KEVIN Sheedy leaves Australian football knowing he has something in common with Ned Kelly and not too many others in the history of this land. He's a legend in two cultures, white and black.

What's that mean? It means, for example, that when Essendon played the Aboriginal All-Stars in Darwin before the season began, the largely indigenous audience was at least as much for Essendon as they were for the All-Stars.

Former Goanna lead singer Shane Howard, author of the song Solid Rock, has a saying: "Black Australia never forgets." Black Australia certainly won't forget Kevin Sheedy. You ask Aboriginal people in the Top End who Kevin Sheedy is and, like as not, they'll tell you he's the feller who changed things for them in football. Sometimes I think Sheedy has the stature in their culture that Michael Long has in ours, as if they are seen from two different directions as telling the one story.

Sheedy's relationship with black Australia is not the sum of his achievement. He won four premierships. He led the way for a period in tactical innovation. He took a club identified as Protestant and made it a national sporting icon. He dreamed up the Anzac Day match between Essendon and Collingwood, which is now a major part of the day itself. The game changed around him not once but several times, and you only say that of the greatest.

As a player, he was hard but skilful with a wild edge that could make him a disturbing presence for opposition players. His early Essendon teams were hard as nails. A Hawthorn player who was part of the epic clashes between the two clubs in the '80s once told me he took until Monday or Tuesday to recover from a game. With Essendon it was Thursday.

As a cricketer Sheedy was a leg spinner, and something of the craft and trickery of that pursuit pervaded him. He was the sort of person who'd tie a windsock to a pole at Windy Hill to confuse a visiting captain before the toss of the coin. The 2000 grand final win by Essendon was marred by excessively rough play that left a bad taste in a lot of mouths. He also had some part to play in precipitating the crisis that now exists between the AFL and the Gaelic Athletic Association for the spiral of rough play and worse that caused the Irish to threaten to withdraw from the combined rules matches.

Essendon ruckman Simon Madden was captain under Sheedy in his early days at the club. He once remarked that what needed to be understood about Sheedy was that if he had discovered that Albanians had a special aptitude for the sport, Essendon's team would have been stacked with Albanians. Possibly so, but what is not in dispute is that one of Sheedy's outstanding characteristics is his curiosity and eagerness to learn.

In the '60s, it was said of people like Sheedy that they were "on one crazy trip". He was never crazier, never grander — as grand as the big, smiling face at Luna Park, in fact — than he was yesterday at his press conference, when journalists dutifully sought to make the occasion conform to expectations. "You're telling me this is no big event today?" said one in disbelief. Yes, he said, the decision was made long ago.

He seemed to enjoy playing with the media. "No fighting, boys," he said at the start, in reference to the wild sense of anticipation in the room. Repeated attempts were made to inject the occasion with melodrama. There was none. He was doing what he and the club thought best. Then, in departing, he told the media with whom he has dealt and worked for 27 years: "You don't know me."

The Aboriginal presence in the game preceded Sheedy's influence as a coach. As a player with Richmond in the '60s and '70s, Sheedy had watched and admired Geelong's Polly Farmer. At Richmond, he also had an Aboriginal teammate, Tasmanian Derek Peardon, a member of the "stolen generation", who had gone straight from an orphanage to the Tigers. Peardon didn't speak much. This roused Sheedy's curiosity, he once told me, about what the word Aboriginal actually meant. Up until that point, he'd never met one.

Before the arrival of the Krakouer brothers at the Kangaroos in the '80s, great Aboriginal players like Doug Nicholls, Farmer and Syd Jackson had triumphed as individuals — in most cases, not only as the sole Aboriginal player in their particular team but also in the competition. In 1993, through Sheedy, Essendon was the first club to take in a group of Aboriginal players. The immediate result was a premiership, although this was achieved at dramatic cost since Sheedy dropped Derek Kickett, the oldest of the Aboriginal players, for the grand final. It is said the pair have not spoken since.

In 1993, just as the Aboriginal flag first began appearing behind the Essendon goal, Collingwood president Allan McAlister made his infamous statement that Aboriginal players were welcome at Collingwood so long as they behaved like whites. McAlister was attacked from all sides but he was only stating the common belief in the football world at the time.

In Western Australia, I once heard the dictum that "two coons in a football team is enough". Essendon's 1993 premiership is the moment when such attitudes began to become obsolete and the AFL started moving down the road that now sees it recognised as a national leader in the field of reconciliation and race relations.

The winner of the 1993 Norm Smith Medal was Michael Long. No portrait of Long is complete without Sheedy, and the opposite is also true. In public, Long often gives Sheedy cheek. In private, if you ask Long whether Sheedy is a great coach, a cloud of disbelief passes over his face that you have even asked the question. Long was famously quiet as a child. I once asked his father Jack what Sheedy had given his son. "He taught him to talk," Jack Long said. He meant — to be heard.

The public support given to Long by Essendon, by Sheedy and by prominent players like James Hird and Matthew Lloyd was vital to the radical change that came over the culture of the game after Long bent the AFL to his will over on-field racial abuse in the mid '90s. Ask Michael Long what Sheedy's importance is to the history of the game and he'll say, simply, he opened the door of opportunity to Aboriginal Australia. In so doing he enabled the game to furnish a vision of Australia of which we could be proud.

I rate Kevin Sheedy alongside Ron Barassi as the two most influential figures in the game since the end of World War II.