Football will remember Phil Walsh as an intense and driven man, passionate about success wherever he worked and determined to pursue every possible end to achieve it.

In just half a season in charge of Adelaide, Walsh had already become a figure of intrigue to the wider football public. His phrase "man conversation", used to describe a heart-to-heart chat with his players, had already crept into the game's vernacular.

Walsh the coach kept strange hours. He'd go to bed at 8.30pm, rising anywhere between 2am and 5am to attack the next day's work full on.

Such tales evoke images of hard men, men who as players would have been at home in the back pocket getting down and dirty. That has been the profile of some of the game's greatest coaches - from the modern era alone games-coached record-holder Mick Malthouse and Essendon coaching legend Kevin Sheedy.

That, though, wasn't the persona of Walsh the player at all. He was a dashing, elegant wingman, who burst on to the VFL scene in his first year with Collingwood in 1983 after arriving from Hamilton, the heart of Victoria's western district.

Those of us old enough to remember those times can recall the excitement generated by the 23-year-old, who managed to play every game that season. He was quick and he loved to run and bounce.

He seemed a natural on the big stage, too. When Collingwood played Richmond late that season at the MCG in front of 82,000 people, the occasion was huge, Tiger legend Kevin Bartlett's 400th game.

Walsh managed to upstage it, though, with a best-on-ground performance in which he managed to pick up 31 possessions and kick three goals, one of them subsequently judged the goal of the year. Indeed, Walsh would finish that season judged the VFL's best first-year player.

Even then, however, lay a glimpse of the sort of mental toughness that lurked beneath the graceful playing exterior.

Before he'd even had the chance to become entrenched as a Collingwood favourite, Walsh, at the height of the "player wars" between the Magpies and Richmond, decided on a move to Punt Road, along with little man John Annear.

The furious Magpies fought tooth and nail to keep him, enough for his quest for a clearance to end up in the Federal Court, the matter dragging on and on until it was resolved only shortly before the start of the 1984 season.

But that wouldn't be the last time Walsh would depart the comfort zone. After three years at Richmond, he was on the move again, this time headed for hostile football territory and a new club in the Brisbane Bears in their 1987 debut.

The struggles of the "Bad News Bears" have long been the stuff of football legend, but Walsh adapted better than perhaps all his new teammates, winning the best and fairest and going on to play 60 games for Brisbane over four more years before continued soft tissue injuries hastened his retirement.

That strength of mind was evident in every coaching role Walsh subsequently took on. He worked under Gary Ayres at Geelong from 1995 to '98 as the Cats' fitness adviser. He spent 10 years at Port Adelaide as an assistant, never with a high public profile, but always pivotal to the Power's emergence as a premiership team in 2004.

He moved to West Coast in 2009 as strategy and innovation coach, a role perfect for his relentlessly quizzical mind.

The Eagles couldn't speak highly enough of him. But Walsh's results spoke for themselves. In the Eagles' stunning renaissance from wooden spooner in 2010 to preliminary finalist in 2011, Walsh played a role perhaps no less significant than coach John Worsfold.

It was he who instituted a forward press with devastating effect. And Walsh also helped Worsfold manufacture a modified pre-season program for West Coast's score of veterans. Refreshed and fully fit, they played out of their skins to take the Eagles within a game of a grand final.

Walsh returned to Port Adelaide last year as midfield manager, a move welcomed by those who'd experienced him first time around. Port premiership players like Warren Tredrea and Chad Cornes were massive fans. A newer generation star in Robbie Gray heralded him as "tactically as good as they come".

What impact Walsh may have had on Adelaide will sadly now never be known. The Crows weren't flying at 7-5, but their best moments this season were impressive indeed, a thumping win over North Melbourne to open the new football year, and an equally emphatic dismissal of Collingwood the following week.

And as tough a character as he presented, Walsh recently had appeared to be settling into the job enough to show the larger football world more of his personality.

When Adelaide played Fremantle in round nine, Walsh allowed his own champion in Paddy Dangerfield to go head-to-head with Dockers' star Nat Fyfe, the pair playing out an absorbing duel.

"You might call me old fashioned but that is how I like footy," he said. "When I went to the footy as a young guy ... we'd watch great player versus great player. And that is what we saw tonight; I thought it was great. Maybe I'm a weirdo. I want to win ... but I also think we have to protect the game." Only a week ago, Walsh took his weekly press conference in an unusual direction when he spoke about his visit to an art museum in Amsterdam and a painting by Vincent van Gogh.

"I'll sound again a bit like a weirdo but great art comes out of a level of frustration," he said. "I looked at that painting Sunflowers. And for a bogan from Hamilton like myself, I could actually see beauty in that frustration." There is not the slightest hint of beauty in this human tragedy and senseless loss of life. But there's more than a degree of frustration. Walsh's journey in football was already lengthy. But as a high-profile AFL senior coach, his steely and inquisitive mind may have helped push the game in even newer and more exciting directions.