AS HE prepares to break the AFL's all-time coaching record, Mick Malthouse is spending his moment in the sun with others.
Against Collingwood on Friday night, Malthouse will coach his 715th VFL/AFL match, surpassing legendary Magpies coach Jock McHale.
While he will stand alone as the game's most prolific coach, Malthouse prefers to think of it as a shared award.
Buckley's thanks to milestone Mick
He says his first instinct was to brush it off as just another statistic.
But late last year when AFL head office asked him whether he'd like to pick his opponent for the milestone match, Malthouse said the weight of the milestone came home.
"In my 30 years in football it's never happened, I started to realise the enormity of it," he said.
From there came the realisation that he should embrace the occasion and share it with everyone that had been a part of his coaching journey which began at Footscray in 1984.
"Get over yourself - this is not about you," Malthouse said he told himself.
"It's about the team and people that you've crossed over a long period of time.
"The greatest thing about this football game, is when you win, you share.
"That's why I say it's a shared award."
Malthouse says he's going nowhere
Malthouse has spent so long in the game, replying to his well-wishers might take all weekend.
He told SEN radio he had been overwhelmed with supportive messages and hadn't been able to reply to any of them so far.
But if his coaching history holds true, he'll be doing so after his 407th win as coach.
In 30 AFL seasons as a senior coach, he's only finished with a negative win-loss record five times.
He steered the AFL's original frontier club, West Coast, to two flags and then won another with Collingwood in 2010.
There's no one moment or player or season that stands out for Malthouse, though he did say the 1992 and 1994 Eagles' flags would never be truly appreciated by those not involved.
Eagles chief executive Trevor Nisbett, who was the club's football manager during Malthouse's tenure at West Coast, has implored Carlton to stick with the 61-year-old coach.
"Michael will never give up," Nisbett said on Wednesday.
"He has set the course now for the Carlton Football Club and they should stay the course.
"If they do, they will have a pretty good side in a few years time.
"If they don't, I don't know what would happen there.
"My advice would be when you have coached 714 games of football, you sort of know what you are doing, and Mick knows what he's doing.
"He knows how to develop a football club. He's done it at his previous three clubs and he'll get that right as well. There is no quick fix in this game any more."
Nisbett said he had written a letter to Malthouse to congratulate him on breaking Jock McHale's record, an achievement he described as "absolutely extraordinary".
"It's an exceptional coaching performance. Not just longevity, but also the impact that he has had on the game over three decades and going into a fourth is quite remarkable," he said.
"Having seen some coaches come and go and seeing what they have to put up with, including administrators and boards, it's fantastic that we have someone like Michael still in the game and still coaching at the highest possible level.
"Carlton should be very pleased that they have someone like Mick coaching them."
