"Do you know why you're no longer there?" Massey asked him. "What have you learnt from it?"

They were raw days for Stuart but Massey was giving it to him straight. He knew no other way. From then on, Stuart phoned him before and after every match and sometimes in between.

"He was always brutally honest," said the Canberra coach with a heavy heart on Monday. "They don't usually come as brutally honest as 'Mass'. For me, it's those three or four calls a week that I'm going to miss. I'll never be able to replace them. They weren't always complimentary. He wasn't afraid to rip in. But they were always about making me better."

Stuart is one of the many people in football and beyond who were touched by Massey, who passed away on Monday morning at the age of 86.

The other is Paul Gallen. At the end of the 2009 season, he was at the crossroads of his career.

He'd grabbed rival players on the testicles, racially abused Dragons forward Mickey Paea, called referees cheats and had been accused of taking a dive to milk penalties.

Stuart, Cronulla's coach back then, had heard the rumblings at board level and new some directors wanted him dumped as captain. On the advice of the coach, Gallen stood down before they could sack him.

That's when Stuart decided to take Gallen to see Massey. As they stood on the doorstep, the coach issued a hasty warning.

"This isn't going to be nice," Stuart told him.

"What do you mean?" asked Gallen.

Before Stuart could reply, the door flung open and Massey's weathered face appeared.

"You're a f--king soft c--k," Massey spat.

And that's when Mass begun. It went for an hour or more.

I've spoken to Gallen on several occasions about this meeting and each time he credits it for his reversal in form and attitude.

"I didn't know what to do, eh?" he told me in an interview in 2012. "He was into me and just laid it all down. Did not beat around the bush one bit. He basically said the toughest blokes are the ones who get hit, and then get back up."

Gallen regained the Sharks captaincy. Then the NSW captaincy. Then became vice-captain to Cameron Smith in the Australian side.

Playing in the game of their lives against North Queensland at Allianz Stadium, the Sharks' young players will look to Gallen as their inspiration. Not that long ago, nobody thought Gallen had it in him – until Massey found it and drew it out.

The elders of the game are slowly fading away with time but they never really go away. Their influence still flickers in those who have been touched by them.

Wayne Bennett was also a Massey disciple. The "skinny coach" had Massey alongside him when he won comps at Brisbane and also in the coach's box when the Dragons won in 2010.

"You've got to make it," Massey told Bennett that season. "This could be my last grand final."

There's a legion of coaches and players, past and present, who sought his counsel.

In most tributes in the next few days, you will read that Massey was best known as Jack Gibson's "right-hand man" but in reality he loathed the description.

"I always say that he was my right-hand man," Massey often said in interviews.

He was otherwise called Gibson's "coaching co-ordinator" but it barely seemed adequate because he was more than that.

Starting back in 1967 when Massey scoffed at the mere idea that Gibson was about to coach Eastern Suburbs, they revolutionised the game together, plucking ideas from American football and other codes, and also establishing their own.

They went on to win premierships at Roosters in 1974-75 and then with Parramatta from 1981-83.

Then Gibson and Massey went to the Sutherland Shire – where they both lived – and tried to conjure the Sharks' first premiership.

They convinced Gavin Miller to return to the club for the 1986 season but under the weight of financial problems, a premiership never came their way, prompting Gibson to utter the immortal line upon his departure: "Waiting for Cronulla to win the premiership is like leaving the porch light on for Harold Holt."

When Easts and then Parramatta established their dynasties in the 1970s and 80s, they did so behind two captains who were also true leaders: Arthur Beetson and Steve Edge.

Is Gallen of that ilk? His critics would scoff at the suggestion but there's no doubting his importance to the Sharks.

With Massey's passing, the knockout line from their meeting in 2009 is likely to be firm in his mind as he takes the field against the Cowboys: "You're not foreman material, players have to look up to you."

A few weeks ago, the Sharks captain took his five-year-old son Kody to see Massey because he knew he didn't have long to live.

"Mass was so good to me I just wanted them to meet," Gallen said. "They both probably won't have known the significance at the time but I thought it was nice."