Shinboner number: 656
Guernsey number: 20
Born: January 21, 1953
North Melbourne games: 306 (1973-87)
Goals: 354
Captain: 1979-1987
Coach: 1990-92
North Melbourne Hall of Fame inductee: 2002
Elevated to Legend status: 2002

When some people say they hate losing, it seems little more than a throwaway line. When Wayne Schimmelbusch says it — repeatedly — you sense the pain of past defeats still lingers. It has faded with time, but only marginally.

It was this “hatred” that fuelled his competitive streak, Schimmelbusch says. Ask former teammates, opponents and coaches about Schimmelbusch and the former North Melbourne captain’s hunger for the contest is one of the first things they mention.

Former North teammate Peter Keenan was playing for Melbourne when he first encountered Schimmelbusch. Keenan far preferred playing alongside Schimmelbusch than against him.

“He was very hard, he just tried all the time. You couldn’t kill him with a stick,” Keenan said.

John Kennedy Snr coached Schimmelbusch in the twilight of the player’s career, from 1985–87. Even though injuries had started to restrict Schimmelbusch’s ability to train by then, Kennedy said his running on game days was inspirational.

“He had got used to running himself to the point of exhaustion and recovering,” Kennedy said. “The physical limit is always a bit further than the psychological limit. He had the capacity to go to his physical limit repeatedly.”

Kennedy cited the 1985 Elimination Final as an example. North was down by 31 points at half-time in that game, but stormed home in the second half to win by 19 points. Schimmelbusch spearheaded that comeback after being moved from half-back onto the ball, memorably kicking two long goals on the run.

A photo of him with Kennedy in North’s changerooms after the game (below) is one of football’s iconic images. Standing with his arms around Schimmelbusch, Kennedy is beaming, but his skipper’s face is etched with exhaustion. Not for the first time, he had run himself into the ground for his team.

Schimmelbusch suspected nurture rather than nature was responsible for his competitive streak.

“I don’t know whether it’s inbuilt in you,” Schimmelbusch said. “It may be natural perhaps, but it might have been inbuilt in me by growing up with my brother. Daryl was always chasing me around the backyard and throwing things at me, throwing knives and axes and all sorts of things. He chased me up the street, wanting to ‘kill’ me and you’d keep running because if you stopped running you’d be ‘killed’.”

Obviously, Schimmelbusch employed liberal poetic licence when recalling those brotherly battles, and he laughed a lot. But he left no doubt that they had been take-no-prisoner affairs.

“Because Daryl is only a couple of years younger than me, as kids we competed in everything, all day, every day,” Schimmelbusch said. “Whether it was racing frogs, making boats and racing them down the gutter in the rain, we’d be competing and always it would end up in a fight. Every single time. Both of us just hated losing.”

Daryl Schimmelbusch played 47 games at North from 1978–81, despite standing just 165cm. Wayne, who was 19cm taller, believed his younger brother’s competitive nature helped him overcome his lack of height.

Schimmelbusch began his career at Arden Street four years earlier than Daryl in 1973 and finished nearly six years later. He finished on 306 games, a club record that stood for 20 years until Glenn Archer passed it in 2007.

Affectionately known throughout the football world as “Schimma”, he also captained North more times (150) than anyone other than Wayne Carey (184), was named at half-forward in North’s Team of the Century in 2001, and made a club Legend in the Hall of Fame a year later.

Schimmelbusch first came to North’s attention while he was playing with Brunswick in the VFA (now VFL) in 1971 and 1972. After winning the 1972 Field Trophy as the VFL second division’s best and fairest player, he reported for 1973 pre-season training at North as a 20-year-old. He arrived at Arden Street hot on the heels of another former Brunswick player, eventual 1973–74 Brownlow medallist Keith Greig.

Greig had joined North in 1971 so never played with Schimmelbusch at Brunswick, but Schimmelbusch inherited Greig’s No. 27 jumper after he left Brunswick - a number Greig would hold on to at North - and had gone to school with Greig’s future wife, Denise.

Schimmelbusch played every game in his first season at North, off a half-forward flank. He did so despite missing most of the pre-season with tonsillitis and playing just two practice games.

Schimmelbusch said he was lucky not to be dropped after his first game, against Hawthorn at Arden Street, when he had “four or five kicks” and was held goalless by Ian Bremner. He said, at that stage, his kicking and handballing were “terrible” on his preferred right side and non-existent on his left.

He worked tirelessly on his kicking until he rated it pretty good after five or six seasons, but said his competitiveness and speed kept him in North’s team in his early days. “I think it impressed (coach Ron) Barassi that I had four or five tackles,” Schimmelbusch said of his debut game, adding he might have been dropped if the Kangaroos had defeated the Hawks by 28 points.

His debut game sparked a streak of 90 straight games. He would not miss a game until Round 19, 1976, when an ankle injury sidelined him for two games. Schimmelbusch’s flying start to his League career remains the fastest on record. He reached every milestone from 50 to 250 games quicker than anyone before.

He was helped by the fact North played deep into the finals every year from 1974–1979, which meant that in his first eight seasons, 1973–80, he played 196 games at the remarkable average of 24.5 games a year.

It was a golden era for the Kangaroos. Players from that time accounted for 10 of the 22 players selected in North’s Team of the Century—David Dench, John Rantall, Greig, Sam Kekovich, Blight, Barry Cable, Brent Crosswell, Barry Davis, Ross Glendinning and Schimmelbusch.

That level of star quality meant that Schimmelbusch, who graduated from his initial half-forward role to play on the wing and, for most of his career, on the ball, never won a North best and fairest.

He got close, finishing second in 1979 (behind Gary Dempsey) and third in 1974 (Rantall), 1978 (Blight), 1980 (Greig) and 1982 (Glendinning). But his record in finals was second to none.

Schimmelbusch was listed in North’s best players more often than not in the 29 finals he played from 1974–85. He was also outstanding on football’s biggest stage, being a standout in the 1977 Grand Final draw against Collingwood, and among North’s best players in its 1974 and 1978 Grand Final losses.

“My whole career was about the contest, really that’s what finals are about, the contest,” Schimmelbusch said. “In the home and away season when we won by 10 or 15 goals I was just running around getting my kicks and there was always a ‘Blighty’ or a Barry Cable taking speckies to get best on ground. But when it came finals time there was always a contest and I tended to play well in the close games because I hated being beaten.”

As much as Schimmelbusch relished the contest during the season, he relished the opportunity to unwind over the off-season too. Keenan joked that Schimmelbusch used to turn up to the start of North pre-season training so out of shape he needed a pair of shorts three sizes bigger than his match-day ones.

Schimmelbusch acknowledged it had been a standing joke at North that he had kept several different sizes of shorts at the club. But he said his coaches had given him licence to enjoy himself between the end of the football season and the start of pre-season training, in the knowledge that — as one of the club’s hardest trainers — he would be back fitter than the rest of them.

As quickly as Schimmelbusch’s career started, its finish was drawn out. After playing 196 games in his first eight seasons, he played 110 in his last seven, 1981–87, including 51 in his last four years as his “legs fell apart”. And that’s not including the 1988 season when he remained on North’s list but did not play.

That era, which followed Barassi’s exit at the end of 1980, saw the Kangaroos slip from football superpowers to also-rans. They still made the finals in 1982–83 under Barry Cable and in 1985 and 1987 under Kennedy, but never seriously threatened to win a flag.

When his body allowed him to train, Schimmelbusch continued to set the example for his younger teammates.

And when Schimmelbusch got out into the park he also continued to play some inspirational football. In his final season, 1987, at the age of 34, he played his best football for years after being switched to half-back.

The Roos principally used their skipper as an attacking rebounder but in his 300th game, against Geelong in Round 4, he was given the job of manning Gary Ablett Snr, who, according to official League records, was 6cm taller and 23kg heavier.

The Cats superstar finished with three goals but Schimmelbusch won their duel on points, constantly running off Ablett and, at one stage, out-marking him one-handed.

His coach was in awe. “Oh gee, he did a great job,” Kennedy recalled. “To be asked to play on a player of Ablett’s capacity in the twilight of his career was a big ask, but he just took it in his stride.”

Schimmelbusch’s outstanding start to 1987 earned him selection for Victoria’s State of Origin clash with South Australia after a five-year absence from representative duties.

Leading the “Big V” out as captain that Tuesday at Football Park, Schimmelbusch had a tough afternoon on Carlton’s small forward Mark Naley (four goals) as the Croweaters won by four points.

Later that week, Schimmelbusch played what turned out to be his last game. It was Round 10, 1987, and the Roos had travelled to the SCG to take on the Sydney Swans. Coming off a four-day break following the midweek State of Origin game, Schimmelbusch ruptured an anterior cruciate ligament early in the match and, despite an attempted comeback the following season, did not play again.

After retiring at the end of 1988, Schimmelbusch served as an assistant coach to Kennedy before taking over as senior coach in 1990.

In each of his first two seasons he led North to 12 wins. In 1990 that was good enough for sixth, one spot outside the finals, but in 1991, when North lost its last three games to slide from fifth, it finished eighth.

In 1992, Schimmelbusch’s young team slid to 11th after winning just seven games. And after a 147-point loss to Adelaide at Football Park in the following year’s pre-season competition, he resigned, allowing Denis Pagan to take over seamlessly.

Schimmelbusch stayed away from North for some years after finishing as coach, later saying he had needed “to go and do something else with my life”. But he eventually returned to the fold, serving on club committees and as an occasional player mentor. In the latter role, he worked with Drew Petrie when the spearhead was struggling early in his career.

At a gathering of nearly all of North’s living past and present players in 2005, Schimmelbusch was voted the “Shinboner of the 1980s” for being the player who most epitomised the club’s spirit during that era.

To uphold the “Shinboner spirit”, you must play with a never-say-die attitude, no matter what the odds.

No one did that better than Wayne Schimmelbusch.