Hero: A man of distinguished courage, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities. Someone regarded as a model or ideal.

Melbourne legend Ron Barassi, 78, at the service for Robbie Flower, 59. Photo: Getty

Memorial services are like swims in the ocean: once you’ve made the effort, you rarely regret it.

Sometimes, they are truly uplifting, an antidote to what Bruce Springsteen called the “meanness in this world”.

So it was as the dark suits and expanding girths and bald pates shuffled into the MCG on Monday to farewell former Melbourne footballer Robbie Flower, who died earlier this month, aged 59.

If we didn’t already know it, it soon became clear that Flower was more than the sum total of his parts. As the AFL looks increasingly like a meat market for the pampered, he represented something intangible, something meaningful, a byword for old-fashioned virtues.

No less a person than ‘Superboot’ Bernie Quinlan, who met Flower on a tour of Ireland with a representative side in 1978 and became his best mate, declared: “He was my hero.”

“I wish I could have played football like Robbie Flower. He was a fantastic player,” Quinlan told an audience of hundreds of former and current players and administrators and common or garden Demon fans.

“But he’s my hero not because of his football, but because of what he was as a person. He was just a magnificent human being. He embraced everybody. He had time for everybody.”

In an ‘Open Mike’ session with football journalist Mike Sheahan, Quinlan and Sheahan both spoke of how Flower had helped them through personal crises in their lives, or the lives of their loved ones.

“But we didn’t have exclusive rights to him,” Quinlan told Sheahan. “Everybody who know Robbie Flower loved him.”

Sheahan talked of how Flower’s decision to go public with his prostate cancer as a 45-year-old had saved the lives of many middle-aged men.

The famous No. 2, with autograph, in its spiritual home at the MCG. Photo: Getty

Business partner Chris Reidy explained how Flower considered SEDA, the educational organisation he helped found to assist sports-minded young people struggling to engage with school, as his “single greatest achievement”.

Todd Viney, as tough a player to have pulled on a red and blue jumper, was moved to tears as he recalled the club captain who opened his home up to him for a weekend when the club was courting him.

“We formed a very special bond. After that weekend, I was never going to play anywhere else. That was his greatness,” he said.

Viney recounted the story of the 68-kilogram weakling, a Demon-supporting schoolboy with Coke-bottle glasses who rose from the fourths to the firsts in one season, who had to buy a ticket to play in his first game because the man on the gate did not believe he was a player.

He said the most valuable things in life were irreplaceable. So it was with Flower the footballer, a man who could extricate himself from the most precarious situations.

“People came in droves to watch him play. No one could tackle him. It was like he had a forcefield around him. He just floated across the ground,” Viney said.

“No one played like that then. Who plays like that now? And I’m sure there’s no one in the future who is going to play like Robbie.”

The closest sporting comparison he could draw was with Roger Federer, another “one-off” athlete who made the game look slow as he practised his craft.

He said he could never work out how Flower made a success of his sporting goods business, where Viney briefly worked. The shop was always full of people talking to Flower and getting autographs, but they never seemed to buy anything.

Paul Kelly pays tribute to one of his favourite footballers. Photo: Getty

Brother Tom Flower, who briefly played alongside Robbie at Melbourne and reckons he watched about 260 of his 272 games for the Demons, described an uncomplicated childhood in the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena.

“We’d walk to school in the morning, play some footy before school, at lunchtime, and again in the backyard after school,” Tom Flower said.

He and Robbie shared a bedroom until the day big brother left home. There were three Flower boys – James, Robert and Thomas – but they were always known as Jim, Bob and Tom.

“Mum always used to joke that, if nothing else, we would be able to spell our names,” he said.

“When he started playing football in 1973 he became Robert Flower. We didn’t know who he was.”

He marvelled at the public response to his brother’s death, and how the same word kept coming up: hero. He read out the definition quoted at the top of this article.

“How can he be a hero to everybody? ‘My boyhood hero’, ‘my childhood hero’, ‘my family hero’.

“He was everybody’s hero.”