DENIS Cotterell’s phone rang. Grant Hackett was on the line, sweating bullets, nervous as never before, sheepishly asking Cotterell if he could go around to his Gold Coast home because they needed to have a talk. A serious talk. Within an hour, one of the greatest coach-pupil relationships in world sport would be over.

Hackett knocked on the door of the man who had been by his side for 21 years. Their relationship went beyond the pool. They were mates, but more than mates. You don’t spend that long with someone and go through so many highs and lows without forming a bond that is the closest thing you can get to family without the blood lines and occasional bickering.

There was a lump in Hackett’s throat. This would be difficult.

Cotterell welcomed Hackett in. He had known for three weeks that something was amiss, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He hoped there wasn’t a problem with the 26-year-old’s wedding plans. Maybe Hackett was ill. Whatever the reason, something was eating him up inside.

And then Grant Hackett stood in the home of Denis Cotterell and said the words he never thought he would: he was leaving him to be coached by Ian Pope in Melbourne.

“I think he was probably worried about how I was going to react,” Cotterell said in his only interview since the split was announced last Monday.

“He was emotional. It was hard for him, I could see that, but it’s for the best. If I’d known that’s what it was about I would have suggested it first.

“He hadn’t been himself for a few weeks. I hadn’t seen him like that. I didn’t know what it was and he’d say, ‘It’s not you, it’s nothing’, but there was something distracting him. I was worried there might have been something personal going wrong so, to be honest, when he told me he was going to Melbourne and all the rest of it, I was glad it wasn’t any bad news.”

And there is Cotterell in a nutshell. The young man who had filled so many chapters of his life story was writing him out of the script. All the planning and plotting of Hackett’s surge for a third straight 1500 metres victory would be done by Pope.

Cotterell will no longer be involved after the world titles. Lesser men would have spat the dummy, thanked Hackett for his complete lack of loyalty and expressed a desire for him to rot in hell.

“Life goes on,” Cotterell said. “I’m more than fine about it. If that’s what he wants to do then it’s for the best. There are a lot of good memories there. Seeing him win his first Olympic gold medal, seeing him win in Athens when there were all those problems with his health, that was incredible. And the world records, and what he did at the last world championships, it’ll be good to look back on that some day.

“I’ll probably look back a lot more when his career is over. But it was just as good for me to see how he grew into the kind of bloke he is. He’s become such a leader and how he deals with people is very good. I’m proud of everything we did together.”

Hackett started working with Cotterell when he was five. He preferred ironman-style surf racing for the next decade until his spirit was broken by a loss that was not his fault. Hackett led a race by the proverbial mile until a fluke wave swept someone past him. It was a fluke loss. Hackett was not a believer in flukes.