Two Essendon premierships, a club captaincy and fifteen years as vice president all belonged to the same one-club footballer. Don McKenzie, the ruckman who played all 266 of his VFL games in the red and black, died on September 23, 2026, at the age of 87, Essendon Football Club said.

McKenzie made his senior debut in 1960 and grew into Essendon's leading ruckman across the following decade, contesting centre bounces and around-the-ground stoppages at Windy Hill for fourteen seasons. As a ruckman his job was rarely to take the headlines himself, more to win first use of the ball for the rovers and forwards around him. He played in Essendon's 1962 premiership team and was one of the club's best players in the ruck when it won the flag again in 1965.

He won the club's Crichton Medal as Essendon's best and fairest player in 1966 and played an interstate match for Victoria in 1967. McKenzie was vice-captain in 1968, and Essendon handed him the captaincy for the 1969 season, the same year the club made him a Life Member.

His captaincy lasted one season. In 1970, McKenzie joined four Essendon teammates in refusing to take the field for the season opener as they pushed the club for standardised player payments, a stand the club has since called progressive for its era; the captaincy passed to Barry Davis soon after. McKenzie played on as a Bomber for four more seasons, retiring in 1974 with 266 senior games to his name and not one of them for another club.

He returned to Windy Hill in 1981 as a committeeman and served as Essendon's vice president for the next fifteen years, then chaired the club's football sub-committee in 1997 and 1998. In 2002 Essendon ranked him 43rd in its list of Champions, and in 2010 the club inducted him into its Hall of Fame, according to Essendon Football Club.

Looking back on the premiership years in a 2020 interview with SEN, McKenzie spoke of the bonds forged with his teammates rather than the games themselves. "They are great memories, the comradery that we built up in relation to the premiership players," he said, adding of the sides' annual reunion, "There's a get together every year and it's a good time to catch up with everybody."

McKenzie is survived by his wife, Jill, and their children, Sue, Peter and Jenny. Essendon president Andrew Welsh said, "Don was a true giant of our Club and we're saddened to hear of his passing. He was one of footy's quintessential hard men."

McKenzie's name now sits on Essendon's Hall of Fame wall, a marker of a life that ran from the teenager who first contested a bounce at Windy Hill in 1960 to the vice president who helped run the football department three decades later. Two premiership medals, a Life Membership and 266 games with a single club are the plain record of it. What outlasts the record is the reunion he kept returning to every year, long after the guernsey came off, to sit again with the men he won those flags beside.