KEN Hunter was a magnificent footballer.

There wasn't much to him physically, and with his jumper hanging out of his shorts and his socks perennially around his ankles, he didn't look the part. 

But boy, could he play. He was a magnificent half-back flanker for Carlton, a natural at VFL level from his very first game in 1981 after crossing from Claremont. 

But Hunter belied his light frame by being as tough as they came. He would be thrown around like a ragdoll seemingly every week, but would get up, gather his senses and move on to the next contest. 

Carlton supporters adored him; opposition supporters wished he played for them and in the tribal 1980s that was high-praise indeed. He was part of three Carlton premierships teams and if he didn't make the VFL team of the 1980s, he came awfully close.

Yet, in a remarkable interview for a recently released book, Hunter has spoken at length about the battle with depression that he fought less than 12 months after playing in Carlton's 1987 premiership team.

Hunter told writer Matt Zurbo in his book Champions All that the issue started when Robert Walls took some experienced players to task for breaking a no-nonsense rule and then rebuked Hunter when the half-back called out for being too harsh. 

Within a few weeks Walls and Hunter weren’t talking, and then the player was dropped to the reserves. "I got dropped at 32," Walls told Hunter. "See how you handle it."

Hunter was forced to train with the reserves on the oval outside Princes Park. Then he had trouble sleeping and was soon on medication. "I had no idea what depression was. I thought I was going insane."

Hunter ended the 1988 season in the reserves and after the last game of the season he had to be restrained from ripping off his Carlton jumper and throwing it into the crowd. He ended up being admitted to a hospital in Queensland, a development the club covered up by saying he had injured a hamstring.

As the Blues prepared for their preliminary final against Melbourne, Hunter was walking the streets of the Gold Coast. "I didn't know what I was capable of doing to myself if this thing I couldn't see or touch stopped me from playing in a Grand Final. I couldn't handle it. Then they lost." 

Hunter told Zurbo that he thought the Blues not making the Grand Final might help his condition, but that made things worse and his health only started to improve later that summer after a renewed push to take the correct medication. He played his final season with the Blues in 1989.

"I remembered as a kid, when someone had a mental illness people would always go, 'Shh, shh'," Hunter said. "I don't want to be seen like that. I'm not ashamed at what happened."

"I want people to know it's not just strangers on the street it happens to. Depression can hit anyone, it's nothing to be ashamed of. You can come out of it as a better person. It's bigger than football. 

At a time when more young players than ever are walking away from the game because the demands are too great, Hunter's words are a reminder that this is not a new phenomenon in football and that even when it was a part-time, semi-professional pursuit for the players, the demands were great and the pressure enormous. 

Norm Smith's dark side revealed 

Zurbo's book is quite a read. A longtime amateur and bush footballer and contributor to publications such as The Footy Almanac, he has spent the best part of the last five years interviewing 171 past and present AFL players.

It is a social history of League footy – on and off the ground – starting from South Melbourne rover Billy Williams' recollections of the infamous 'Bloodbath' Grand Final of 1945. 

One of the more extraordinary passages features Noel McMahen, Melbourne's premiership captain in 1955 and 1956 – the first of Norm Smith's six premierships at the club.

Not many of those at Melbourne at the time ever dared speak critically of Smith – at least on the record – but McMahen talks about the 'heartbreak' of Alan La Fontaine making the brave call to play 19 first-year players in 1951, and then being sacked as coach after a one-win season, to be replaced by Smith who he claims was scheming all year to be his replacement despite coaching Fitzroy at the time.

"He upset a lot of people at Melbourne," McMahen said. "He'd take Melbourne players back to his shed and at home and talk to them. He'd always planned to come back. It split the club. As a player it was terrible."

McMahen claimed that Smith put himself ahead of the club, despite all the success he enjoyed at Melbourne. "And that's why he failed eventually. His own personality was always bigger than the footy club."

The true meaning of the game

Zurbo got many of his subjects to make some candid admissions. Graham Cornes talked of the difficulties many of his fellow Vietnam veterans faced when they returned home from active service, whereas he had football to lean back on. 

"No support network, no discipline, no purpose. It's really why so many Vietnam veterans have struggled later in life. I was eternally grateful to the Glenelg Football Club," he said.

Zurbo recorded the final interview with Melbourne great Robert Flower before he passed away in 2014 and got Geelong's Neville Bruns to speak candidly – 30 years later – about his clash with Leigh Matthews in 1985.

Mick Martyn recalls being in Bali with Jason McCartney in Bali in 2001 when the bombs exploded, while former Hawthorn ruckman Ian Paton recounts in excruciating detail just how hard League football was for a 16-year-old who had just crossed from Tasmania. It is fair to say, there wasn't much glamour involved.

But at the same time, his book is a celebration of what makes the game so special. As Stewart Loewe recounted the first time he pulled on the St Kilda jumper in an under-19s game. "It doesn't get any better than this. I was just in love."

Champions All. A History of AFL/VFL Football in the Players' Own Words is available through Echo Publishing.