REMEMBER WHEN

GOLD COAST BULLETIN Thursday July 30, 2009

SCOTT Clayton didn’t look like your average coup mastermind.

But the unassuming Gold Coast Football Club recruiting manager was the architect of the most remarkable football signing since Dally Messenger quit rugby union for the newfangled league competition in 1907.

It all started with a skylarking goose step on an Aussie rules field seven years earlier in Brisbane. Karmichael Hunt was playing for Churchie in the GPS schools competition in 2002 and was spotted by QAFL talent manager Mark Browning who immediately recognised the teenager’s athletic prowess.

‘‘I remember walking around the corner from my office at Coorparoo there and I just saw this guy do this big goose step in a game,’’ said Browning.

‘‘The thing about this competition is it is pretty casual. So it is a bunch of year 11 and 12 kids running around playing AFL. He was certainly putting on the party tricks,’’ Browning told Clayton, in passing, sharing information as talent scouts do.

It stuck with Clayton and a few years later, every time he saw the kid in the Broncos No.1 rugby league jersey show his class, the conversation with Browning echoed in his recruitment brain. “If only...” it might have been saying.

He kept his thoughts and ambitions to himself but when he heard of Hunt’s problems at the Broncos he decided to pick up the phone to ask the most outlandish question in sport in 100 years.

“Is one of the nation’s finest rugby league players, who everyone thinks is heading for a career in rugby union, interested in becoming the marquee signing for an Australian football club that doesn’t even have a team yet?”