JIM MCKAY CHANGED footy with the way he sold the game in the 1970s and 1980s, yet his most historically impressive, if not confounding, deal may have been his easiest.
"A fair bit of wine was consumed, and there were a few glasses of cognac too," McKay remembers.
On the other side of the table was Jan Steinman, a man charged with sourcing sports rights for a then-nascent ESPN sports television network in the United States.
Steinman replied succinctly to McKay's pitch of the Aussie game.
"He said 'Jim, it's exactly what we need'."
So began a bizarre period in Australian Rules history, where, for a time, the code would reach mass American audiences and permeate pop culture.
In the US it will forever be associated with the beginnings of the most famous sports television venture. So much so that if you take a walk-through ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, Australian Rules is immortalised in its halls as a signpost of its embryonic years.
What is not well known is that those curious eyes in the US had a lasting effect on the way the game looks in Australia.
YOU MAY NOT have heard of Jim McKay, but he had a Forrest Gump-like, on-the-spot ubiquity through Australian sports and entertainment for a time.
He helped put on the legendary Sunbury Rock Festivals, was the original producer for the decades-running variety television program 'Hey Hey It's Saturday', and by the turn of the 1980s he'd transformed Australian Rules football from a suburban pursuit into a money-making machine.
Holding the VFL's marketing account, he remodelled it on the American NFL's properties department, placing a VFL logo on everything from children's clothes, to travel agents and insurance policies. Whether it be merchandise or sponsors, rivers of gold started flowing into the VFL coffers.
"I inherited something like $15,000 of revenue, within three years we ratcheted that up to $3 million. It went from nothing to a major revenue source, so I'd proved my credentials."
This achievement that gave McKay licence to look at things radically, specifically at how the VFL had retained its broadcast rights outside of Australia.
"They were happy to let me go until I stumbled,' McKay laughs. "I had some good contacts in America so I thought we should at least try."
THE YEAR WAS 1979 and an audacious concept had just been launched into US loungerooms; a television network entirely devoted to sport.
One of McKay's contacts was Steinman, who worked for a company called TWI. TWI had been given the job of sourcing material for that fledgling sports network, ESPN.
Armed with video clips of the game that focussed on a certain physicality that would be frowned upon today, McKay's spiel, along with the wine and cognac, worked on Steinman.
The almost instant agreement shocked McKay.
He thought he had a strong pitch. He wasn't as confident that he'd go home with a cheque for $US100,000.
"For a sport that was unknown, that was extraordinary."
However, McKay's exploration was perfectly timed in the ESPN life cycle.
"What I didn't know was that they (ESPN) didn't have anything else!"
Indeed, most professional and college US sports were already locked into existing, free-to-air television deals.
ESPN's initial point of difference was constant news updates, but it desperately needed content around it. McKay believes it was the first significant deal ESPN did with a professional sports league anywhere.
"When we started, we were in prime time...in fact we were in every time!" McKay says.
For the record, football first popped up on in ESPN in late 1979. By the next April the full deal was in place, a replay of the previous year's Grand Final heralded weekly programming for the 1980 season.
Soon the game was spreading across the network's sparse schedule. A weekly match of the day program with highlights of other games was often replayed six times across a week.
"When you multiplied the replays, you'd get a cumulative audience bigger back then, than today's audiences in Australia."
BACK HOME IN Australia, McKay's team had a challenge of their own to ensure games were shown within the week they were played.
The tapes would be collected from local broadcaster Channel Seven immediately after games on a Saturday and an around the clock process would begin. Manual editing would accommodate for the distilled hour package, slots for ESPN commercials and voiceovers to link the highlights together.
Channel Seven commentator and host Peter Landy would also work double time to front the custom show for ESPN.
"We used to record it straight after the 'Big League' replay show on Seven was recorded on a Saturday night," he tells ESPN.
Landy would introduce each week's show as if a viewer was watching for the first time, outlining the scoring and the rules and even some tips on skills.
He would become a cult hero to some in the US, inspiring fan mail and one fan's early web-era tribute page.
"I heard it was reasonably successful but was unaware of any of the feedback back then," he says. "We gave an address out at the end of the show to write to, but the letters were forwarded to VFL House, so I never saw any of it and I didn't get paid any extra for it!"
Years before the internet, a weekend's worth of work would see tapes ready by Monday and on a plane to the US for a Thursday screening.
Rob De Santos was a college student in Ohio when he and his roommate stumbled upon a package McKay had put together one night in that first season of 1980.
"We had this new channel ESPN, which showed sports 24 hours, which we thought was kinda wild, because we couldn't figure out what they were going to show. Truth is they weren't sure either half the time," he remembers of the time the strange game came on their screens.
"We came home from work, got a couple of beers and turned on the tv to see what we'd find. We started watched watching it, fell in love with the game quickly and I've followed it ever since."
De Santos would later form the Australian Football Association of North America, which he still chairs today, discovering that there were 1000s of sports fans around the country who had that very same experience.
"Australian football was a gift for ESPN," he says.
"They didn't have access to the prime American sports, so they were showing basketball from low level colleges and field hockey. Whereas Australian Rules football was being played by professional athletes."
As popularity grew, Grand Final broadcasts soon became a live affair via satellite with studio hosts in the US. Iconic ESPN broadcaster Bob Ley hosted games, with VFL greats Ron Barassi and Mike Fitzpatrick travelling to Bristol to provide expert knowledge. Fitzpatrick was shocked when he saw ESPN cameramen wearing footy jumpers.
George Bodenheimer, the ESPN mail boy who rose to company President, described Australian Rules in the oral history of the company, 'Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN', as 'one of our bedrocks" of the early years.
"We put up a graphic on the screen that said, kind of in ESPN style, 'We don't now the rules either. If you would like to know the rules, send us a postcard'. And we got fifty thousand postcards."
That kind of interest saw the VFL employ David Grunwald, a US journalist who'd fallen for the game, as the league's publicity officer in the US.
Grunwald told The Age in 1985 that "Women have often rung for (Lions forward) Mick Conlan's phone number or address, and another lady rang to say if Ron Barassi was ever in Toronto, she had a spare bed for him at her house."
Many of the 46 Australian Rules football clubs across America's origin stories are children of the 1980s who saw the game on ESPN who found like minds and Aussie expats to rekindle those memories.
The sport also helped legitimise ESPN in moment that is still talked about all these years later; the day television icon Johnny Carson outed himself as a closet 'footy' fan.
Ley explained the gravity of this for the network in an interview with the author in 2020.
"We were striving to get ourselves on the landscape with recognition... and one night he (Carson) made a joke about ESPN and Australian Rules Football," Ley said.
"Everyone in America watched Carson before they went to bed so to be mentioned by Carson was to be put on a cultural pedestal.
"That was a crossover moment for us...Carson validated us. "
And for some like McKay, it validated the sport.
"That summarises the whole ESPN period," McKay says.
THE REASONS AUSTRALIAN Rules originally found a home on ESPN, were also the reasons in inevitably slid off the radar.
As the network grew, it eventually had the finances to purchase the major US sports rights it craved. First it was NCAA college basketball and football, then in 1987 it gained a suite of NFL rights. The NBA, MLB, and NHL would follow and footy was pushed to the margins.
As the decade ended, the schedule squeeze, coupled with changes to broadcast deals back home and McKay's exit from the VFL saw it disappear from ESPN altogether.
In the decades since, much to the chagrin of US-based fans, catching Australian Rules on US television has been a haphazard affair.
Indeed, De Santos's organisation was formed in 1990s to lobby television stations to screen the game, powered by an internet community that had been enchanted by those early ESPN broadcasts.
The recent purchase of AFL rights holder Foxtel by international streamer DAZN has raised hopes of infiltrating mainstream offshore sports coverage again.
Reflecting today, McKay sees the ESPN-era as one of the greatest off-field achievements for the code.
"We were once in the big-time on American television, prime time across America," he says.
"There is an enormous sense of pride because ESPN had become the No. 1 sports network in the world by that time."
"The enormity of it was not lost on us and the league. We all think, how do we get back to that? And that's the next chapter to be written."
THOSE HEADY DAYS of the 1980s may be long gone, yet the ESPN experience has had a lasting effect back home.
Its legacy is present every time we watch a game.
Back in 1986 ESPN executive Steve Bornstein came out to Australia to meet with McKay armed with feedback.
"He said 'you know the one thing about this game, because the ground's so big we don't know which team is kicking to which end," McKay recalls.
Bornstein went on to compare it to American football where lines every ten yards alert spectators how far the play is from the end zone and asked whether it was possible to do something similar on a VFL field.
"I said 'Steve we'll never get away with that...but maybe we could put a line halfway between the centre line and the goals and paint them in different colours."
The idea evolved into a '50-metre line' and McKay went to the VFL with the problem and the solution; one would be red, and one would be yellow to differentiate each end.
With a wave of their hands, the VFL referred McKay to the clubs and their ground managers.
"The customer said their viewers had trouble knowing which end teams are kicking to, but the clubs and the ground managers didn't want to know about it."
McKay remembers pleading that it would only be for broadcast matches going back to the US, then hiring his own painters and spending Thursday afternoons supervising the painting of grounds.
Finally, the line appeared in some broadcast matches mid-season during 1986.
The early font of the 50-metre line even mimicked the numbers on American football fields. "I thought I'd make it look like theirs," McKay says.
Yet within weeks novelty gave way to strategy.
"(Essendon coach) Kevin Sheedy worked out that he could use the 50 metres line as a tactical device with where his players were positioned.
"The ground managers changed their tune."
By the end of the season, the 50-metre arc was the norm, and has been part of the game ever since.
"If it was for international television - who cares? But if it could win a game..." McKay laughs.
"The 50-metre line all came out of footy being on ESPN in the States."