WATCH: See highlights of Sam Lloyd
Sam Lloyd's parents took a step back this week, retreating to Barwon Heads to draw breath. They headed home to Deniliquin on Wednesday - Bill on his motorbike, Prue in the car, along a road they've travelled so many times Bill admits "we've worn out a lot of vehicles".
<>The journey might have worn out their son, too, but Sam has become very good at making every sign post in his football life a winner. Last Friday night, in front of about 150 proud-as-punch "Deni" folk at the MCG (and 62,000 or so others), he finally reached his dream destination.
"Sam's always achieved what he wants; he's pretty determined," Bill says, not overly surprised that his son became an AFL footballer - and Richmond's best player on debut at that - aged 24. Endangering familial harmony, Prue is having none of that.
"It was definitely a surprise to us - we never, ever thought this would happen, and I don't think Sam did either." They concur on their second son's ability to meet every challenge put before him once he's committed himself to the task, a quality that underpins football's latest mature-aged fairytale.
His studies at Geelong Grammar were a case in point. "He'd never studied, then he put his mind to it that 'this is the score I need', and he blew everyone away."
Now, he is one subject away from completing a construction management degree at RMIT, although his mother teases that his motivation stems from wanting to get the upper hand on his builder brother Jack, two year's Sam's senior and to whom he is close. "He probably just wants to boss the older brother around, have the builder working for him."
His AFL apprenticeship was more drawn out than his studies. Having been in the Geelong Falcons squad but denied a game by an ankle injury, Lloyd travelled back and forth from Melbourne with Jack and another mate while playing three seasons for Deniliquin, kicking 110 goals as a 20-year-old in 2010 and another 65 playing mainly on the ball in a premiership season the next year.
Gary Parsons, who coached the club to five flags in nine years, cherished having a player of "uncanny ability" who was a nightmare for opposition sides to match-up on. "You put a little bloke on him and he sits on your head, put a big bloke on him and he's too good on the ground," Parsons says.
The next three years took in Mt Eliza, Bendigo Bombers and Frankston, stepping stones that became progressively more slippery yet were traversed with aplomb. Prue Lloyd thinks her son's Deni ton put him on the radar; "they followed him a bit, and he just kept playing footy". The Lloyds have never pressured Jack, Sam and Jane. For their middle child - "a bit of a menace, a bit of a character" - one thing just led to another.
Bill Lloyd has a rugby background from time spent in Sydney and country NSW, worked in swimming pool distribution for many years, and on the back of the millennium drought developed a device for cleansing channel or dam water to spare people on the land from buying drinking water. The "Floculator" worked well, but he didn't bother having it patented.
Now he has a local storage business, does clay target shooting for sport, and performs what he calls "my community service" by collecting scrap metal that forms a major fundraising plank each season for the Deniliquin Rams footy club. "I think it's a great thing to support kids' sport, keep them away from drugs and the like."
Prue is ladies' captain at the golf club, and with competition on Thursdays and Saturdays and that well-worn three-and-a-half hour drive to Melbourne whenever Richmond's fixture accommodates, is girding herself for a busy year. "We'll just take it as it comes ... we've got our lives."
They won't make it to Brisbane on Thursday night, but might join those proud townspeople at the footy club where everyone will convene after training to have a meal and cheer on the first local to make the AFL scene since Leo Barry.
Their son's life has changed in a dramatically good way, but Parsons says to see him at a local wedding recently was to find the same down-to-earth, popular young bloke who not so long ago was a Ram, and by his own estimation "a million miles" from being a Tiger.
"You wouldn't have known he was playing AFL," says Parsons, whose 17-year-old daughter told Lloyd not to forget her if he gets invited to the Brownlow.
Now that he's taken the last step on football's varied pathway, his old coach thinks a leap of another kind isn't beyond him. Speaking to Richmond's website this week, Lloyd presented as a humble rookie with much to learn, especially where applying forward pressure - not such a fundamental when you're kicking bags of goals in the bush - is concerned.
Parsons has no doubt he'll meet that challenge, too, and could even become the latest in a long line of Richmond cult figures.
"We've seen him take some unbelievable marks up here. I said to someone the other day, I think he'll take mark of the year before the season's out. I don't think we've seen anywhere near the best of him yet."
His mother noted her son's unease in the season's early rounds, sensed that he just needed to get a game to settle the flutter. This week she spoke to "a different person, he was so much more relaxed".
Not that he's really any different. "He won't change," Prue Lloyd says. "He won't be allowed to anyway."
