Madge unmasked: Inside ‘legendary’ boot camps and truth about infamous harbour cruise

Michael Maguire is walking around the back of a golf practice range on his ever-lasting search for the edge. He’s just started pre-season torture tests with the Broncos, but this is an off day. Vomit buckets, range ball buckets, all in a week’s work.

Without being rude, he looks a little out of place, almost too intense for this genteel game which moves at a glacial pace. He marches around the range, his trademark chiselled chin protruding, shadowing and locking in on Broncos superfan Cameron Smith before a weekend round of the Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland.

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If there’s a clue, any clue, he can sniff from watching one of the country’s best and wealthiest athletes prepare for his pursuit, Maguire wants to put it under the microscope and use it at the Broncos. He sticks like glue to Smith for much of the morning. We might never know what he learned, if he learned anything, but we do know he’ll stop at nothing in his pursuit of coaching success.

“He’s got different oxygen in his blood, that boy,” jokes Gilbert Enoka, the mental skills coach with famed associations with the All Blacks, Maguire’s winning NSW State of Origin side and soon-to-be English cricket foes in Australia’s Ashes quest.

“What makes him tick? He’s driven and he wears his passion on his sleeve. When he wants to look at doing things, he will broaden his view, get opinions and when he understands what direction he wants to go in, he’s very, very decisive.

“He locks onto it like an Exocet missile.”

When Maguire was run out of Tiger Town a few years ago, his tale was a television series of expletives and a coaching career at the crossroads. For all he’d achieved with Wigan and South Sydney, where was he going to possibly launch his next missile from? Who would give him the chance?

It’s a testament to Maguire’s sheer determination that, within the space of three years, he’s on the cusp of completing the rarest rugby league coaching trifecta: inflicting the Kangaroos with their heaviest ever defeat when in charge of New Zealand, winning an Origin series decider at Suncorp Stadium after being 1-0 down, and now snapping the Broncos’ 19-year title drought, if they can beat the Storm in Sunday’s grand final.

Even harder is deciphering the man himself.

It’s difficult to get to really know Maguire, particularly so for members of the media, given his tough exterior and sheer bloody mindedness focused on one thing: winning. He prefers to keep the fourth estate at arm’s length.

The respected author Malcolm Knox was charged with writing the book about South Sydney’s fairytale 2014 premiership win. When he sat down with Maguire in the off-season for his recollections, he learned the coach was still renting the house he was living in, and he cared little for recounting what had just happened because, in his mind, another game was around the corner.

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Ever since those days, when he squeezed every drop out of the lemon to turn that South Sydney team from a good one into a great one, the perception of him hasn’t changed: a ruthless taskmaster who expects the same high standards of himself as his players.

But is perception reality?

“Well, I would say Madge is just about the most disciplined man I’ve met,” says Matty Johns, who has worked with Maguire as a sporadic consultant for almost two decades.

“The first cousin of discipline is stubbornness. That’s been one of those things throughout his career that’s been a criticism. The perfect example is the spew buckets.

“But that’s the price you’ve got to pay for success.”

Maguire’s pre-season boot camps are legendary, even if very few details have leaked into the public domain over the years.

Angus Crichton tells the story of Maguire’s old Rabbitohs team, at the end of a spirit-sapping few days with little to no sleep, being asked to separate grains of white and brown rice in the middle of the night.

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When he allowed cameras to a Broncos summer training session before their 2025 campaign, they filmed a brutal uphill road run in which Reece Walsh has never looked so far from beautiful. It’s worked.

It doesn’t stop there. He’s wielded baseball bats in front of his players to prove a point, and once even wanted to spend $1000 to bring a snake into the inner sanctum to teach his players how to strangle an opposition.

To an outsider, it’s the madness of Madge. To an insider, he knows exactly what he’s doing.

“The thing that really impressed me, and it taught me as well, was how he used the emotional hits,” Enoka says of the Blues’ incredible Origin comeback in 2024.

“In my experiences, I think they can be overused. If you have to get your men up emotionally all the time, then they’re lacking some sort of responsibility.

“His ability to hit that emotional mark, and to hit it so accurately, I think was the difference maker for the group. He put a lot of time and thought into what he did and why he did it. Every time he did it, there was a lift in the performance.”

Maguire’s first year at the Broncos has been anything but smooth. A reasonable theory would have been to suggest the side, after Kevin Walters’ brutal axing, would have exploded in the early rounds this year with a heavy pre-season schedule, and the challenge would have been the final third of the year when lethargy creeps in. It’s been the opposite.

The Broncos, who spluttered to six losses from seven games mid-way through this year, were enveloped by suggestions some players were put off by Maguire’s extreme training methods. There were even reported complaints about an early trip to Sydney for a mid-season game, where Maguire had organised the squad to board Anthony Bell’s lavish boat in Sydney Harbour and listen to an address from Tom Slingsby, Australia’s Olympic Games gold medal-winning sailor and skipper of the country’s SailGP team.

So, what really happened that night?

“He just came to me and said, ‘I totally have full faith in this team and believe in them. I just think it’s a mental thing. They’ve got all the skills, but we need to unlock that’,” Slingsby says. “He seemed like such a passionate coach trying to do right by the players.

“I spoke about my experiences about going to the Olympics and failing as favourite, then having to turn that around four years later with resolve. Or the America’s Cup when we were down 8-1 and managed to win 9-8. I just spoke to the guys and answered some questions.

“It’s hard to know how much they get out of something like that, but it was a really productive talk I thought.”

Yet how can you criticise Maguire when, in their two finals matches to date, the Broncos have roared back from 14-point deficits against the Raiders and Panthers to reach the decider?

If you were a betting man, you would suggest Maguire might not have slept much those nights. Enoka says the coach has “one of the most active and fertile minds” he’s ever seen.

So, does Maguire get any sleep?

“I’m sure the guy doesn’t,” jokes New Zealand Rugby League chief executive Greg Peters. “I asked him a few times and he dodged it. He’s in the gym at 4.30 in the morning and he’s always on. Always on.

“But I can’t speak highly enough of him and what he did with New Zealand. He’s completely driven and passionate about coaching, but also about people. We have a saying in New Zealand, ‘he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It’s people, it’s people, it’s people’.

“Michael subscribes to that big time. He’s a hard taskmaster. But he’s like a sponge in terms of learning, engaging and wanting to find different ways of learning.”

Says Maguire’s old Raiders teammate and current Blues coach Laurie Daley: “This is his passion, it’s his drive, he loves footy. He wants to win and 24/7, he’s always thinking about it. He brings that intensity with him wherever he goes.”

Johns knows him better than most, and he puts Maguire’s success at the Broncos down to a few factors, chiefly his ability to compromise his style of coaching to suit Brisbane’s DNA and its natural entertainers such as Walsh, Ezra Mam and Kotoni Staggs. And not doing things by half measures.

Shortly after Maguire took over the Tigers, he asked Johns if he could bring a couple of his playmakers to a session near the Fox League star’s northern beaches home.

“Sure, why don’t you bring a couple of back-rowers to so we can work on a few combinations,” Johns said.

Maguire agreed.

“As I’m walking down to the field, I walk past my neighbour and he says to me, ‘the Wests Tigers are up there training’,” Johns says.

“I said, ‘yeah, they’re bringing a couple of playmakers and a couple of back-rowers’.

“The bloke said, ‘a couple? There’s f***ing 30 blokes there’. I literally turned up and went, ‘how the f*** am I going to run this session?’ But we got there.”

By about 9.30pm on Sunday night, Maguire will know if he’s got there with the Broncos.

It’s been a long time since Wayne Bennett engineered Brisbane’s 2006 grand final upset of Bellamy’s Storm, and there will be a special place in Queensland rugby league history reserved for NSW’s last Origin-winning coach if he can do it to Melbourne again.

“I can understand why people say Queenslanders coach Queensland sides best,” Johns says. “Their style of effort is different to ours. In NSW, in a lot of ways we’re about ‘Xs’ and ‘Os’. In Queensland, it’s about effort and simplicity.

“What you’re seeing now is the benefits of that tough pre-season. We’ve seen epic finals games against great sides and they’ve come from 14 points down both times.

“If you want to know what the answer is, it’s in the bottom of one of those vomit buckets.”

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