On Thursday, one of the legendary coaches of AFL history, Ron Barassi, tweeted his congratulations to Mick Malthouse. Said Barassi: "It takes something special to do it [coach] for over 30 years."

It takes one to know one. Coaches are different from other people in the way that German shepherds are different from poodles and terriers.

They have to have presence. When they walk into a room, the room takes note. They have to be able to generate energy. They have to be supportive of their players. They also have to hone and shape and, if necessary, discipline their players. They have to hate losing. Where football's concerned, they have to live intensely and, as Barassi pointed out, Malthouse has been doing all that for more than 30 years.

To me, Mick is like an old rock out in the desert. He's still there. He's survived. He's still strongly himself. From the time he started his senior coaching career in 1984 with the Bulldogs (then called Footscray), he has shown the ability to draw teams together and galvanise them.

His sides have been uniformly tough and competitive. Sadly, the most he has struggled as a coach has been at Carlton, presumably his last assignment, but a former Hawthorn premiership player with a better eye for the game than mine insists Malthouse has done remarkably well at Carlton. Why? Because he's got the worst list.

Of the four AFL clubs he has coached, the one that had the most obvious Malthouse makeover was West Coast. Footscray and Collingwood were old working-class clubs that related naturally to his hard, reductive style of play, but when he joined the Eagles in 1990 he inherited a swift, highly skilful team that liked playing in space. In a few seasons, Malthouse made them dour, methodical and relentless.

I judge coaches in part on whether they can grow players. Malthouse has grown lots of players. The West Coast team grew in his image and won two premierships under him. But it is also true that a supremely gifted player such as Chris Lewis, who had the football world at his feet as a 20-year-old midfielder, ended up spending the bulk of his career trapped in the forward pocket.

Not everyone who played under Malthouse is a fan – among those who begged to differ are Brownlow medallists Brad Hardie and Tony Liberatore – but a remarkable number of those who have played under Malthouse speak well of him.

In 1993 I spent a year with the Dogs, then being coached by Terry Wheeler. Together with president Peter Gordon, Wheeler revived the Dogs and matched Malthouse's achievement in taking the club to a rare preliminary final appearance. Malthouse by then had been gone for four seasons; even so, it was notable that when the club's senior players – tough, capable footballers such as Steve Wallis (father of player Mitch) and Steve MacPherson – talked footy, they often ended up quoting Malthouse.

Malthouse is a much more interesting man than his public image suggests. At Collingwood, I thought he did much more media than was in his own best interests. When his departure from the club proved so messy and prolonged, he became a figure in a public melodrama.

Last year, elements of the media deliberately tormented him and I felt he was within his rights to respond as he did. But, again, it didn't endear him to the public, who saw what looked like a private spat being played out endlessly in their living rooms.

Malthouse is like an infantry officer who came up through the ranks. He has a history of extracting loyalty from players, in part because he is skilful at reading people. I particularly recall him telling me about a panicked player fronting him after a team talk delivered in writing on a white board, saying: "Don't ever ask me to read what you've written, will you?"

Malthouse understood the player didn't want his teammates to know he couldn't read. Both West Coast and Collingwood benefited from his abhorrence of racism and he has made stands on environmental issues.

Malthouse has a proud record as a coach. Three premierships puts him only one behind Barassi, Parkin, Hafey and Jeans. He deserves to be treated with a respect commensurate with his status as an elder of the game. And he's still out there.