AFL players are increasingly wary of talking to the press. To get to meet Brett Kirk, I sent some footy articles I had written to the Swans for Kirk to read.

The answer came that he had invited me to meet him at his home not far from one of Sydney’s famous beaches. The woman from the Swans handling the arrangement was surprised.

"He’s happy to talk about his football," she told me, "but he keeps the other part of his life private."

I realised later he had decided to trust me. Kirk is big on trust. It’s part of the belief by which he lives. "If you want to get to know me," he told me later, "you should see me in my home. This is who I am."

His home is only a couple of streets from cliffs beneath which a mighty ocean keeps shoulder-charging a continent. I sat there watching for half an hour before knocking on his door.

When it opened, he was more or less what I expected. Friendly grin, taut brown body, dark bristly hair only partly tamed. Behind him, I could hear two dogs barking in a benign way. The house is cool and modern and friendly.

A couple of Buddhas here and there, a photo of Kirk presenting the Dalai Lama with an autographed Swans guernsey. In the kitchen, where we sit, is a poster saying “Two Dogs Are Better Than One” and another, a 1950s photograph of an old man sitting beside a pool in a hat and his family some distance off standing around a barbecue.

The text on the poster begins, "One year my granddad decided to hold a pool party for his hat . . ."

Kirk and his wife Hayley have three kids under the age of three. "I love the chaos of kids," he said.

He has two little girls, 16-month-old identical twins, one of whom approaches me with grave knowing eyes, picks up my backpack and tries to carry it away. She has no fear but she watches me all the way. A bit like her old man with a football.

He tells me he would like to have more kids. Where does his love of footy come from?

"My father," he said. Noel Kirk lost a hand in a farming accident when he was just four. At 17, he went to play footy with a club in rural NSW and was told by the coach he would never become a footballer.

But he did. A tough half-back flanker. Brett Kirk saw the obstacles his father overcame and knew that overcoming obstacles was a big part of the game - perhaps the biggest.

Former coach Rodney Eade tells a story about Kirk when he first arrived at the Swans. Eade told the players who thought they were senior footballers to stand on one side of him. Kirk stood with them. At the time, no one else at the club thought of him in that way.

From the time he was a kid, he loved everything that went with the game. Climbing the fence to get into the ground, running onto the field at half - and three-quarter - times for a kick, the sheds after the game, the feeling among the men, the smell of the liniment.

After the game, it was straight to the pub. Parents went inside for a beer. The kids played hide-and-seek and chasey. In a similar way, he always enjoyed family get-togethers. Lots of people, lots of connections.

Hayley returns while we’re talking with their three-year-old son. The boy sleeps with a footy like his dad did at the same age but he is also doing dancing, which is where he has just been.

Hayley has a quiet grace about her. She speaks only once during the interview, when Kirk is saying he got his persistence from his Dad.

"Your Mum’s a pretty tough chick," she said. You sense she probably is, too. Kirk describes his wife as "the stone in my life".

They met at university where they were both studying to be teachers. If he wasn’t going to be a teacher, he was going to be a nurse. He wanted a job where he could help people.

Each Tuesday morning for the past three or four years, he has worked as a volunteer at the Sydney Children’s Hospital, conducting fitness sessions.

He’s got other Swans players involved. "I think they get more out of it than the kids."

As he tells his life story, a big turning point occurred in his late teens when a former teammate at the North Albury Football Club, Jay McNeil, died of cancer.

He had been the footballer Kirk describes as his "mentor", the one he "sat up with talking about everything".

The loss made him go a lot deeper in himself. He studied yoga and saw the extent to which people’s destinies are determined by their thinking. He has a tattoo on his shoulder, three Celtic circles within a larger circle. That’s him, his wife, his children.

He also has a tattoo on his back, a Buddhist mantra about a lotus flower emerging out of mud. It’s the idea that strength/power/beauty - whatever you want to call it - can come out of dark places.

When Paul Roos took over as coach wanting to change the culture of the club, he found, in Kirk, someone open to such ideas.

The players were encouraged to look at the history of the club. "We’d lost our connection with their struggle," Kirk said.

He identified with one of the names used by the old South Melbourne - the Bloods.

On the podium, after receiving his premiership medal in 2005, he grabbed his jumper and cried: "This is for the Bloods!"

He meant his teammates as well as the players of the past. "I wanted people to know how passionate we are about our footy club."

His uncles once asked him why he played AFL footy, in view of the concussion and injuries he has received. His reply was he plays for his teammates.

Kirk uses language you don’t normally hear in football. He calls those he plays with at the Swans his brothers. He says it’s "so important that players care about each other".

I have spoken to only one Swans player about Kirk and that’s Lewis Roberts-Thomson.

Roberts-Thomson says Kirk has "a special energy" and has deep regard for him.

"He’s just so fair," Roberts-Thomson said, "so understanding of each person."

Ask Roberts-Thomson to describe Kirk as a footballer and he recalls the moment when Kirk left the field during the 2005 preliminary final with a gash in his head.

"It was the most blood I’d ever seen," Roberts-Thomson said. He is a minimalist. He means the most blood he has ever seen on the footy field.

Kirk was bandaged and came straight back on. "It was so inspirational," Roberts- Thomson said. The following week, when the Swans won their first grand final in 72 years, Roberts-Thomson, the young kid who started as a rugby union player, showed what a fine Australian footballer he was, holding the Eagles at bay in the early stages of the game when they threatened to dazzle their less brilliant opponents.

Kirk is an unfashionable footballer. He was originally cut from the Swans’ list and no other club saw enough in him to even give him a try.

But since Roos’ arrival as the Sydney coach, Kirk has won two club best-and-fairests and been an All-Australian. The performance he most deserves to be remembered for, in my opinion, is his second half against West Coast in the 2006 grand final, the one the Swans lost.

At half-time, West Coast looked to have the match won. "Walking into the rooms at half-time, I saw the blokes’ heads were down," he said.

"The feeling of defeat was already there. I thought I just have to try to show the players we can do this.

"I knew I’d put my body anywhere and do anything to generate something in the other players. I’d try to empower them with my actions."

Kirk lifted them after half-time like men lift heavy weights. He forced himself upon the contest, won mad balls, skied it forward, to no one in particular to begin with, but what he did was tilt the balance of the game from where it lay so much in West Coast’s favour until it was the Swans who were flying and the Eagles who were being grounded.

The fact he will be remembered less for this than the stars of the previous year’s win appears to bother him not one whit.

Kirk has a vigorous and original sense of humour. Nathan Buckley once told me with wry amusement about a night he was in a nightclub and a shadow appeared that stood in front of him, rose with him when he went to the bar, pulled money from his own pocket and slapped it on the bar before Buckley could pay for his drinks.

It was Kirk. He tagged Buckley all night. Kirk tells me he doesn’t celebrate quite as hard as he once did.

As he says it, he props his kids up in feeding chairs in front of a television. He says kids teach him patience and indicates it’s not something he’s always had.

And so our talk continues, with Kirk’s three-year boy watching a nature program and shouting like a lookout in a crows’ nest each time he sees an animal. "Dad," he cried out, chubby finger pointing at the screen. "A whale! A whale!"

Our interview breaks for a whale, a tiger and a rhino.

Kirk actually introduced the Dalai Lama when he spoke in Sydney. People were allowed to publicly ask one question of Tibet’s spiritual leader, the man recently accused by the Chinese government of leading a rebellion.

Kirk asked him what was the most important thing he could give his children and the Dalai Lama answered: "Affection."

I ask Kirk if he wants to coach. He doesn’t think too much about the future, nor indeed the past. He tries to be "present" — for his kids, his teammates, his wife.

He knows he wants to keep living somewhere near the coast with trees around him. I ask him his best footy memories.

He has two. The first, predictably, is winning the grand final. Looking into the eyes of his teammates and knowing they had done it. They had lived the dream, if you want to call it that. The shared belief that made the group endeavour possible.

The second was playing in the game when Michael O’Loughlin broke the Swans’ club record for most games played. "The care and passion I have for Michael is so much," he said.

"I loved playing in that game."

His worst memory from footy? He doesn’t have one. Footy’s proved to him you can do what you want if you put your mind to it.

We part with a grin. As I’m coming back through Melbourne Airport, I get a text from him. "Hey Martin," it said. "I really enjoyed sharing with you. When I voice the important things in my life, it makes me even more passionate about them."