I RANG Malcolm Blight this week and said I wanted to talk to him about Andrew McLeod the footballer. "Ah," Blight replied. "What a lovely project."

Blight coached Adelaide to back-to-back premierships in 1997 and 1998. McLeod won the Norm Smith Medal in both grand finals. When I met McLeod on Thursday, I asked him what he remembered of the 1997 grand final against St Kilda.

His first memory is running out and realising there were more people at the MCG than there were in the whole of Darwin. "I freaked right out," said McLeod, who hails from Darwin.

He has a slightly slow way of speaking, the edge of a Territory drawl. Darwin's home, he tells me. Always will be. When I push him a little further, he does give me one other memory from the '97 grand final.

It's Blight saying to him at three-quarter-time: "Have you got another one in you?"

That's the end of the story. You have to imagine the rest. I imagine Blight is saying: "Do you have another quarter in you like your first three?"

I sat with Bernie Sheehy that day, a canny observer of the game. I thought McLeod deserved the Norm Smith Medal and so did Bernie. "He was good when they weren't," Bernie said.

He meant Adelaide weren't good early but McLeod was. And by the end of the game, he was doing more than playing well - he was 21 years old and controlling a grand final.

The next year, against a Wayne Carey-led North Melbourne, his mastery was even more pronounced, particularly after half-time.

As Blight described it: "Every time he touched the ball, or nearly every time, we scored a goal. It was unbelievable. He gave people such clear possession."

That's what I remember about the 1998 grand final - the acres of space that started appearing around Adelaide players after half-time.

By good fortune, I happened to stand beside McLeod's father, Jock, at the press conference after the game. I asked him how he compared his son's two grand final performances.

He thought about it and then said: "Last year, he dominated. This year, he created." Jock confirmed that his son played the second grand final with an injured knee.

Jock's father spent time in the Northern Territory but Jock was born in Sydney and grew up in Melbourne. He went to the Territory "about 40 years ago" and played footy with the Buffaloes, Darwin's famous Aboriginal club.

Andrew's mother, Marie, is an AhMat, one of the major Darwin Aboriginal families. Andrew McLeod has both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island heritage and asked what it means to be indigenous, he said simply: "It's who I am."

As a kid, he played all sports and was drawn to rugby league as much as footy. He says he just played for fun and to be with his mates who called him "Bunji", a local Aboriginal word for brother.

He says most of Adelaide calls him that now. He went to Port Adelaide in the SANFL and fell to Fremantle in the AFL draft. In one of the most infamous football transfers of all time, Fremantle, then coached by Gerard Neesham, traded him to Adelaide for a player who name has long since disappeared into the mist.

But playing AFL football was not something McLeod had aspired to. He just played for fun. "I suppose football got serious when I was traded to Adelaide," he said.

Blight said he could see the talent in McLeod when he arrived as coach of the club but was unsure of how to release it. "We played him half- forward, he did OK, but it wasn't quite happening for either Andrew or the team."

Blight rang Stephen Williams, McLeod's coach at Port Adelaide in the SANFL. "Well," Williams said, "we recruited him as a half-back." And from that day onwards, says Blight, McLeod's career blossomed.

That same year, 1997, McLeod won the club best-and-fairest from half-back. In the course of the year, Blight also tried him on the ball. That worked very well, too. But Blight didn't leave him there.

In the coach's words, "we put that one back in the pocket". As a result, Blight says, "the tagging of him never happened".

"No one knew him and it set us up."

I put McLeod's two grand final performances up with those of Michael Long in 1993 and Gary Ablett in 1989 as the great individual performances I have witnessed, but in terms of McLeod's career, they are now a long time ago.

The story of the intervening years is one of continued success, the only significant individual honour to have eluded him being the Brownlow.

In 2001, McLeod lost to Jason Akermanis, the joker in the pack, after a final round in which McLeod had 37 possessions and didn't poll a single vote.

Blight describes McLeod's career as "brilliance and durability" but there was a period around 2004 when he nearly lost his way. He had marital problems and moved in with then best friend Lleyton Hewitt, a friendship that later fell apart over Hewitt's plan to publish film of places McLeod had taken him on traditional Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory without permission from the traditional owners of the land.

McLeod is now back with his wife. This unsettled period in his life made him the property of the tabloid press, which he clearly found most distasteful.

"I'm a pretty private person." Of the overall period, he says: "I like to think I've become a better person from those experiences."

What happened to Andrew McLeod, the footballer is that he woke up one morning and didn't know why he was playing the game any more.

Something had gone. He still finds it difficult to describe exactly what happened but in the end, he says: "You can get away from why you actually do things."

He credits his former captain and premiership teammate Mark Bickley for giving him "tools" with which to handle some of the pressures that befell him.

Bickley, now a presenter with Channel Nine in Adelaide, remembers McLeod being "flat".

The incident that put McLeod back on track was going to watch his son play footy with his father, Jock. "I saw why my son plays footy. He loves it. And I was standing there with my old man. That's what it's all about."

And he did something he doesn't normally do - he watched a replay. "I'm not one to watch footy. I don't watch replays. I don't like to read about myself."

Nonetheless, he watched a replay of the 1997 grand final and found he enjoyed re- living the game. "It ignited that passion again.''

Ask Bickley what makes McLeod a great player and he says, jokingly: "What? You can't see for yourself?"

When Victorians list great players of the past five years, they usually nominate Nathan Buckley, James Hird and Michael Voss. This is not the South Australian view.

Bickley says what distinguishes the best players is "brilliance over a long period". McLeod's met that criteria.

Blight says McLeod is one of the best five players he's ever seen.

I ask Blight if he would compare McLeod to Gary Ablett senior. "Yes," he says. "They both thrilled you nine times out of 10."

Bickley says a characteristic of McLeod's career is that he has always produced in big games, pointing to the individual honours he has won in representative matches.

I confess to Bickley a slight feeling of disappointment about McLeod's career in that having seen him perform so well in two grand finals, I always wanted to see him in a third. Three Norm Smith Medals would make him unique.

Bickley disagrees. "He had two opportunities and he took them. Some players, like Brad Johnson, don't even get one opportunity."

When asked the highlights of his career, McLeod says grand finals are "the ultimate". After that, he says, is playing for Australia.

McLeod toured Ireland in 2005 and got to room with Hird. "I know I shouldn't swear, but I was thinking, 'How f---ing good is this?'''

McLeod says you make "special bonds with other people" out of representative games.

"I really want to play with 'Buddy' Franklin and Matthew Pavlich," he says. Every player wants state of origin because it's the opportunity to play with the best, McLeod says. If you play the game for the reasons McLeod does, that's what you naturally want to do.

After the 2005 tour, Jim Stynes said it was the indigenous players in the Australian team who got the most out of Ireland, and specifically named McLeod.

When I mention that, McLeod tells me of entering a 700-year-old castle. Watching his face, I could see him recall the moment the great age of the stone walls closed around him. "The passion Aboriginal people have for their land and their country is similar to the Irish."

Stynes told him of how his uncle jumped the fence at Dublin's Croke Park the day the British soldiers opened fire on the crowd in 1920.

"I love those stories," he says with a grin. "They get me going." McLeod has a Torres Strait warrior headdress tattooed on his right shoulder and is described to me by one who knows him well as a very proud man.

After playing for his country, he lists his next highlight as playing for the Aboriginal All-Stars. I ask him who his footy heroes were growing up. "The Territory blokes," he says. Maurice Rioli and Michael Long but first and foremost Michael "Magic" McLean. "Magic's No. 1 in my eyes."

At the age of 31, McLeod says the biggest thrill he gets out of footy is going into indigenous communities and spending time with kids. Adelaide's football operations manager, John Reid, not a sentimental type, describes what McLeod does for the Aboriginal kids who come to watch the Crows train. "He puts a smile on their face for three weeks," Reid says.

McLeod says he no longer takes the game for granted. A match such as the one to be staged tonight, he says, is an opportunity to represent his family, his state, his home town, his people and his club.

In fact, he's representing everyone but Victoria. Finally, I ask McLeod what he thinks of Blight. "I loved him as a coach. He gave me so much confidence as a young bloke. He said, 'Let yourself go. Play the game your way'."