A Canberra fixture who likes to stay ahead of the game

In his first Twitter post of the year, Laurie is tricked out in his trademark shorts, footy shirt and bucket hat, and if it weren’t for the caption, it could have been taken on any day in the last three decades.

Of course the long, wild hair is grey-white now, instead of strawberry blond, and the ruddy features are weathered from years on the field, but Lord Laurie, as he is affectionately known by generations of Canberra footy fans, is an unmistakable figure.

A coach of the Brumbies on and off since 2000, he has led Canberra’s professional team through highs and lows, with a couple of overseas stints thrown in and, in his earlier years, a decade of teaching sport to high-school students.

But despite his status as a fixture, a constant, a wild-haired, bucket-hatted figurehead for Canberra sports fans, Fisher’s ethos as a coach is by no means fixed.

He says it’s his willingness to innovate that has contributed to his long career.

“I really work hard to watch a lot of rugby and then to formulate my own ideas, so I'm constantly changing,” he says.

“What I offer now bears no resemblance to what I offered 10 years ago, to how I coach and the content that I coach. To try and be thinking of little nuances that other people aren't doing that are going to help us.”

And his Twitter presence - genial, enthusiastic, peppered with sunsets - is a clue to how this 60-year-old likes to engage with the world.

“I just work hard to stay current or even ahead of the game,” he says, and he’s not just talking about rugby.

But mainly, he is. Football has always been part of his life, thanks to his grandfather, who moved to Canberra in the 1930s to coach rugby league. As a schoolkid, Fisher played rugby union, along with his dad and his two brothers. The family lived in Ainslie, and they played for the local club. Breaking the mould never occurred to him.

He remembers an idyllic Canberra childhood, roaming the streets with other Ainslie kids, spending all their time outdoors.

“I guess Canberra was a lot smaller back then,” he says.

“Living in Ainslie, there were a lot of kids around, so you just sort of played in the park across the road, and you kicked a footy or played cricket, and you didn't really travel too far, you just stayed in your neighbourhood.”

Born in the late 1950s, he was too young to remember the lake being filled in, but he does have family yarns about big family wins at the now-underwater old Acton Racecourse.

“There were stories of buying furniture because they'd backed a winner, or getting our first TV. Those sort of things,” he says.

Like most born-and-bred Canberrans, the difference between the city then and now is just part of the narrative. We’re sitting at a hip suburban cafe, where Fisher seems to be a regular. There’s a reason: his daughter, one of his four grown kids with wife Bernadette, manages the place. Two of the others work at equally hip coffee places in different parts of town, and he likes to spread himself equally between them.

The point is, he’s just as comfortable sipping a flat white as he is out on the field, yelling and jumping around. He’s known for his gregariousness and enthusiasm on the field, but in person, he’s much more subdued.

“I'm a quiet bloke, but at training, I'm noisy, I really put on a show out there and be enthusiastic,” he says.

“I never lack for that, because I could be in a classroom with 30 kids, so how lucky am I? It's not hard to be enthusiastic.”

It’s true: Fisher taught high-school PE for 10 years, at Telopea Park School, his first job after finishing university. It was a natural training ground for a future coach,

“I think the habits of PE teaching, of running activities and being organised and having a group of people and keeping them amused, trying to teach them skills - I do reckon you will find so many rugby coaches who have been PE teachers,” he says.

He also loved working with kids, although dealing with teenagers was challenging - there was always a contingent of those who refused to care. But he says his main goal was to help all the students find something to enjoy - and to make physical activity a lifelong habit.

“You don't win all those battles, but at least you'd give it a crack to try and enjoy physical activity,” he says.

“A lot of it was, with kids, trying to take the competition out of it. All the good sports kids, male or female, love competition, they want to win, they want a result.”

It was being out in the sun for hours every day that finally wore him down; he left teaching after 10 years, and took a job at the Australian Institute of Sport, as residence manager for the institute’s 150 live-in athletes. He lived onsite, during the five-year lead-up to the Sydney Olympics.

Once the games were over, he moved into coaching, watching the Brumbies train and taking up a newly created position as the academy coach.

“The rest is history for me,” he says. But it’s been a chequered kind of story, at least in terms of the game itself. Rugby Union didn’t become a professional game worldwide until the mid-90s, but when Fisher began coaching at the Brumbies, from 2000, the game still had a non-professional legacy.

“When the game first went professional, I think we were ahead of the curve,” he says.

“In all three teams, and particularly here at the Brumbies, we had a really intelligent group of players, a good coach, and I think they sort of led the game and how it should be played and how you get conditioned for it. And then that sort of diminished over time.”

While he can’t pinpoint an exact reason or turning point, he says those who weren’t lifelong professional players had come from different backgrounds.

“I think in the early days, because it hadn't been professional, all those guys worked, or they'd been to uni, they had professional jobs,” he says. Nick Farr-Jones was a lawyer, Brett Robinson was a doctor. But those days are gone.

“The longer the game has been professional, the more guys come straight out of school and straight into a professional contract, so they don't have those life experiences, and a really narrow point of view, and they get shoved in programs and get organised,” he says.

“I just think that changeover of a highly intelligent group of guys who had life experience and ideas was fantastic in the sport and that really pushed us ahead in those [first] years of professionalism.

But then everybody's playing catch-up from there and we've lost that. I think we went through a period where we sort of led the game in terms of being really structured, and then the game went past being structured and we stayed in that game…

“We fell behind as the New Zealanders took the game forward. We didn't go forward with that at all, we stayed in our structured environment.”

Despite his familiarity to Canberrans, Fisher has been away a lot. He spent three years coaching the Munster Rugby team in Ireland, until 2011, and later, another three years in Gloucester in the United Kingdom. The game is the game, he says, but the biggest difference there was how the weather conditions affected the players.

And also, he says, the general attitude to the sport.

“It's a much more attritional game, which is great for my learning,” he said.

“Both clubs said the same - all our supporters want to see 100 per cent effort. If you win a game 3-nil, they will be jumping off the rafters. Winning is just heart-on-your-sleeve, play as hard as you can, and if it's ugly, it's ugly, it doesn't matter. They don't worry about ugly, they just want to see effort and obviously they just want to see you win.

“Whereas over here, you've got to have bells and whistles and sparkles and all sorts of things, and if you don't do that, people don't want to come and watch.”

It used to keep him up at night, he says, the pressure to win, and to meet the expectations of fans. But these days, he’s much more relaxed.

“The challenge for coaches is to rationalise how you think about things,” he says.

It hurts, of course, to be criticised for letting the fans down when your team loses. He still remembers a furious fan thrusting a piece of paper in his hand after the Brumbies lost.

It said, “I hope you f*** off and coach somewhere else”. But that’s just one person’s opinion.

Ultimately, he says, he’s in the best possible city, healthy at the ripe old age of 60, and with a good few years of coaching left. He’s been back with the Brumbies for two years, and counts himself lucky at having a third crack at the job that means the most.

“I used to think a lot, I used to overthink and overcoach, and that's what young coaches generally do,” he says.

“You want to show how much you know and how good you are and how much you've got, and you just coach the shit out of things, whereas these days, it's the sooner you can step back and let the boys take over, give them the knowledge, give them the skills, and it's far more rewarding.

“It's less and less about me, and more and more about them.”