JONATHAN Brown is a character. When he was two, his parents left him with a family who helped with babysitting. They returned to find the family embarrassed.

Their dog had bitten Jonathan. What did Jonathan do next? He bit the dog. He blushes slightly when I raise that story, but I have already confirmed it with his father Brian, vice-principal of Warrnambool's Emmanuel College and a former Fitzroy player.

When Jonathan was 4, Brian Brown coached Colac. Jonathan always went with his father to training and, from the start, he played games with the players. They hung him up by his collar in a locker, they lowered him by his ankles into a bin.

"I loved everything to do with footy," he says. His smile follows his words, framing them.

As an infant, he also liked being out in the paddocks with his grandfather, Corker Brown, a farmer in the Otways. One day, after his truck broke down in a paddock, Corker observed: "The truck's f--ked". When Jonathan next went to training, he told one of the players about the truck. The player told other players.

Soon everyone was asking Jonathan — or Brownie, as they called him — how the truck was.

Within no time, Jonathan not only played with men, he swore like them. His father thought eventually he had to take the matter in hand and told Jonathan that if he didn't stop swearing, he would take away all his toys on a trailer. "That helped a bit," Brian Brown recalls.

That year, Colac won the premiership. There is a photo of four-year-old Jonathan holding the premiership cup above his head like an Olympic weightlifter holding a weight. I ask him if he remembers the moment. "Vividly," he replies. "All the players were yelling, 'How's the truck, Brownie'?"

I met Brown two weeks ago in his team hotel. Most players prefer to meet journalists on neutral ground like the hotel foyer. He invited me to his room. "Come in, mate," he said. "Sit down". His manner was large and friendly. He directed me to the best chair, insisted on ordering me a coffee. On visits to Warrnambool, he is wont to appear behind the bar of the pub belonging to his old footy club, South Warrnambool. Brownie, as he calls himself on his answering machine, makes no secret of liking a beer. You can imagine him running a country pub, having a word with everyone as they pass through the door.

Brownie can be hard to get hold of. Once you get hold of him, he can be hard to get away from. He's a talker of a sort you meet in the country. The sort that thinks if you're going to have a talk, you stop and have one. To that extent, it's serious but there's plentiful opportunity for humour. We talked for a couple of hours. The only thing he wouldn't talk about were his current contract negotiations.

He explained to me, for example, why he rates Hawthorn's Luke Hodge as a dangerous player — his penetrating left foot can pierce the flood. We talked about Sydney's Barry Hall and how frustrating the flood is for big leading forwards who rely on meeting the ball in one-on-one contests. Sydney's handling of the latest Hall incident worries him. He's not so sure it was wise for the club to let a private matter become so public. "Barry Hall's a proud man," he said. "You wouldn't want to embarrass him. I'd be embarrassed if my private life were discussed in that way."

I asked him about coaching. His grins and says, "I'm interested … but nothing definitive".

He follows Michael Voss' career, including his appointment as assistant coach at West Coast, with keen interest.

Jonathan Brown is the sort of man who can tell you how proud he was having Voss as his captain during the Brisbane Lions' glory years. Voss was the pride of the team. He remembers the lift it gave them in the 2003 grand final when Collingwood's Scott Burn collected Voss — "it was a good hit"— and Voss bounced back to his feet, completed the play, then pursued Burns shouting at him — showing his indestructible might in that arena.

Brown's history could be compressed into his following utterance: "I was a footballer from day dot." When he was 10, he was taken into the Fitzroy rooms at the club's then home ground, Princes Park. He names the players he met that day — Gale, Ironmonger, Osborne, Broderick … He bears in mind how much that occasion meant to him when kids approach him for autographs. He replies to every letter he gets, "even if it takes me months to do it". When he first arrived at Brisbane, he got to play with two former Fitzroy players — or, as he says, "two of his heroes" — Alastair Lynch and Chris Johnson.

At Fitzroy, Johnson had worn Brian Brown's old number — 2.

Brian Brown is remembered as a straight-ahead, no nonsense defender with — according to his son — a booming voice.

Jonathan Brown has a booming voice. I heard it when the Lions played the Dogs at the MCG last month. Brian Lake had him wrapped up like a ram in thorny hedge. Each way Brown went to run, one of Lake's limbs impeded him. On his third or fourth endeavour, Brown broke free, running straight at his teammate with the ball roaring, "YES". But by then it was too late. The ball had gone up the flank. All that energy and exertion had been for nothing. That's what Brown means when he talks about the need to work hard as a forward.

He's always worked hard. As a kid, if he wasn't at the footy club with his dad, he was in the paddocks with his two grandfathers.

His mother's father, K.P. Mugavin, had a farm at Killarney, outside Warrnambool.

The Mugavins were into greyhounds. Brown spent a lot of his early life feeding greyhounds, walking them and training them. When he was 10 — the year he was admitted to the Fitzroy rooms — he met E.J. "Ted" (Mr Football) Whitten at the dogs.

The Mugavins won the feature race, but another of their other dogs called My Mate Teddy had won earlier in the evening.

Whitten gave the 10-year-old a taste of his famous iron handshake and told him he'd have put his house on My Mate Teddy if he'd known he was running.

If anyone had Whitten's persona and passion for interstate football earlier this year in the Hall of Fame Tribute Game, it was Brown. He has an appetite for interstate competition, after copping plenty in Queensland as a Victorian.

He was 15 when he played his first senior game for South Warrnambool. That morning, his father got him up at 5.30 to go fencing ("just to take my mind off it"). By then, he was also, like Hall, doing boxing. He loves the physical movement of the sport, the way boxers set themselves up to attack and defend. When he was 15, the chairman of selectors at South Warrnambool got him in the boxing ring to prepare for senior selection.

His second match was at Camperdown. "There are some pretty tough farmers round Camperdown," he said. South Warrnambool players were no shrinking violets, either. There were "three or four" all-in brawls and three send-offs. By the end of the match, the 15-year-old and one other were all that was left of the South Warrnambool forward line. "It was a pretty quick learning curve."

It taught him to look out for himself. At the same time, he had coaches who insisted he keep his eye on the ball.

"I always had good coaches."

He did year 12 but never thought of being anything but a footballer. His father had played in a Fitzroy night premiership.

Uncle Noel Mugavin played with Fitzroy and Richmond. His mother's sister married Billy Picken, a figure of Collingwood romance in the 1970s. When he was 18, he happily went to Brisbane under the father-son rule.

I ask him what he remembers of his four grand finals. The first was in only his second year of AFL footy, when he was 19.

From the start, he played centre-half forward, classically regarded as the most difficult position on the ground. What he recalls of the first grand final is the quietness in the rooms before the match. "Nerves make for quietness," he says. A door to the changerooms opened. Down the tunnel, he heard the music of the pre-match entertainment. He was lacing his boots. From the second grand final, he remembers the relief at winning.

"Expectations were so high". On the radio, going to the ground, a commentator tipped Brisbane by 18 goals. "That was never going to happen. It was raining." He has no memory of the start of the third grand final, having been knocked out in the first minute by Collingwood's Scott Burns. "Luckily, the doctor let me stay on the ground."

His memory of that game is the number of his teammates who played injured. "Nigel Lappin had two broken ribs. He finished with a punctured lung and played well. There were a lot of guys in that team who could play with pain — and the greatest example of that was Voss."

His fourth grand final he played with a knee injured the previous week when he took one of his trademark chest marks, running back with the flight of the ball, not looking to see who was coming. His knee felt as if it were broken. It became swollen. He couldn't sleep. He played with a painkiller that, in terms of sensation, "took the whole knee out". Suddenly, he couldn't judge the distance of his kicking.

He also hit Josh Carr and got a five-week suspension. "I was going to do what I could to help Brisbane win the game. That was at a key moment. If we'd won four in a row, we would have been the greatest team of all time". But this notion of the game — the one displayed so vividly before his youthful eyes in his second match at Camperdown — was no longer widely, if silently, supported.

Brown was recommended for anger management. "It had nothing to do with anger."

An eventful period followed for Brown and a series of suspensions ensued. He quotes a Leigh Matthews adage — football is about overcoming hurdles.

This was what Brown calls "the discipline hurdle". In a way indicating he found it helpful, he quotes a club psychologist saying you can't control your emotions, and you can't control thoughts arising from your emotions, but you can control your actions.

His next hurdle was injury. In 2005-06, he lost the equivalent of a season. Brown weighs 105 kilograms. In his own words, he hasn't got a leap and he's not quick. ("I'm not gifted.") Instead, he runs 13 to 16 kilometres a game, burning off opponents with endurance.

He restructured his training to strengthen what he calls his "core". He recently measured his working week at 53 hours.

"Love of the game never deserts a footballer," he says. "It's the grind that gets them." In 2007, he played a full season and won Brisbane's best-and-fairest award.

In 2007, he was voted Captain of the Year by the AFL Players Association. Before his departure from Brisbane, Voss made it clear that Brown should succeed him as captain, but the Lions don't have captains any more. They have a leadership group.

Brown's favorite footy hero is Kevin "Bulldog" Murray. "I love talking to the old Bulldog", he says, grinning broadly now.

Murray was the champion of the Fitzroy Football Club in the 1960s when Fitzroy had precious little else. He played with no teeth and had tattoos decades before they were fashionable. He won a Brownlow Medal he still wears round his neck. Part of Brown belongs in the era of Bulldog and Whitten, with its fierce local rivalries and wild ways, with the players sorting out differences on the field and drinking lots of beer together off it.

But to say that about him and no more would be to sell him seriously short. He's also adapted, thoroughly and conscientiously, to the new.

Watch him in the packs. Where others lift their elbows, semi-consciously seeking to defend themselves, he drops his.

His intention is the ball — this is a man who controls his actions. He is highly skilful and accomplished. His kicking action is superb. It starts with a steady rhythm like the run-up of a fast bowler. The step before kicking the ball, he leans back — againlike a fast bowler. When he boots the ball, it is with finesse.

He tells me that over the years, with pressure kicks, he has learnt "to have a crack".

The night after I met him, Brisbane played Essendon. Brown was injured in the second term. He was leading to the flank when the kick held up in the air and he had to stop and prop.

Essendon ruckman Jason Laycock caught him "flush" with a knee to the hip. The pain was like a shock, he told me later.

In the commentary box, Voss said: "He won't go off." He didn't, finishing with a limp and five goals. He is a champion in a thoroughly modern, old-fashioned way.