LIZ HOGARTH speaks to Brisbane Lions’ AFL star Shaun Hart.

Shaun Hart, star performer with the Brisbane Lions Football Club, is pretty unusual. He is a committed Christian in a footy club; a blokey, aggressive, environment that at times tests his faith.

“The greatest example is in terms of sexual jokes and the disrespectful things that occur in football clubs,” says Shaun. “The challenge for me as a Christian is to say I will not be part of that and set an example that it is not what is necessary to have fun in this life. That’s the greatest moral challenge I face in the Lions.”
But it is not just in the dressing room that he faces opposition to his faith.

“I have had a couple of challenges on the football field that have been so pathetic that I have almost not heard them,” he says. “You also get a little bit screamed [at] over the fence by opposition people, because they like to vilify you and make you feel a bit uncomfortable, but it’s mainly stuff that you can laugh off.”
But Shaun says he gets about 99 per cent respect for living out what he believes. “The greatest step a Christian can take is to be real with what they believe, not be fraudulent and not be up one day and down the next,” he says.

Fellow veteran Lions player, Alastair Lynch, 35, testifies to Shaun’s success in showing something of Christ to his teammates. “A lot of the guys look up to Harty, just the way he conducts himself in life, and regardless of religious belief, he’s an honest type of person,” he says. “You can trust him, and if you can trust the bloke you’re playing next to, you get an enormous amount of confidence.”

‘Harty’ is no ordinary footballer. He won the Norm Smith medal for best player on the ground in the 2001 Grand Final and, at 32, remains a force in a team that have beaten all comers in the premiership for the past two years. As a sportsman he has achieved almost all he could have hoped or dreamed of, but he still gives the glory to God. “I could not have achieved what I have operating without my faith; there is no possibility of me doing that,” he says. “My relationship and understanding of God has driven me to be able to be that successful person and I would love more people to know the power of ‘the way, the truth and the life’ that Jesus is.

“I don’t want the accolades because I don’t think I deserve them. The accolades deserve to be elsewhere where people might not want me to put them, but that’s where they are going.”

It is not just after a successful game or an award that he honours God. Before his first grand final he meditated for a week beforehand on Philippians 4:13. “‘I can do all things through Christ’; I just drew on that because I just had to believe that it would come true for me.”

Though highly competitive, the Lions’ wingman tries – in the words of the famous poem – to ‘treat those two imposters’ triumph and disaster ‘just the same’. Teammates and commentators have spoken of his dignity and composure when he was briefly sent to the reserves early last year.

Shaun has been a Christian now for just over ten years, and his faith is well-known and well documented. He was Queensland’s Christian athlete of the year in 1998-9. And with the whole AFL world watching, he started his Norm Smith medal speech in 2001 by thanking “my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.”

His search for God started when he met Linda, now his wife, on moving to the Gold Coast from Victoria after being drafted by the Brisbane Bears, as they were called then, in 1989. They were both working for the Endeavour Foundation, an organisation that helps intellectually disabled people. He tells the story of how his wife and a friend found out that a footballer was coming to join the Foundation and were speculating on how much of a ‘big head’ he was going to be. “My wife likes telling that story,” he laughs.

Originally from Staffordshire in the UK, Linda had been a Christian for a number of years when the couple met. “Her incredible example and incredible joy led me to want to know what was in her that wasn’t in me, and I discovered that by going to church with her,” he says. The church was called Reach out for Christ, at Carrara on the Gold Coast. It was there one evening in October 1992, at the age of 21, that he finally decided to accept Christ into his life. “That was it,” he says. “I was hooked and just found myself finding out about what I had been wondering about life for so long.”

The family, including the couple’s two children, Jessy, 9, and Ricky, 5, now attend Christian City Church in the Gold Coast suburb of Miami.

Despite living and playing in Queensland for the past ten years, Shaun retains an affection for his home town of Shepparton in Victoria, where he first started playing football at the age of seven. Growing up as a Richmond supporter, he admits he sometimes feels the irony when he returns there to play as part of an often-victorious opposing team.

Despite a recent win over Richmond, this current season has not been quite the victory march towards the finals next month for the Brisbane Lions that some had predicted. Shaun considers the concern about the Lions recent form to be a ‘media beat-up’. But he admits some defensive work has not been up quite up to scratch.

The Lions remains undaunted, however, according to Harty. “I expect us to win,” he says. “If we are willing to do the things we know are right on all occasions we could end up with our very best result yet.”