First of all, it needs to be settled how Port Adelaide regained Gavin Wanganeen while forming its inaugural AFL squad in the spring of 1996.

Did the club put a McDonald’s franchise – the one on West Terrace – in the incentive package to be Port Adelaide’s first signing and, inevitably, first AFL captain?

“Not true,” says Wanganeen.

Not in question is Port Adelaide’s intent with its recruiting concession to claim four uncontracted players at the 15 rival AFL clubs at the time.

“Gavin Wanganeen was number one,” says inaugural Port Adelaide chief executive Brian Cunningham. “Nathan Buckley was number two…”

At the end of the 1996 AFL season, Wanganeen had a Brownlow Medal and a premiership, both won in his third year at Essendon. Buckley had followed Wanganeen from Port Adelaide to the AFL in 1993, and was far too entrenched in his dream with Collingwood to ever return to Alberton.

Wanganeen, aged 23 at the end the 1996 campaign, always was more vulnerable to the emotional “come home” card repeatedly put on the table by Cunningham. This meant more than a McDonald’s franchise.

“That Port Adelaide (storyline) had a big influence on me; it made (the return for 1997) too hard to turn down,” Wanganeen says. “I grew up at Port Adelaide. I went from the under-12s through all the grades to my (SANFL) league debut (as a 16-year-old in 1990).”

Wanganeen was dubbed the “rubber man” for his acrobatic approach to the game. Supplied image

A year later Wanganeen was at Essendon where master coach Kevin Sheedy, now a board member, still carries the torment of losing one of the most influential and creative players of the new AFL era.

Sheedy’s sales pitch as the two sat at a cafe in Essendon late in the 1996 season was based on holding to the advantages at an established, powerhouse club in Melbourne where Wanganeen had reached 127 senior games in six seasons.

Sheedy asked Wanganeen: “Do you know how it will be at a new club – being smashed and tagged every week?”

As destiny would have it, Wanganeen’s first AFL match of 173 games for Port Adelaide was against Essendon at Football Park, late on a Sunday in early April 1997.

Port Adelaide lost by 33 points (after kicking 3.8 in the first term) – hardly the smashing that came against Collingwood a week earlier at the MCG, where Wanganeen was barred from taking the field after being suspended for striking Richmond opponent Ashley Prescott in a trial game at Port Lincoln.

And Wanganeen was not targeted by his former Essendon teammates, either physically or verbally.

“That day was the weirdest I felt running onto a field, and it stayed with me all through that game,” Wanganeen said. “It was so weird, so odd. It was hard to play.”

The guilt – and lasting regret – Wanganeen carried that day was from his failure to personally tell his Essendon teammates in 1996 that he was going home to Port Adelaide.

Wanganeen was Port Adelaide’s first AFL captain, leading the club’s first four seasons in the national league. It was the inevitable choice for the club, but not the preferred decision of the homecoming hero, who admits he was an “immature and naive” 23-year-old in his first season back at Alberton.

“I didn’t want the captaincy: I was too young and I did not want the added responsibility,” Wanganeen says. “I was happy to go out there to do my thing.”

As captain, Wanganeen was taking to the field with the “Port Adelaide thing” as directed by coach John Cahill: “As captain, you have to play aggressive, hard footy – and the boys will follow your example.”

“I was reported quite a few times,” Wanganeen notes.

Wanganeen’s game – as an “attacking defender” – emerged in a clash with Melbourne at the MCG in April 1994.

Seeing the slightly-built Wanganeen struggle physically at half-forward against hard-bodied defenders, Sheedy moved Wanganeen to defence.

“And I played the role the way I always wanted to play – win the footy,” Wanganeen recalls of his reluctance to fall into the stereotype of dour defenders. “I would go for marks. When I made a spoil, I wanted to win my own crumbs. I would run and I would make forwards chase me.”

A year earlier, in that ultra-successful 1993 AFL season, Wanganeen was recognised by his peers as the league’s most courageous player. The so-called “Rubber Man” would throw himself into hectic contests, always bouncing out, on his feet ready to advance his team. That players’ vote as the game’s most courageous competitor means as much to Wanganeen as the Brownlow Medal of 1993.

At the end of 2000, when Wanganeen abdicated the Port Adelaide captaincy to Matthew Primus, Essendon had another AFL premiership. And Wanganeen was fearing regret.

Wanganeen was a reluctant captain. Supplied image

“That is why 2004 was make or break,” recalls Wanganeen of the torment Port Adelaide endured from 2001-2004 when it was the league’s best team during home-and-away games but chokers in finals.

“A lot of hard work went unrewarded,” he adds. “If we had lost (against Brisbane in the 2004 AFL grand final), we would have been twisted old men.”

Wanganeen, after failing to influence the game in the first half, was the hero of Port Adelaide’s dramatic preliminary final against St Kilda in 2004 at Football Park. His last-quarter goal from the north-east pocket remains one of the classic solo efforts of Australian football.

His four goals in the grand final against Brisbane at the MCG led to emotional responses rarely seen from Wanganeen. The burden of revisiting his decision to leave Essendon in 1996 was lifted.

The only sour note from the grand final was the loss of Wanganeen’s match-day jumper, either in the changerooms at the MCG or at the team hotel. A decade later, after a social media campaign by the Port Adelaide Football Club, the guernsey was returned, still showing the telling marks of the day – the blood stains, grass marks, sweat… unwashed, just as Wanganeen wanted it.

“I never thought I would see it again,” says Wanganeen. “Without it, I didn’t feel I had played in the grand final.”

Wanganeen feels his Port Adelaide stint should have completely replicated his Essendon tenure with both a Brownlow and flag at each club.

Wanganeen became the first Indigenous player to reach the 300-game milestone, just before a knee injury ended his career in 2006. His best season was at Port Adelaide, in 2003 when he played the majority of his matches on a wing. He will argue to this day that he should have picked up three rather than two Brownlow votes in the season-closing Showdown. Had the umpires, who gave best-on-ground honours to Showdown Medallist Peter Burgoyne, agreed, Wanganeen would have been in a four-way tie with Mark Ricciuto, Adam Goodes and Nathan Buckley.

From his childhood in Salisbury, “where we did not have much”, Wanganeen made an exceptional path through Australian football that is recognised with his name honoured on a pavilion at Adelaide Oval.

At Essendon, Wanganeen remains highly regarded – number 19 in the club’s roll call of champions and in the back pocket with its team of the century.

At Port Adelaide, where he served a short period on the club’s board, his name stands among the greats and on a medal for the best under-21 player each season.

In Australian football’s greatest pantheon, the Australian Football Hall of Fame, Wanganeen has stood alongside the game’s greatest contributors since 2010.

Wanganeen emerged in an era that tested the game’s tolerance amid racism. He was twice racially vilified on the field, once in 1992 and once in 1993. After consulting teammate and fellow Indigenous star Michael Long, he chose to say nothing of the incidents despite both “cutting deep”.

Three decades later, Wanganeen, a noted artist, is admired as an individual and as a footballer who entertained and played with a sense of invincibility.

“I just loved to play footy,” Wanganeen says.

The latest inductees to the South Australian Sport Hall of Fame will be announced at Adelaide Oval on March 1. For details and tickets, go here.

Read InDaily throughout February as we reveal this year’s inductees.