Adrian Barich: Ian ‘Serge’ Miller was the best bloke football ever gave us, and I have one regret

The Perth Football Club and the West Coast Eagles have suffered many big losses in their time, but this one feels like one of the biggest.

Ian Miller, known throughout football as “Serge”, has died at 76, ending more than half a century of extraordinary service to our great game.

If you asked anyone who knew him to describe Serge in one word, you would struggle to get past “real good bloke”.

But even that doesn’t do him justice. Serge was kind. Compassionate. Funny. Generous. He cared about people.

In the political, competitive and heavily masculine world of football, Serge possessed a remarkable quality. He was never heard to say a bad word about anyone. Not once. He could meet Gordon Ramsay and come back with: “He’s actually not a bad bloke when you get to know him.”

His football CV was outstanding. He played 276 games for Perth, Fitzroy and East Perth, won the Sandover Medal, represented WA and was an All-Australian.

He won two premierships, one with my beloved Perth Demons in 1968 and another with East Perth in 1978, when he also won the Simpson Medal.

He is in the WA Football and Perth Football Club halls of fame, our Team of the Century, and a life member of both the Eagles and the AFL.

But strangely, when people talk about Serge this week, they rarely start with the Sandover Medal or the 276 games.

Serge, along with his great mate Allan “Chubby” Stiles, brought me to WA from Canberra in 1983 to play football. That decision changed my life, and I wasn’t the only young footballer who could say that.

He made young men feel safe, welcome and valued, particularly those who had crossed the country as teenagers without their families.

Later, at West Coast, after working alongside Malthouse, Wiley and Nisbett through the Eagles’ golden era of the 90s, he became the club’s player services co-ordinator, looking after generations of Eagles.

He picked them up from the airport, found them host families and stayed in touch with their parents.

When Ben Cousins reached one of the toughest moments of his life, Serge didn’t walk away. He went with him to the United States when Ben went into rehab, alongside Ben’s dad Bryan.