 different coaches – most often Clarkson (22), Chris Scott (19), Cameron (16) and Hardwick (14) – for a 152-2-95 win/loss record and a 61.54% strike-rate.

After enjoying finals football in seven of his nine years as an assistant-coach Longmire took the Swans to the finals in each of his first eight years in charge, and after two years out is on track to return to the business end of the season in 2021.

Longmire has coached precisely 100 different players at the Swans after Braeden Campbell, Errol Gulden, Logan McDonald and Tom Hickey debuted for the club in Round 1 – seven percent of the all-time playing list of a club founded in 1897.

No less than 72 of the 100 played their first game in red and white under the 2012 premiership coach, with Josh Kennedy (235), Luke Parker (226), Heath Grundy (186), Kieren Jack (185), Nick Smith (182), Dane Rampe (181), Dan Hannebery (180), Jarrad McVeigh (178), Jake Lloyd (168) and Sam Reid (158) having played most often under him.

One of his favorite times as Swans coach followed the retirement of McVeigh, Grundy, Jack and Smith, who were carried off with 300^th-gamer Lance Franklin after the last game of 2019.

Having taken the club to the 2012 premiership and the 2014-16 grand finals he found himself out of the finals for the first time. But still he was caught up in what he described as the soul of football. A moment so special he was moved to take a photograph of it.

As he recounted later: “I was standing in the middle of the SCG and everyone was happy … was pumped. The crowd was going off, blokes were getting carried off, and was I thinking, ‘should I be feeling happy or should I be dirty we’re not playing next week’.

“You just go with it because it was such a great day and great send-off, not only for those players going out, but for our young players to sit there and watch it. That was important to show these blokes what that link is.”

The celebrations continued post-game. “I was standing in the rooms looking around,’’ Longmire said. “And there’s LRT (Lewis Roberts-Thomson) a former player, Clementine McVeigh who is Macca’s wife, Andrew Ireland on the board and our ex-CEO. There’s Nick Smith, Hanners (ex-Swan Dan Hannebery) is in there somewhere, kids are everywhere, parents everywhere, Plugger (Tony Lockett) was there with his daughter, Josh Kennedy’s boy Emilio was running around, he’s mad but a funny bugger, there were board members through to former players … it had everything.

“We’re eating pies and drinking Crownies and it was just fantastic. I got up and grabbed the phone and went bang with the camera. It’s one of my favourite footy photos of all-time. I’ve been tossing up whether to blow it up and put it somewhere at the club, in my office. You know what it shows … it shows a footy club.’’