Mike Sheahan: the best of the best

Helping us launch the 2017 AFL season on Friday, 31 March is MIKE SHEAHAN, Australian football’s number one living writer, journalist and  interviewer whose popular Open Mike segment has been a ratings winner for Fox Sport’s for years.

Mike has covered VFL and AFL football since the late ‘60s having started as a teenager at the Werribee Banner. He played 55 games with the Bees, mainly in the centre and at half-forward.

The first major paper he worked for, Newsday in Melbourne lasted five minutes. He went to Hobart for a time before Graham Perkin, one of the most esteemed of all journalists — and for a decade editor of The Age — called him to Spencer Street.

Forty-five years later he is football’s pre-eminent journalist and commentator — loyal, caring, knowledgeable and skilled… the best of the best.

No footy writer shares his array of awards and distinctions. No one was more driven, broke more news stories, penned as many quality features or had the trust of those who counted.

To pay your mortgage and bills as a journalist and young father you have little choice but to shift camps, regularly and Mike did, from The Age to The Herald, the Sunday Age and the Herald Sun. He also worked for the AFL under Ross Oakley for five or six years.

He retired from newspapers in 2011 after almost two decades as chief football writer of the Herald Sun and continued in radio with the ABC and 3AW and in television with Channels 7 and 9 and Fox Footy. On the Couch was a regular awardwinner. And now his Open Mike is an interview series as compelling and riveting as any in sport.