Read Part 1 of Shannon Gill's feature on the 40th anniversary of the private sale of the Sydney Swans to Geoffrey Edelsten here.
FOR A TIME, the Geoffrey Edelsten effect worked.
The Swans' spending bought it a damn good footy team that started winning and the notoriously fickle Sydney public flocked.
"The SCG was pumping," says former Swans skipper Dennis Carroll.
"We had the 'Go Sydney' music playing when we kicked a goal, we had the Swanettes dancing."
Matches were themed and when the SCG was turned into 'Hollywood' one week it seemed appropriate, not desperate. In Melbourne, ratings for live games from the SCG soared and paved the way for the television rights riches that would eventually flow from the next decade.
The true Swans figurehead became its glamour full forward Warwick Capper.
For all his subsequent professional and personal misfires, in those golden years his long hair, trampoline leap, safe hands and impossibly tight shorts made him footy's most recognisable national figure.
READ: Part 1 - 40 years on: Inside the 'circus' that was Edelsten's Sydney Swans
Swans teammate Neil Cordy believes that his true influence has been forgotten in the ensuing years.
"In terms of profile they didn't need Edelsten as much once Capper had become a superstar," Cordy says.
"It gets lost how good he was, he kicked 195 goals in 1986-87. He was huge."
Edelsten may well have shaped the future Capper aesthetic. After taking ownership The Doc had Capper film the video to his ridiculous pop single 'I Only Take What's Mine' at his mansion.
While Warwick wowed on the field, the Doc was doing his own off-field gymnastics.
Edelsten eventually found those investors he needed, a Western Australian public company called Westeq.
"At the time money was falling from the sky for those WA mining companies. Westeq had more money than it knew what to do with," The VFL's marketing guru of the time, Jim McKay tells ESPN.
"Funding the Swans was small change to them at the time."
Unbeknownst to the general public, soon they would be the majority owner of the Swans and set up a company called Powerplay to run the club.
Meanwhile Edelsten continued to cosplay as its public 'owner'.
He wore a Swans tracksuit with 'Owner' emblazoned on the back, wife Leanne's jacket read 'I Own the Owner'.
For a time, whatever Edelsten wanted, Westeq doled out the cheque for.
"They had the marketing flair but it was just spend, spend, spend," Linnell says.
While the strategy to spend big at start-up is tried and true, in the context of a footy club there was always going to be some flow-on chaos with that approach.
And by this point the scrutiny on Edlesten was increasing.
Linnell's reporting of the time was accompanied by the regular graphic - 'Who Owns the Swans?'
While controversy swirled, Westeq decided it was time to reign in the Doctor. They'd bailed out the Swans, but Edelsten was getting all the reflected glory.
Just 12 months after his so-called purchase, Edelsten 'resigned' in July 1986 as chairman. He had been given an almighty shove.
Despite some delusions of buying out his majority share co-investors, he was completely removed from the ownership picture by the end of the season.
By then the Swans season of extraordinary improvement had ended with two finals losses.
"Once the fog of euphoria lifted a bit, you started to see things," Carroll says.
"One moment he was there, and then he was not. Here we go again - who's after the Doc?"
While the era is forever associated with Edelsten, he was in charge for just 12 months.
"Everyone remembers him, but he was the bomb that went off and then fled the scene." Linnell says.
THE TANGLE THAT the Swans' private ownership had become was symbolised in the working week of a new recruit for 1987, Neil Cordy.
On the weekend he played for a Swans team that were the league's glamour team, lighting up the SCG with big scores and big crowds.
During the week, he and a group of Swans players were handed day jobs knocking on the door of pubs and clubs around New South Wales trying to sell them a satellite television service.
In late 1986 Powerplay, under Pritchard's stewardship, bought Sportsplay, a satellite television company with designs to take on similarly new rivals Sky Channel and Club Superstation screening sport directly to hospitality venues.
Sportsplay had rights to harness racing and greyhounds and it was soon to gain rights to show VFL football in pubs and clubs.
Yet selling the product was hard yards.
"It was the start of a version of pay TV in Australia, but you couldn't broadcast live against the gate in Melbourne," Cordy says.
"And while Sportsplay had the trots and dogs, Sky Channel had the gallops and that's where the money was."
Powerplay wrote two cheques each week for Cordy and co, one for playing for the Swans and one for their Sportsplay sales efforts.
"We weren't getting paid much, but the integrity officers would have been all over it today," Cordy laughs.
Pubs and clubs weren't that excited by the Sportsplay pitch, so as the money started sinking, Powerplay thought it needed more marketing strategy and television nous.
It gave McKay an offer he couldn't refuse - they'd buyout his company Active Marketing, with a buyback offer of protection if things went south.
For that he'd become the boss of Powerplay overseeing the Swans and Sportsplay, along with the Westars NBL basketball team it owned and maintaining the success of his own company.
"Sportsplay had burned so much money by that point, Westeq made no secret of bringing me on as a last ditch effort to save it," McKay says.
"But Powerplay included the Swans, not just Sportsplay. For a brief time I inherited the footy club which was something I was never particularly comfortable with."
Nevertheless, on the field the 1987 Swans were irresistible.
Hovering around the top of the ladder, at one stage they kicked 30 goals three weeks straight at the SCG.
They were the most exciting team in the newly-expanded VFL, Sundays with the Swans was appointment television viewing around Australia.
Off the field, it appeared to be working too. The Swans operating performance resulted in an encouraging $600,000 profit for the season.
The problem was that the Swans were just one part of what was becoming a fragile Powerplay structure. Powerplay was losing $1 million per month on the Sportsplay venture.
Looking at how pay TV eventually took hold years later, Sportsplay needed to spend ten times that figure to get anywhere.
Westeq had cash to keep funding the Swans, but they didn't have that level of wealth.
It was emblematic of how within the Westeq conglomerate, eyes were diverted away from some of the nuts and bolts of football. Like the recruiting of young talent.
"Everyon got caught up in the razzamatazz," Carroll says.
"The Doc came in and bought the new players, but it was like putting a great roof on the building when our foundations were shaky."
"There was no planning for the future on the field."
Two teenagers zoned to the Swans, Wayne Carey and John Longmire, were sold as bargains to North Melbourne and would become superstars of the 1990s.
"It killed our club for the next decade."
IN THE DAYS before finals were held outside Victoria, the Swans tripped up on the road again in September 1987 losing two straight finals. Gallingly they were eliminated by Northey's Melbourne.
It is worth noting that under today's rules, three of those four Swans finals in 1986-87 would have been held at their own SCG and not in Melbourne.
But worse was to come.
Via Westeq, Powerplay's money was being drained by Sportsplay, leaving it staggering.
Then weeks after the 1987 season the entire operation copped a knockout blow - the 1987 Wall Street global financial crash.
Overnight, Westeq could no longer sign those cheques and called in the administrators.
"Had the stock market crash not have happened, the money would have continued to flow. But it did and Westeq fell apart," McKay says.
Sportsplay was offloaded to Alan Bond and rolled into Sky Channel. The Westars basketball team were merged into the Sydney Kings.
What would happen to the Swans was a more vexing question.
THE MOST SYMBOLIC full stop on the Swans' extravagant private ownership era occurred in early 1988.
Reeling from the collapse, Westeq's board started the corporate clean up and their next move was to sell off Capper to the similarly constructed Brisbane Bears.
McKay says he was furious about the decision for decades.
"The board didn't even tell me they'd done it. (TV reporter) Eddie McGuire came to interview me and told me it had happened," he says.
"They sold off one of the biggest reasons people were coming through the gates."
The players were just as shattered.
"Nobody wanted to see Warwick go," Carroll says.
"I thought 'here we go again', the lack of certainty and stability was my whole career."
As the 1988 season started, Swans players didn't know when their next match payment would arrive.
"Merv Neagle had his car repossessed at training and had to get a lift home, even the phones got cut off one time at the Swans office," Cordy remembers.
Doug Sutherland, the Chairman of Westeq who also happened to be the Mayor of Sydney, walked around training one night with a clipboard asking who hadn't been paid yet.
At one stage McKay's marketing arm was the only one generating funds in the conglomerate so they wrote that week's player cheques.
Eventually the VFL had to step in as Powerplay was in ruins and Westeq was effectively an empty shell.
Less than three years after selling the club for $6.5 million the league paid a nominal fee of $10 to momentarily buy the Swans back. McKay bought his own company back for $1.
For all the aggravation and consternation the private ownership experiment had provided for them, the Victorian clubs appear to be the only ones that earned money from the whole expedition, via the initial license fee.
A group that included TV journalist Mike Willisee, music scion Glenn Wheatley, Just Jeans owner Craig Kimberley, and ironically, original bidder Basil Sellers eventually put up their own money to 'buy' the Swans licence from the VFL in a five-year commitment.
Yet this wasn't with the entrepreneurial ambitions that greeted the Edelsten sale. This was more a group of fans in donation-mode to save the club from extinction
The finances didn't improve.
"I had to put up with it two or three times in my career," Carroll says.
"You were either not getting paid or taking pay cuts. It was an ongoing thing."
BY THEN, PRIVATE ownership had become a dirty word in football.
The Swans were in disarray, the Brisbane Bears were about to do the same, while the West Coast Eagles had transitioned away from a public float after just 12 months of existence.
The Swans would lurch on as their saviours sunk money for the next five years, before they were able to convince the AFL and its clubs to buy back the license and convert it to a membership-based club.
Only an impassioned plea by Weinert and canny brinksmanship from the AFL in the boardroom saved the club at all.
All of that group are rightly lauded in Swans history, but private ownership was banished for good.
Whenever the concept is periodically brought up as a new way forward, the survivors of the Swans story have a chuckle to themselves.
"What would happen to the game if a Gina Rinehart came in with unlimited funds?" Linnell asks.
"Thats what people fear more than anything out of private ownership. That the game would rest in the hands of a few again."
Hennessy thinks it was only a quirk of history that it ever entered footy's lexicon.
"I never detected any great enthusiasm at the league or the clubs for private ownership. It was amazing that it happened at all."
For all the issues, Carroll says that private ownership saved the club.
"If the Doc hadn't come along, what would the VFL have done? It was too hard for them to take us over."
Which leads to the great sliding door moment - what if Edelsten hadn't won the auction?
"Sellers and Dick Pratt, they understood business. That's where they (Edelsten and Westeq) lacked the business acumen," Linnell says.
Since 1985, Basil Sellers has become the Sydney Swans greatest financial benefactor.
"Given what we know of Basil Sellers over the last forty years," Carroll concludes.
"The ownership decision really was a no-brainer."
With the hindsight knowledge of the hard slog that has been the establishment of the GWS Giants, there is also an alternative, though less popular, view.
To borrow half a phrase from Australia's treasurer at the time, maybe the Edelsten experience was the explosion footy in Sydney had to have.
"If you took a helicopter view, you'd say that type of showbiz promotion cemented the team as a part of Sydney years ahead of what a more traditional method would have brought about," McKay says.
"Putting Westeq's eventual collapse aside, Edelsten, for all his faults, did that."