Phillip Walsh was one of the key pillars on which the Brisbane Football Club was born and a man who will forever hold a special place in club history.

He was the inaugural winner of the Brisbane Bears Club Champion Award in 1987, and was at the forefront of a playing group thrown together in a fashion almost 29 years ago that is as incomprehensible as his tragic passing in Adelaide today.

Under special recruiting guidelines established by the then VFL, the Bears were to be the beneficiaries of a one-off foundation draft in which each of the 12 existing clubs would make available three out-of-contract players free of charge.

They had to have played a minimum of one senior game in 1986, or a reserves finals match.

Ken Murphy, Bears General Manager, said at the time: “It’s a joke. When we committed to spend $4million on the license fee it was on the understanding that the other clubs would help te new team become competitive. Yet there’s hardly a player of genuine talent on the list. The VFL is kidding itself if they think this is a good list”.

It wasn’t. Only eight of the 36 players offered to the expansion club ever joined the club, and they played a grand total of 114 games. But the one standout in what was largely a bunch of unwanted misfits was Walsh, a left-footed wingman who played 60 Bears games.

Walsh, who turned 27 shortly before his first Brisbane season, very quickly established himself as a leader among the inaugural Bears playing group.

On the weekend of 6-7-8 February 1987, less than two months before their first game, the entire football operation ventured to Orchid Beach Resort of Fraser Island for a pre-season camp. It was a site owned by dual QAFL Grogan Medalist and long-time local football sponsor Keith Leach.

It wasn’t your average camp. The players trained on the air strip which coach Peter Knights said at the time boasted a surface ‘better than some grounds he’d played on in Melbourne’ despite occasionally having to make way for light planes to land.

Players were split into six groups for competitive activities in things ranging from normal football drills and beach iron man to Frisbee gridiron and football baseball. Walsh’s ‘Coconuts’ narrowly edged out Mark Mickan’s ‘Mangoes’ for the $300 prize. Other team leaders in what was something of a pointer to eagerly-awaited leadership appointments were Mark Williams, Frank Dunell, Geoff Raines and Mick McCarthy.

Walsh went on to play all 22 games for the Bears in their first season and polled 24 votes to win the B&F from Raines (22), captain Mickan (17) and Mike Richardson (17). He polled 19 votes to finish fourth in the 1988 Bears B&F behind Mark Withers (22), Raines (21) and Scott McIvor (20).

In 1987 I was young reporter at The Courier-Mail who was assigned the role of covering the wildly fluctuating fortunes of the fledging Bears.

It was a time when the relationship between players and reporters was altogether different to that which is so heavily regulated and controlled today. With colleague Brian Burke, from the Daily Sun, I was fortunate to enjoy unfettered access. We travelled with the team to the extent that the club booked our flights abs accommodation. We even rode on the team bus, and often the best stories were those that were never written.

It was an intimidating situation for a raw scribe from Queensland, who suddenly found himself mixing freely and writing about players he'd watched in awe on television in years prior, but most players were welcoming and accommodating. None more so than Walsh.

He understood fully the pioneer role in he and the club had been thrust into unchartered football territory if Queensland. And if a less engaged or less sympathetic player would give me a hard time he'd say "give him a break - he's doing his job and we need that".

Even then Walsh was a big picture man and a protector of the code, just as he was right to the end in his days as coach of the Adelaide Crows.

In an interview about a decade ago for the official Bears history, Walsh admitted he was ‘chucked out’ by Richmond, and didn’t have too many options when he moved to Brisbane. He was going to get sacked anyway, he said. But it was a move he didn’t regret for one moment, and saw him play the best football of his life.

Originally from Hamilton, Walsh had won the VFL’s unofficial ‘rookie of the year’ title in 1983, playing 22 games in a side which reached the preliminary final. But he’d shocked the club, seeking a transfer to Richmond, and after three days of a court hearing he and John Annear were granted a release to the Tigers. But it was a bad move, he said, as he added only 40 games in 1984-86.

“I had unfinished business. It was a new club and everyone was going up there with no baggage. I saw it as an exciting opportunity and I was really desperate to prove I could play,” Walsh said, still remembering vividly the day the bulk of the interstate players flew with partners to Brisbane.

“It was the day Rocket Racer won the Perth Cup. It was owned by Laurie Connell and I backed it. It had that much elephant juice in it that they had to walk it back to the stalls afterwards. And it died later that day.”

Walsh’s 60 games for Brisbane were split over five years. After his 22 games in 1987 and 20 games in ’88 he was plagued by injury and managed just eight games in ’89 and 10 games in ’90 before he didn’t play at all in 1991.

He played his last game against Footscray at Western Oval on 1 September 1990. The Bears lost by 21 points but Walsh had 28 possessions and kicked two goals in a side which included Marcus Ashcroft, David Bain, Campbell, Darren Carlson, Peter Davidson, Rodney Eade, Michael Gibson, Brad Hardie, Alex Ishchenko, Martin Leslie, Rod Lester-Smith, David O’Keeffe, Chris O’Sullivan, Steve Reynoldson, Mike Richardson, Mark Roberts, David Wearne, Mark Withers and Mark Zanotti.

Walsh reflected fondly on his time at Brisbane. Ï never regretted it for one moment, and I certainly played my best football up there under Knightsy,” he said.

“For a lot of guys it was a bit like an extended footy trip but I was a bit older and more settled. It was a huge culture shock, going from Melbourne to what Brisbane was like in those days. It wasn’t the cosmopolitan city it is today – it was more like a big country town. And nobody knew much about footy.”

Nor did coach Knights ever regret taking Walsh. “He was one of the best players we picked up because of his strength of character. He was so professional in the way he went about everything… as professional as anyone I’d come across,” said Knights.

“He had a point to prove and he was terrific. While we had our three official leaders in Mark Mickan, Mark Williams and Steve Reynoldson there was really a core group of six, and Walshy, Geoff Raines and Mike Richardson really helped set the example with their professionalism and preparation.”

Walsh was also one of the few Bears players who settled into outside employment straight away. A secondary school teacher, he taught at Pine Rivers, Nashville, near Sandgate, Loganlea and later at a new school at Ellanora on the Gold Coast.

“A lot of guys were happy to sit around not working because they were being paid compensation money but that wasn’t a very healthy situation. At the outset a lot of people promised help with jobs that didn’t eventuate and that made it all very difficult. It was just a really tough time and of all the friends I’ve made in football some of the closest are from the Bears days,” he said.

As the inaugural Bears club champion Walsh received $6000, a trophy and a lounge suit from teammate Brad Hardie’s fiancee’s father, who owned a furniture store and was a keen supporter.

Also, he received a ticket to one of the most memorable experiences of his life. An All-Australian tour to Ireland via New York with Bears teammate and Australian goalkeeper Matthew Campbell.

“It was in the days when they picked the side from the teams which didn’t make the finals and I got a late call-up after I’d won the B&F,” Walsh recalled. “It was strictly Gaelic football – no hybrid rules. We played a warm-up game against the New York Irish Gaelic Association in the south Bronx. It was a team full of New York policemen and as soon as they hit the front in the last quarter they blew the siren. It was the only time they led for the whole game. And then they took us out for a wow of a time that night.”

In Ireland, playing in front of a packed house at Croke Park in Dublin, the host nation won the first Test by eight points before Australia, coached by Neil Kerley, took the second by 21 points after a mid-tour training camp cum holiday in London. Prime Minister Bob Hawke was among the sell-out crowd for the third Test, where the Aussies clinched the series by four points in controversial fashion.

“We got pretty fair-dinkum after the first game,” said Walsh of a series marred by a lot of fisticuffs.  “We fought the second game so they brought all the thugs in for the third game. Paul Roos was sent off and under the rules he wasn’t allowed back on. But he came back and we won, which prompted all sorts of protests. I ended up with the ball when the final siren went. It was like the FA Cup where each player goes up through the crowd to get presented with a medal. It was a really big thing. Sensational.”

Teammate Campbell, a close friend of the popular wingman and now a FoxFooty commentator, recalls the tour well. “One of the Irish commentators called him ‘Willie’ so all the boys referred to him as Willie Walsh for the rest of the trip,” he said today.

“One night about 10 of us were out for dinner and Walshy came up with a novel way of deciding how he would pay the bill. He organised a game of coins whereby we tossed heads or tails and you were eliminated if you were the odd one out. I think he thought the rest of us were pretty stupid and it was a good way of getting out of paying but as fate would have it he was the last one left and ended up paying the full cheque,” Campbell said.

Mickan, Walsh’s captain in the early years of the Bears, today described Walsh as “the ultimate professional … he was a long way ahead of his time in that regard,” he said.

Walsh also received the Bears’ first Brownlow Medal vote – the ‘one’ vote in the first game against North Melbourne, when he had a team-high 31 possessions in an unforgettable 33-point win..

“I always tell people I led the Brownlow that year,” he quipped at the time. “I’ll never forget that first game – I played on John Holt and didn’t have a bad night. For a team that was slagged off so much those first two games were very memorable, although I played very poorly the game against Geelong. I played on Mark Yeats and couldn’t get near it.”

Walsh was also the first Bears player to be secretly married in Brisbane. It was in a small registry office on the site of what became the Brisbane Casino. About 12noon on 15 April 1987 Walsh and long-time partner Meredith exchanged their vows in which he described as ‘a spur of the moment thing’. The only witnesses were teammate Chris Waterson and his wife Carol, and by 5pm the groom was at training. He told nobody at the club, and had Waterson not posted a notice on the players’ bulletin board nobody would have known.

Also, he was the first person to sue the club. “The AFL still had a contract which said if you were put off the senior list you no longer had to be paid. It was a draconian clause compared to what the CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement) is today. I had the club sign another document which guaranteed I’d be kept on the senior list for the duration of my contract and they broke that in ’91 when Robert Walls sacked me. I’ve got no complaints with that – I only played one practice match and was injured for the rest of the year – but it was just the legality of it all,” he said. So he sued Bears owner Reuben Pelerman and won an out-of-court settlement the day before it was due to go to court.

Walsh’s time in Brisbane spanned four coaches but he only played under two – Knights (1987-89) and Norm Dare (1990) - due to injury. He missed the short Paul Feltham era in late 1989 and didn’t play a game under Walls in 1991.

Still, in the combined 29-year Bears/Lions history he still ranks second in games played in jumper No.18. Only Craig Lambert, who played 96 games for the club in No.18 from 1994-2000, sits above him on a list which includes Peter Worsfold (21 games from 1992-93), Anthony Corrie (53 games from 2004-08), Todd Banfield (53 games from 2010-12) and Nick Robertson (16 games from 2014-15).

Even after his retirement Walsh stayed a further 12 months on the Gold Coast before returning to Melbourne in 1993. For two years he studied full-time, completing a Masters Degree in Japanese before getting back on the football merry-go-round. He was strength and conditioning co-ordinator under Gary Ayres at Geelong from 1995-98 and joined Port Adelaide as assistant-coach under former Bears teammate and close friend Mark Williams in 1999.

He played a key support role to Williams in Port Adelaide’s 2004 premiership, had an extended stint under John Worsfold at West Coast and returned to Port in 2014 before winning the Adelaide Crows senior coaching role this year.

Peter Blucher is a former AFL writer with The Courier-Mail who later served as Communications Manager of the Brisbane Bears/Lions.