IF NOT for the urgings of his father to 'have a go in the city', Bill Walker may never have stepped on to the big stage of football to reveal his incredible skills.

The 34th and newest Legend of Australian Football stands easily alongside the greatest to have played the game with a record bulging with success – triple premiership player at Swan Districts, 300-gamer, five-time club best and fairest and the only person in the history of the WAFL to have claimed four Sandover Medals as best and fairest in the competition.

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But growing up in Narembeen in the 1940s and 1950s, 300km east of Perth in the WA wheatbelt at a time when road travel was much slower than today, the idea of playing in the major competition in the city was like travelling to another universe.

Born in Huntly, New Zealand during the war, Walker and his family were back in WA by 1943 and he grew up an active sport-loving kid in the country.

Upon finishing school at 16, the priority for Walker was to get his qualifications as a wool classer, to begin his working life, and he was more than happy playing in the bush – dominating at every junior level and regularly winning the champion player award at annual country carnivals once he began playing against men.

While small and lightly built as a rover, he was strong for his size and blessed with lightning pace, incredible stamina and outstanding skills on both sides of his body. The physical gifts were coupled with a steely determination to be the best, find ways to improve and a competitive streak that hated losing.

Junior coach Jock Morris had taught him well about both winning the ball in packs, and protecting himself at the same time, while also stressing that the very best players could use both feet and were equally skilled with left and right hand, which made him a standout.

The eight WAFL clubs in the city certainly all knew who he was, but getting his commitment to come to Perth was a different matter entirely, particularly after his first trip to a big football club ended abruptly.

"I loved footy the moment I started playing as a child and played at Narembeen, then Merredin where I boarded so I could attend Merredin High School, which wasn't too far from Narembeen," Walker said.

"I was going pretty well with footy but once I finished school, my priority was to get qualified as a wool classer and I took off up further north for a couple of years and really concentrated on work, just playing in different places depending where I was.

"I had all the Perth clubs chasing me but I wasn't that interested in moving to the city while I was still trying to get my qualifications.

"I got invited down once to go to East Fremantle and train when Steve Marsh was coaching there, just after he'd left South Fremantle, but that didn't go well and put me off the city for a few more years."

Marsh, a member of the Australian Football Hall of Fame and a Legend of the WAFL Hall of Fame with seven flags as a player and coach, was a firebrand with a fierce tongue and the club secretary hadn't told him about a new young talent they were hoping to get to the club.

"I arrived there at Fremantle Oval with my gear and the secretary introduced me to Steve Marsh and told him I was going to train. Marsh looked at me as a little young bloke and then looked at the other bloke and 'what the … hell do you think I am, a …. babysitter or something? I'm the …. senior coach trying to train men. Get him down the other end of the ground.' There were a few more adjectives in there too when he said it. I just stood there for a minute or two as I didn't know what to do, so I just turned around and left," Walker said.

And back he went and stayed in the country for a couple more years while every other club continued to come knocking, urging him that his next experience with their club would be very different and much better.

As he kept dominating in the regions wherever he played, it was the wise words of dad that convinced him to finally make the move, arriving at Swan Districts just before he turned 20 – a late start at the highest level compared to most of the greats who usually make an indelible early impression.

Swan Districts was chosen on the basis that it was a club under new coach Haydn Bunton that was looking for youth to try and turn around its fortunes, hoping to win its first-ever premiership, and he was more likely to be given games to establish himself.

"I got my qualifications and all the clubs were still contacting me to come to Perth and play, so dad and I had a chat about what to do," he said.

"He said, 'you've got these clubs telling you you're good enough to make it, so just go and have a go. You'll regret it if you don't go down there and this may be an opportunity that leads to something else. Opportunities don't come up all the time and if it doesn't work out, you can always come back here and work on the farm'."

Even then, he wasn't sure how he would go until he'd played a couple of internal scratch matches.

"I guess every young player has that bit of nerves the first time you go up to league level, and you put those players on a pedestal because they are league players, and I didn't know until I started playing how I would go, but I felt OK," he said.

In the week leading up to the season, Swans would have their jumper presentation and it was announced that 30 players would be part of the senior league list. Once Walker hadn't heard his named called in the first 20-odd players, his assumption was that the smaller players usually got the lower numbers and therefore he hadn't been picked to be part of Bunton's plans, particularly as Bunton would be the first rover and filling the position Walker hoped to play.

As he was getting ready to head out the door, his name was called and he was presented with number 29. He would wear 29 for the rest of his career, never taking a lower number.

Most amazingly, his early years at Swans saw him commute every Friday afternoon to Perth with a five-hour drive and then return home on Sunday after the game, never once training with his teammates on a Tuesday or a Thursday as he established himself in the senior side. The four pounds per game as a senior player mostly went on his petrol money as he was determined to still live out of the city, as a number of other greats of the time also did.

As deputy rover to Bunton, the captain/coach rarely took himself off the ball in Walker's early years and he had long periods in the forward line, where his new approach to forward line duties revolutionised WA footy and made him a sensation as a goalkicker. His pace and stamina ran opponents into the ground.

"When I started playing, the positions on the field were very set for the forwards and the backmen and it was only really a few players who moved a lot around the ground," he said.

"The forward pockets used to always be right near the full-forward close to the goals and didn't roam too far, but when I started playing, my plan was to be the rover for the whole forward line and be wherever the ball was in our forward area. I wanted to win it and get kicks and try and score goals. I didn't want to wait for the ball to come to me, but to go and get it if it was anywhere near me.

"The back pockets used to stay close to their full backs and so I got a lot of space chasing the ball in the forward line," he laughed.

"I got a lot of a goals that way."

He topped the goalkicking for the club in his debut year with his radical approach and starred in September, kicking a team-high five majors on Grand Final day as the club broke through against East Perth and won its maiden premiership, in scenes that were a revelation for a young country lad.

"The club had never won a flag and here it was that I get to be part of the premiership in my first year. It was amazing after the game to see all the older people emotional and crying and it still gets the tingles going now when you think about it 60 years later," he said.

A debut premiership was backed up with success again in both 1962 and 1963 for three flags in his first three seasons, all the while with a weekly nearly 10-hour round trip from Narembeen to play. Backmen and opposition midfielders tried every tactic to try and disrupt his brilliance but Walker wasn't one to react to the snipes behind play.

"Players would try everything with you, with hits and grabs and standing on your feet and all sorts of stuff, but I didn't retaliate. I'd laugh at them and I'd run them in the ground so they couldn't keep up with me," he said.

"I never threw a punch on the footy field but my dad had trained me to defend myself, because I was small when I was young, so I'd say to any of the persistent blokes, 'you'd be lying on the ground if you tried that with me off the field', and they'd get the message." A delightful way to explain when he'd had enough of the close attention.

Once Bunton left the club at the end of 1964 to return to South Australia, Walker would assume the full-time mantle as first rover playing on the ball for most of the game and immediately won his first Sandover Medal as the competition's best and fairest player in 1965.

He and Glenyce, the love of his life, with children now part of the scene, decided they would try to live in the city from 1966, with Bill now an established star of the league and automatic state selection. Now training regularly with his teammates, he promptly won the next two medals again in 1966 and 1967 as the undisputed best small player in the game.

Former chair of both the AFL Commission and the selection panel for the Australian Football Hall of Fame, Mike Fitzpatrick, was a teenager watching WA footy at this time, just before his own debut several years later as an opponent with Subiaco, and says Walker's sustained brilliance has stayed with him across the years.

"I started getting interested in footy from when I was about 10, and I remember watching him consistently. He was just an outstanding player that had all the qualities you'd want – skilful, fast, brave and made the right decisions," Fitzpatrick said.

"Whoever the opposition put up against him, he tended to make mincemeat of them and really great rovers also kick goals, and he kicked lots of goals while also getting lots of touches.

"When I started to play league footy against him, as an opposition ruckman, it was my job to make sure the ball didn't go anywhere near him, because if he got it there was no point chasing him because you couldn't catch him.

"I think the other WA greats would look at Bill and say he's the top echelon.

"I got to play in several state teams with him and it was an honour to play with him as his ruckman, because he made the rest of us look good," said Fitzpatrick, who would be part of one WA premiership with Subiaco before his celebrated career at Carlton where he won three more flags and captained the successful sides of 1981-82.

The great Swans side under Bunton would slowly break up through the latter part of the 1960s as Walker maintained the highest standards, but there would not be the same team success as his career progressed.

As was the custom with the best players of the time, he ascended to the role of coach regardless of whether he was best suited to the job, which he felt he probably wasn't, and pushed on relentlessly to 300 games, even as his body would start to feel the pain of relentless physical contact at centre bounces and within packs across 16 seasons.

In the late 1960s, there were regular enquiries from St Kilda, Geelong and Collingwood about a move to the VFL, but a move to Perth had been a big enough challenge for a country lad, let alone travelling across the country to live in Melbourne for a few years.

A couple of training sessions with Collingwood under Bob Rose convinced him that Melbourne's weather wasn't for him.

"I had a couple of clubs from Melbourne chasing me but 'Polly' (Farmer) was one of the few heading over at that time.

"I trained at Collingwood's ground and it was midwinter and they had the cricket pitches on the ovals in those days and it was just inches of mud. All the blokes were sloshing out there about to start training and I'm running through mud everywhere. I was used to playing on sandy soil and being able to run and I said to myself, 'why the hell would I do this'?"

When retirement came at the end of 1976, his list of honours was extraordinary and Walker was more than ready to head into business life, making a massive success of ventures into pubs and hospitality.

But football would have a way of drawing him back, when long time club stalwart John Cooper would co-opt him on to the Swan Districts' board.

Swans had hired John Todd as coach, another firebrand, and Cooper said he needed Walker's help to try and manage Todd, who had zero tolerance for administrators and was trying to reshape the playing list.

"John (Todd) was very volatile about getting what he wanted as a coach, and John Cooper made me the football director to try and manage him, because I'd obviously played a lot at the top level and had coached myself," Walker said.

"Well, John was a fair challenge and never spoke to me for long periods, but we turned the club around and he turned around the playing list with young players to such a good extent that we won three premierships in a row for a second time.

"There were some fair old arguments and some tough periods but we needed to change to find success again and it was a great time for the club to be successful again."

The premierships of 1982-84 meant Walker had now been involved in a senior role in the first six flags in club history, but a storm was coming, in the form of a national competition that would change the status of WAFL footy forever – condemned to live on a lower tier below the new West Coast Eagles and then Fremantle, when they joined the AFL competition.

Walker, like Max Basheer in South Australia, was a powerful voice of opposition that demanded respect be given to the historic state leagues and argued repeatedly that what was being lost in WA and SA was being ignored by Victorian-based administrators.

His feelings about the birth of the national competition, and what it meant for historic clubs outside of Victoria, has not waned over the years.

"I didn't have a lot of the time for the Victorian administrators of that period, who were running roughshod over football in the rest of Australia," he said.

"Max and I were kindred spirits in that WA had eight clubs and SA had 10 clubs and we wanted to see an even national competition with representation around the country, not one that was dominated by one state.

"In the end, we lost and I said to Glenyce that I had to finish up as an administrator because you get tired after a while of banging your head up against a wall."

Now a grandfather of seven and great-grandfather of two, Walker still watches Swans as often as he can and admires the skills and fitness of the modern player. The two Derbies each year have a special atmosphere for when he catches AFL matches but five decades on from the last time he played at the highest level, he is very much focussed on one role these days.

"My main job these days is being Pop. I love having the children, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren around as often as possible. Myself and Glenyce will travel when we can to watch them doing things and having them around is very special," he said.

He and Glenyce met at a dance in the late 1950s as both were finishing school and were married more than six decades ago, with it being a joint decision to give the city a go once their children arrived on the scene.

Across an hour chatting on his life and times in footy, he repeatedly mentions the multiple times where her support and love were central in their lives, were pivotal to key decisions on next steps and how the times with family have easily overshadowed his stellar achievements kicking a ball around an oval.

His (many) footy awards are beautifully displayed in a cabinet but the house is filled with photos of the family at various ages, with children's toys in most rooms.

"Glenyce was a very good catch. I did very well," he said.

A Legend of the game could not be more content with his lot.

Bill Walker

• 305 games for Swan Districts 1961-76, 456 goals
• 21 games for WA
• 5x Best and Fairest 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969, 1970
• 1x Leading Goalkicker 1961 (61 goals)
• 3x Premiership player 1961, 1962, 1963
• 4x Sandover Medal 1965, 1966, 1967, 1970
• Simpson Medal 1967 v SA
• All Australian 1969
• WAFL Best First Year Player 1961
• Captain 1972-75
• Swan Districts Team of the Century
• Coached Swan Districts 1969-71, 63 games for 14 wins, 48 losses, one draw
• President Swan Districts 1983-95
• Life Member – Swan Districts, WAFL