NOT SO long ago, it was unusual for a footballer to be studying at a tertiary institution. And in those days, it was a tradition at footy clubs for any player with a few brains to be nicknamed 'Professor' or 'Doc'.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nick Wilton was a key-position player at Hawthorn who was known as Doc. In his case, it was for good reason: he was studying medicine.

His Glenferrie teammates were fascinated to be playing alongside a footballer who spent his weekdays with a stethoscope around his neck, rather than a hammer in his hand. Between training drills, players asked for a diagnosis on a problem that was ailing them.

"When they got injured, they used to ask me what was going on," Wilton said, adding, when pressed, that Peter Russo and Gary Ayres were his most regular patients.

Now 53, Wilton recaps his career in a coffee shop behind his Moorabbin radiology practice, Melbourne Imaging Services, in Melbourne's south-east. He is still tall and lean, only a few kilograms over his playing weight.

He envies 1990s Adelaide wingman Matthew Liptak, who managed to combine
footy and medical studies because he spread those studies over several years, but in the early 1980s, deferral or part-time studies were not an option for medical students.

Besides being one of the last footballers to work around a medical career, Wilton's background is unusual in that his home address as a teenager was in London, where his father was a member of the diplomatic corps.

He boarded at Xavier College in Kew, which was in Hawthorn's suburban zone, but as a London resident, he was not zoned to any club.

Melbourne and St Kilda tried hard to get him, but Wilton chose Hawthorn because the Hawks in that era were more successful.

In 1978, when Wilton was 20, he played a couple of games in the seniors. In 1979, he played a few more, only to wreck his knee halfway through the season.

His first full season back in the swing after the knee reconstruction was 1981.

Unfortunately, that was the year that, as a fifth-year medical student, he was obliged to live in a hospital and be available to work from early morning until late evening.

He was forever swapping nights with his fellow students so he could get to training. On weekends, he had to swap Saturday shifts just to be able to play.

Wilton squeezed in one night's training a week in 1981 and played a few more senior games but, by mid-1982, his ambition to combine footy and medical studies became untenable when he finished at the bottom of his class in his mid-year exams.

"The dean of medicine said, 'You either give up footy or you give up medicine'," Wilton said. His Hawthorn career was over after 13 games and seven goals.

Wilton said his most memorable game with the Hawks was a reserves match. It was the opening round in 1982. The half-forward line read: Dermott Brereton, Nick Wilton, Gary Ablett.

Wilton was playing on an old mate from Xavier College, Steve Curtain. At quarter-time, with a few goals under his belt, Wilton chided his mate.

"Don't worry about you," Curtain said. "The bloke next to you is a champion."

Wilton was adamant Ablett had 50 possessions in that game - and failed
to utter a word to his teammates.

"They'd just got him down from Drouin that morning. I kicked 12 that day. I reckon I got eight from him."

Players from both teams were shaking their heads as they left the ground after the final siren. All of them knew they had seen something special.

Wilton resumed his football career in 1983 at amateur club Old Xaverians, playing for another five years. After many of those games, he had to start
a shift at Prince Henry's Hospital at 6pm. On one occasion, he started the night by watching a Collegians player, whom he had just played on, being brought in to the ward on a stretcher.

For several years, Wilton injected AFL players with painkillers that enabled them to play, but, in recent years, he has given away the weekend work and stuck to radiology.

His winter weekends now include regular skiing and watching Hawthorn with his three sons, aged 22, 20 and 18. He goes to the occasional Hawthorn reunion and he often bumps into former teammates at social functions.

And they still call him Doc.

This story first appeared in the AFL Record