It was a balmy Brisbane night. The kind of night that has citronella candles flickering right along the river.

Israel Folau knew the kind well, never once batting his eyelids as the Lang Park crowd milled around him, many still in singlets and thongs.

But while the multi-million-dollar dynamo was on familiar ground, he was entering new territory. All 102 kilograms of him.

With two seasons as a Brisbane Bronco already under his belt, Folau's bus ride down Caxton Street that night was filled with a smorgasbord of familiar sights and sounds. Maroon-clad fanatics downing mangos in the swamp. Saturday night specialists sipping on whiskey apples at Lefty's. The riff-raff congregating suspiciously outside of Honey B's.

Only this time, none of the locals would be cheering his name. Even if every last one of them had turned up, and paid up, to see him.

Sweaty shoulder to sweaty shoulder, 35,081 made their way through the Lang Park turnstiles on the 23rd of February, 2013. 35,081 were on hand to witness history.

Or so they had been told.

Spruiked as the first man to play Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union at the highest levels possible in this country, Folau made his return to Suncorp Stadium after 905 days. His hand poised to re-write the history books.

Despite earning detractors along the way, the gravity of the then-33-year-old's achievement couldn't be understated. Folau's ability to hop from the Melbourne Storm to the Broncos (NRL), then over to the GWS Giants (AFL) and jump into place with the New South Wales Waratahs (Rugby Union) had kids weaving several dreams into a singular naptime.

No longer were aspirations of becoming a Kangaroo, a Wallaby, or an All-Australian mutually exclusive.

Two years on from his rugby union debut, Folau would be joined in this rare club by Karmichael Hunt, after the Auckland-born, Australian representative made his way from Brisbane to Biarritz, then to the Gold Coast Suns and onto the Queensland Reds' roster in 2015, all while changing gears - and gear - with relative ease.

 

Yet, for these Polynesian superstars to stake their claim across all three codes, earning a chance to stroll contentedly down streets paved with gold, their path first needed paving.

For eight years, footy fans from all three codes have been under the impression that Folau was the first man to spin a Steeden, shoot a Sherrin, and grab a Gilbert professionally, to be paid for the honour.

But what if this collective belief was wrong?

What if the history books had been etched incorrectly?

What if we told you that more than six decades ago, it took a Sydney copper to sprint, so Folau and Hunt could stroll?

As the maxim goes, truth is often stranger than fiction. But for Raymond Douglas Millington, this strange truth is his life's work.

Not that many had noticed.

Unless you are a nonagenarian that packed scrums around suburban Sydney, chased leather in inner Melbourne, or featured in the Harbour City's first-grade competition during the 1950s, it is unlikely you have ever heard the name, Ray Millington.

However, for the vast uninitiated, the New South Welshman - all 76 kilograms of him - became the first name to sit at the table of three when he completed the trifecta way back in 1957.

A feat completed to absolutely no acclaim.

Take a beat and check out Ray's entry in any edition of The Encyclopedia of AFL Footballers. You will find it is only marginally larger than a jelly baby. Folau and Hunt's by comparison? Theirs are more like mini Mars bars.

“I've had a pretty colourful sporting career,” Millington wryly told Zero Hanger from his home in Sydney's West.

Now less than a month shy of his 91st birthday, and over 63 years since he hung up his boots for good, Ray Millington no longer moves like the whippet-like competitor he once was.

“I'm getting old. I say that every day and I don't like it very well, but it creeps up on you and you have no alternative," he admitted through a fatigued drawl.

“Don't rush yourself, mate. It's all I can say to you.”

But as whippet-like competitors of any age are prone to, Ray still has plenty to say.

Precursor to Pendles

You could be forgiven for believing that for someone to play VFL football, top-grade rugby union and pull on the Sydney Roosters' famous Tricolours in one lifetime, they must be a near-supernatural entity, an all-conquering athlete touched by the gods themselves.

Part Scott Pendlebury, with a touch of James Tedesco, and just a sprinkle of Roy Hobbs in there for good measure. What most would call a natural.

However, if you took the short odds to back Millington in as the most gifted galloper in the race, the bookie would be holding your hard-earned. That ticket would be worthless.

“No, no, no,” Ray rebuffed. “I was never a natural. I had to work pretty hard to get to where I got.”

Raised in the country surrounds of Grose Wold – an 80-minute drive north-west of Sydney's centre – Ray spent the early years of his childhood playing cricket and rugby league with the 10 others in the schoolyard of his one-horse town. A town where, ironically, most blokes earned a crust as horse studs.

But with the Curtin government committed to sending fit men to war following the German's march into France, the Millington family traded the sticks for the tight-knit, double-terraced streets of Paddington in 1942, after Ray's father was asked to make the barracks on Moore Park Road home.

 

With rations, blackouts, and tightened purse strings the norm, 10-year-old Ray wandered to the end of the road and changed the course of his life.

Once located less than a Phil Manassa run from the SCG's stately Members' stand, the Moore Park Playground was filled with kids of the depression honing their sporting skills from dawn until dusk, each enjoying unfettered access to enough poles, goals, nets, bats, and balls to keep dreamers of every persuasion in business.

“The playground was only about three or four hundred yards from where I lived, so I'd go there straight after school and stay there until around 7 o'clock at night,” Ray recalled.

“We played cricket, rugby league, basketball, rugby union, tennis, baseball, and whatever else."

It was on this field of dreams that Ray was moulded into the precursor to Scott Pendlebury, with his own basketball background fostered under the watch of Australian hoops royalty.

“We were always bouncing basketballs or swinging bats or something. That was seven days a week. That's how I got my start,"

“We had a very, very, very good supervisor in Ray Rosbrook. His skills as a sports coach were of an international standard. He was a superb head coach of the New South Wales basketball team.”

The playground's posts and courts are long gone now. Each removed or sealed over with bitumen and marked into multiple gridlocked lanes. These days, the junction of Moore Park Road and Dowling Street acts as the mouth to the Eastern Expressway - a route used by tens of thousands of Sydneysiders every day, and avoided by hundreds of thousands more.

“The place I lived in Paddington just sold for $3.5 million,” Millington sighed. "Such is progress, I guess."

Like present-day developers, progression would soon become the name of Ray's game, with all roads soon leading to the SCG's greener pastures, and the playground fading fast in his rearview mirror.

Collate the history books, and they will say that Ray was the first person to play any form of Aussie Rules, rugby union, and rugby league on the cricket ground. Still, his first mark at the venue came without a ball at all.

During the summer of 1950, a time in which Menzies was still moving furniture into the lodge, Ray took on all comers during the NSW Junior Athletics carnival, heading home as state champion in javelin, hammer throw, and the pole vault.

A burly lad, by then on the verge of adulthood, Ray's crowning vault wasn't without misfortune, as he flew for the heavens, crashlanding like an ungainly Roy Cazaly.

“I've got a photograph of that. Me going through the air, arse upside down,” Millington said with a prideful chuckle, recalling with ease the events of an afternoon that unfolded more than 70 years ago.

 

“I think the bar was at about 10' 6 – over three metres in today's measurements – and the pole broke. In those days, the sandpit was just two inches of sand thrown on the grass."

It was this size and courage that had served him well as he wandered into view of Australia's own game. His sticky hands and high leap were more than handy, too.

“I wasn't a natural, but just having a basketball in your hand every day gave you that hand-eye coordination and that's why I adapted to Aussie Rules a lot easier than most," he explained.

“I had good hands, very good hands, and because I used to compete in athletics carnivals, I could jump."

"Learning to kick came with difficulty, but back then it wasn't much of an issue, as everyone just went back and laced off big torpedo punts."

Originally turning out for the now-defunct Dellmuth Football Club, Ray stab-passed his way around the ovals of suburban Sydney, eventually lining up with Eastern Suburbs - a club once home to Swans co-captain Dane Rampe and triple premiership Blue, Mark 'Sellars' Maclure.

Tasting grand final defeat in his first season at Trumper Park, the 17-year-old with the dukes and the hops had made waves since his rise to the seniors. Waves that would carry him into a sky-blue jumper and a date against a Hall of Fame spearhead.

 

“I was selected in a composite New South Wales team in 1949 to play Williamstown, who had just won the VFA competition down in Melbourne," Ray said.

"We played them at Wollongong and the great Ron Todd was at full-forward for them. They only beat us by six points and I kicked three for the day."

Ray's goalkicking prowess would continue throughout the 1950 season, with the Sydney Morning Herald routinely reporting on his ability to “dazzle spectators with high marks and long kicks”. 

An 11-goal outing against Balmain in late May saw him skyrocket into the state side, booking a place on the plane for the 1950 State Carnival.

“We went up to Brisbane for about 10 days or so. We played on what's now the Gabba and beat Canberra and Queensland.".

With the Waratah stamped on his chest, the pride that filled Ray way back when remains a sensation he can vividly recall today, even if his jaw may have been a bit jutted at the time.

"I was just a kid. I was overawed, but I was up myself…"

"You think that you're Superman."

"But I played alright. I played pretty well.”

Man of Steel or otherwise, avenues were beginning to open for the nippy forward with a bloodhound's sense for goal.

Although the dog days of rationing and blackouts had been shrugged off by the spring of 1950, with the nation now finding itself on the doorstep of economic prosperity, VFL outfits still took a decidedly narrow view when it came to signing talent.

Time and again, the stars and also-rans of the day came from within the near reaches of all 12 clubs, or from the bush just beyond town. But whether city slickers or hayseeds, there was a tie that bound almost every teammate: the 'Barassi Line'.

More than 30 years on from landing a league side to call their own, Sydney may as well have been on a different planet to Melbourne in those days, with few in the Harbour City caring for a game that remains more religion than sport south of the Murray River.

But this Millington kid had something. Something that was too sharp to ignore. From the sticks to the big smoke; from the playground to national recognition, a chance to travel to football's Mecca would soon follow.

 

Gorillas and Galloping Greens

1951 was the quintessential 'almost season' for the Fitzroy Football Club.

10 wins, six losses, and, peculiarly, two draws, saw the Gorillas - the club's overtly aggressive mascot between 1939 and 1956 - finish just outside the top four, forcing them to watch on as the hated Pies, Cats, Dogs, and Dons did battle in September.

By then, it had been four years since the Roys had last punched a finals ticket - their last look coming during their preliminary final loss to Essendon in 1947. It had also been eight years since their last premiership - a drought that would remain unbroken throughout their final 45 years of existence.

Though little more than the tracks of a sliding door had kept Fitzroy from a spot in the four, the club's brass sought an alternative fix for their marginal woes. One that would cost them a mere fraction of the hard-earned spent elsewhere.

In an effort to climb the ladder, the Gorillas looked north, asking a raw utility to trade pre-bohemian Paddington for Fitzroy, a suburb still light years away embracing frothed oat milk in their fairtrade coffees.

“I was approached by the president of the NSW Aussie Rules competition, Les Taylor, at the end of 1951. He must have been approached by Fitzroy because he told me to head down to Melbourne and sign with them," Ray explained.

“There were articles in the paper down there about how Fitzroy's officials met me at Essendon Airport because other clubs were interested in signing me. They never told me who those mystery suitors were.

“At that stage, I was the youngest from New South Wales to ever go down to Melbourne. I was only 19 at the time."

Young, brash, and keen to get his hands dirty, Ray and his wife, Norma, made a home for themselves in the heart of Fitzroy, waking most days to the sound of trams thundering past their front door.

“We lived directly opposite the footy ground In Brunswick Street," Ray explained.

"That was back when the Harveys were playing cricket with Fitzroy.

"We walked straight out the front gate and across the road into Brunswick Street Oval."

Across the tram tracks and beneath the shadow of the old railyard silo, Ray rubbed shoulders with a strong and silky ilk, honing his craft alongside Team of the Century members, Bill Stephen and Allan 'The Baron' Ruthven, by then a Brownlow medallist and the Roys' captain-coach.

There was also 'Butch' Gale and Norm Johnstone, two men that were more granite than flesh and bone. Around them was place-kicker Tony Ongarello, a dapper gent who would famously hide brandy in his walking stick later in life.

 

Though the new kid on the block, the teenaged Ray Millington matched it with these champions, seeing scribes from The Age dub him the Roys' most impressive off-season recruit.

But even after training the house down over the summer, Ray was forced to uphold a time-honoured tradition: earning a spot in the seniors from the reserves.

At 176cm, Ray was deemed too short for a forward post. And though unfamiliar with the rough and tumble of life at the coalface, the Sydneysider was asked to cut his teeth in the middle.

“I used to be the centre-half forward or full-forward up in Sydney, but I was just too short. So, the club threw me in on the half-forward flank instead," Ray recalled of his perpetually moving magnet.

At 0-2, the Gorillas' 1952 season wasn't off to a flier. And, after seeing gun centre-man Don Furness go down with injury, centre half-forward Ron Simpson hit for six with the flu, and their boom recruit earning rave reviews in the twos, Ruthven brought the kid into the big time.

At Princes Park in Round 3 against the capable Ken Hands, Ern Henfry, Bruce Comben and the guile of Ollie Grieve, Ray was quickly swept up in the rise in class, earning a reminder square between the numbers stitched onto his guernsey.

“My first game, I was 19th man and had to go on pretty early," Ray recollected with ease.

"It would have been in the first quarter. By the time I got to my position, I was shitting myself.

"Here I am, a kid from Sydney playing in the big league in Melbourne, running on in front of the crowd at Carlton."

"The first mark I went for, big ‘Chooka' Howell, all six-foot-four of him, took a mark over the top of me and belted the shit out of me.

“I remember thinking, ‘Christ, I'm in A-grade here'.”

Though Ray would make the short walk back down Curtain Street a winner that early-May evening, he would be back kicking the dew off suburban ovals until mid-July.

In those days of ankle-high boots, training on a Thursday and full-to-the-brim ashtrays at half-time, back pocket, of all positions, was a specialist one. And at Brunswick Street Oval, the Roys had the best in the state in Bill Stephen.

A routine Victorian representative, Stephen would again don the Big V in 1952, travelling to face the Croweaters at Adelaide Oval. His void would be filled by the kid used to seeing his magnet flung about. A kid that would help hold the Tigers to just five goals at their Punt Road manor.

Forward, back, or in the guts, with two wins from two starts, Ray had moulded himself into the Roys' lucky charm. And despite his past in baby blue, he too would familiarise himself with the Big V before too long.

“I made the Victorian seconds team that year," Ray said.

"We played a combined Victorian country team as a curtain raiser to the major interstate match between Victoria and Western Australia at the MCG.

"They had me running in the centre that day, too."

Sadly, that afternoon at Melbourne's Mecca would act as Ray's crescendo south of the Murray, as circumstances - both at home and across the road - would cap his VFL career at just two senior games.

 

Though the Gorillas would go on to taste September success that Spring, edging the Blues by a point in a semi-final bout for the ages before going down to the Magpies a week later, Ray would watch each final from the stands.

Still, whispers from the board room led Ray to believe the red carpet would be rolled out for him in 1953.

While the notion of a kid from the wrong side of the border taking the spot of the club's playing coach and Brownlow medallist seems fanciful, according to Ray, it is one that was squarely on the Roys' selection table.

“The selectors told me they wanted me to then play in the centre. I had played there all year in the reserves. Unfortunately, ‘Baron' (Ruthven) was the starting centre," he said.

"But the rumours were that he would retire and that I would have a genuine opportunity to play firsts in the middle. However, he played on for another two seasons, so I probably would have been left to cool my heels in the reserves."

Happy news on the home front would help slam the door closed, with Norma falling pregnant and a move back to Sydney proving impossible to deny.

The cruellest blow of upping and leaving after only one winter came when Fitzroy refused to grant Ray a clearance, effectively tying the 20-year-old to the club even after he had left town.

Sporting careers are littered with 'what ifs', and although Ray would have plenty more chapters to write by the end of 1952, he remains steadfast in the belief that had he stayed on in Melbourne, he would have stacked up at senior level.

“Oh, yeah. I was told as much," said Ray when asked whether he could have matched it with the VFL's stars of the day.

"That's why Fitzroy held my transfer up. The club didn't want me to go.

“I was a bit of a victim of circumstance, really.”

Back on familiar ground, Ray returned to Easts for the '53 season, tasting premiership success, and yet again, earning state honours.

But while the NSW police force recruit's frame and nous had him dominating defenders at Trumper Park - and even the SCG - on Sundays, the lack of professional pathways placed a use-by-date on his Aussie Rules days.

A date that would have mates from a different code down the road soon calling for a helping hand.

 

“All my mates were playing rugby union at Randwick, so just to do something, I went out and trialled just to run around,” said Ray of his choice to head down to Coogee Oval.

“I played in two grade trials with them and played pretty well."

Part Pendlebury, part Tedesco, with a sprinkle of Hobbs and a touch of Serge Blanco, Ray hit the ground running, winning the Galloping Green's fullback position.

These were the days before Super Rugby clashes and World Cups. There were no central contracts, boot deals or battles across umpteen time zones, only fixtures between suburban Sydney sides. Gordon and Eastwood; West Harbour and Randwick. Fixtures filled to the brim with Wallabies.

At Coogee, Ray would share a dressing room with many of these stars, including those that would eventually have bricks and mortar named in their honour.

“I immediately made the first-grade side at Randwick, and Sir Nicholas Shehadie was captain. He was also the Australian captain. We were full of internationals in the forwards,"

“There were probably four to six internationals in the Randwick side when I played. We didn't make the four because they were all forwards."

Ray would also share the sheds with a man who would go on to raise polarising offspring, linking up with the father of Australia's 30th Prime Minister, Scott Morrison.

“Johnny Morrison was a prop, and in the police force, too,” Ray said.

“He was a good bloke, Johnny. I knew him pretty well.

"He went into politics himself and finished up as the Mayor of Waverley Council."

Ray's two seasons at Coogee Oval followed a familiar trend. Not only did he make his presence known, scoring freely by hand and by boot, but he would again shift around the park, plugging holes at centre, first-five and at the back.

His wares wouldn't go unnoticed by rep selectors either, returning to the SCG to play in a curtain raiser before the eyes of many of his more experienced teammates.

"I got picked for the rugby union city colts. We played Duntroon College on the cricket ground before Australia in Fiji during June of 1954,”

But with the cost of living growing as his young family expanded, Ray eventually made like Morrison junior, trading the amateur 15-man game in for rugby league's relative riches.

 

Chooks, pies and Venetian blinds

They say there is no such thing as a free lunch, and with the force providing little for a cop that kept his nose clean, Ray was again left to cash in on his dash and dare.

“My sporting life hit a crossroads in 1956 and the juxtaposition of my sporting interests with the needs of a young family was thrown into clear relief,”

“I was back playing Aussie Rules, but a mate was playing lower-grade rugby league with Eastern Suburbs (nowadays the NRL's Sydney Roosters) and receiving a small amount of payment.

“I got nothing in Victoria, and up here, all I got was a pie for lunch or something."

“I had three children I was raising on a police salary, which was not exactly generous. In fact, you could say it was very poor."

Lured in by the promise of two pounds (four dollars) for every 3rd-grade appearance, and five (10 dollars) in the reserves, Ray made the short trek back to Moore Park, entering the Roosters' coop in 1957.

“I hadn't played rugby league since I was 15, so I was an older recruit with Easts, by then a 25-year-old," Ray said of his choice to try out a third code.

Though he would spend the vast majority of his first two seasons in Tricolours playing reserve grade, sporadic shots in the firsts  - and the accompanying 17-pound (34 dollars) payday - would arise.

On the 25th of August, 1957, before 11,360 at the old Sydney Sports Ground, Ray made his first-grade debut for the Roosters, running in 13-6 loss to Manly.

Ray's set was complete. Not that anyone had noted.

But it would take a toe-to-toe battle against one of rugby league's immortals before Ray's spot in the seniors became his, and his alone.

“Our first-grade fullback was a bloke named Tony Paskins. He was the captain of New South Wales. He was just a great player,"

"In '58, we were to play Souths at Redfern Oval and I was down to play second grade. I arrived there and was told Tony was injured and couldn't play,"

"They threw me the boots and said, ‘Right, you're playing, Ray'."

“The fullback for Souths that day was Clive Churchill. That was his last year. It was one of the best games of football I played to the point that at training on the following Tuesday, one of the selectors came over and told me I had held my spot.

"I held it for the rest of the year."

In all, Ray would don the Roosters' famed chevrons during 18 first-grade games, including a match-of-the-day clash at the SCG against the immortal might of Reg Gasnier, Norm Provan, Johnny Raper, and the Dragons pack.

Pies may have been off the menu, with some folding stuff finally coming Ray's way, but - far from the property portfolios, fast cars, and diamond earrings accrued by Folau and Hunt over the years - Ray's earnings only covered simple furnishings.

"In 1959, I played a full season of first-grade, earning total payments of 310 pounds (640 dollars in today's currency) for the year,"

“As a result, we could indulge in Venetian blinds in our house at Mount Pritchard."

And while his family would be sheltered from the summer sun, the 9-to-5 grind - a grind unfamiliar to those that would walk in his wake - put an end to his playing days for good.

“I couldn't get to training. I was transferred out West as a detective. It would have been unfair," he remembered.

"If I was working at 5 o'clock and we had a serious case and I said, ‘Look, fellas, I've got to go. I'm going to footy training,' it would have gone down like a lead balloon.

“It took an hour and a half to get to the old Sydney Sports Ground, so I just packed it in."

There would be attempts to lace them up again after making contact with clubs closer to home, but just as Ray found when he made the move home from Melbourne, his skillset would come at a price.

“I asked for a transfer from Easts in the hopes of joining Parramatta, but the club put a £300 transfer fee on my head to discourage other clubs from signing me," He recalled, the last note of dismay still lingering.

There would be no seasons on the Basque coast, nor homecomings before tens of thousands of singlet-clad fans. Ray's days in the arena were over.

Still, even after all these years, Ray knows his place as a true pioneer, just as he knows where he would be lining up in today's game.

“Nah, they couldn't. It's impossible," Ray said when asked whether a fourth name could ever repeat his code-hopping deeds.

“The players these days train seven days a week. They do weights and sprints. We never did any of that. If some of the blokes I played with back in the day trained like the players today, they would have succeeded.

“But none of us would survive today. They're too tough. They're too quick. Too everything.

"I wouldn't even be the ball boy these days.”

And though Ray set the table for Folau and Hunt's future feast, creating legacies and bottom lines that will serve their circles for some time, the man that sat at the table's head alone for nearly six decades isn't giving his seat up for anyone.

“Israel Folau couldn't play Aussie Rules. He was awful. Karmichael Hunt could play a bit, though. He wasn't a bad footy player," Ray said without wavering.

“They only went over for a bit of publicity. The Giants wouldn't have signed Folau if they needed him to actually play footy. He couldn't catch a ball.

"Still, it's not bad company for a boy from Paddington, is it?"

 

Regrets, I've had a few

None of us really know our parents. Not in totality, anyway.

We never knew them in the prime of their lives. We vaguely recognise them in fading photographs. More vibrant people, still yet to be burdened with the weight of mortgages, pickups, dropoffs, and tedious parent-teacher evenings.

We know the people in front of us, at least we tell ourselves we do. We know they are the ones that fed, clothed, and put a roof over our heads. We remember them instilling life lessons, either by hook or crook.

But at the end of the day, even the dying ones, we are left only with memories and moments, each thatched together with our own particular cross-stitch. Memories and moments that mean something to us.

And though Ray's three children - Mark, Peter, and Robyn, now parents and grandparents themselves - knew their father as an Aussie Rules pioneer, a union transplant, a late-in-life league import, and a copper, there are still tales untold within the Millington clan.

“I talk to my kids, and I ask them, ‘Do you know what I did for work?' They have no idea. Not a clue," Ray said down the phone line.

“I've had an interesting life.”

A beat cop-cum-detective in Sydney's wild West, taking every grizzly case home to the dinner table was never an option. Even those involving gunfire and shotgun weddings.

Ear massages from defenders, and hip-drop tackles from forwards are one thing, but in 1968, Detective Millington found himself in the line of fire when pulling up one morning to a fibro cottage in the suburbs of Sydney's sprawling West.

Knocking on the door, Ray found a man inside with a woman, a baby, and a shotgun. The man was Wally Mellish, described as an unintelligent psychopath and the centrepiece of the infamous Glenfield Siege.

Shots were fired, threats were made and while the big guns would replace Ray on the front line, it would take police - including Commissioner Norm Allan - eight days and a wedding before Mellish was removed for sentencing.

After acting as Mellish's impromptu best man, Commissioner Allan would promptly nominate himself for a Medal of Valour. A film depicting the unbelievable events would eventually be released, but as had become customary, Ray's role would go uncredited.

Later in life, after his badge and gun were handed back and the golf course lured him like a trout to a fly, Ray would reprise his competitive spirit, shaving stroke after stroke off his golf handicap when playing alongside Norma and his two sons, Mark and Peter.

Although, as Sinatra crooned in his trademark track of a life lived, Ray's life hasn't unfolded without regrets on either side of the boundary line.

"I made a lot of mistakes in my life. I should have just played one sport. I played too many."

"I should have concentrated on those where I had a natural flair. I became quite accomplished at Aussie Rules, but I gave it away at the very time when greater performances beckoned.

"Let me express a heartfelt mea culpa. I regret that my abiding interest in all things sporting meant that my wife and children went through life without my involvement at the level that it should have been.

"In short, I was selfish and I deeply regret this failure. I am sorry."

Less than a month out from his 91st birthday, the former footballer, the ex-cop, the keen golfer, and the man known simply as 'Millo' is still keeping himself busy, taking time to mail this writer snippets and photographs from days gone by; even calling for a friendly chat about the weather.

While Ray's records can be found etched in several yellowing record books, little has been done to collate them, bringing what is a truly unique journey across codes and lines, both real and imagined, to life.

Still sharp as a tack straight off the production line, Ray could have kept his yarn rolling for some time, however, he has never lost a wink of sleep over the fact that others have been championed for the barriers he hopped first.

“It doesn't worry me, mate," Ray Millington declares.

“My days were a long time ago.”