Sydney Swans recruiting manager Simon Dalrymple was a young playing hopeful at Hawthorn in October 1986 when he picked up the Saturday morning ‘Age’ and got the shock of his life. He’d been offered to the Brisbane Bears.

“Honestly, I knew nothing about it. It was the start of the off-season and I was getting ready to play cricket. We had the paper delivered and I was having breakfast when I turned the page and there it was … I was supposedly moving to Brisbane.”

It was all part of a special ‘Foundation Draft’ ahead of the Bears’ entry to the AFL with West Coast in 1987. Each of the 12 existing clubs were required to give three out-of-contract players to the expansion club in a move initially intended to form the nucleus of their playing list.

“It was a joke … most clubs used it to give away players they didn’t really want,” said Dalryimple, whose path to a senior game was blocked by a superstar Hawthorn side which had won the 1986 premiership and would go on to finish 2^nd-1^st-1^st-5^th-1^st in the next five years.

“In hindsight I should have gone. I nearly got a game early the following year when Jeansy (coach Alan Jeans) told me one week ‘you’re a chance’ but then I got glandular fever and it never happened.”

Dalrymple, now one of the game’s most respected recruiters, finished his playing career in the VFA and joined the Western Bulldogs as a development coach in 2007. He took over as national recruiting manager in 2010 and served in that role until joining the Swans in 2018.

He is one of a host of well-known names that were part of the Bears Foundation Draft, which has become topical this week amid prognostications over likely recruiting concessions for the AFL’s latest club in Tasmania in the wake of the admission of the Gold Coast Suns (2011) and GWS Giants (2012).

Under the AFL criteria, via which the Bears had privately hoped to sign 18 players, those nominated for the Foundation Draft had to have played a minimum one senior game or a Reserves final in 1986.

It was a bonus for the club whose Reserves sides had played finals because they could effectively off-load three of their least-required players without impacting the senior group.

The Swans, finalists in 1986, offered the Bears 19-year-old Robert Capricoli and 25-year-old Graham Jones, who had each played one game in 1986, and Mark Whitzell, a had played 12 years in six years at the club, including two games in ’86. None of the trio ever played again.

It is a staggering all-football story that demonstrates how far the game has come from the days when expansion clubs had to pay $4 million dollars for a licence and got pretty much nothing else in return.

One of the most topical ‘offerings’ to the Bears was Bruce Reid, father of current Swans player Sam Reid and his Collingwood brother Ben. He was 31, had played 119 games with Footscray and Sydney from 1977-85, and had retired at the end of 1985.

Carlton also offered Michael Aitken, a 1986 Reserves premiership player who had quit football and moved to London to continue medical studies, while Rene Kink, a top player with Collingwood and Essendon before  an unimpressive seven games at St Kilda in 1986 ended his 181-game career, was offered by the Saints.

The 36 players collectively had played 122 games in the AFL in 1986. The Bears took eight of them for a combined 114 games, while 21 of the 36 never played, and the other seven the Bears rejected played a total of 154 games for other clubs.

Also offered were Dean Bailey, later to coach Melbourne, Graeme Cordy, who subsequently played with the Swans alongside brother Neil Cordy, Daryl Cox, father of current Essendon player Nik Cox, Sean Ralphsmith, father of current Richmond player Hugo Ralphsmith, and Rod MacPherson, brother of ex-Bulldogs player Stephen Wallis and uncle of current Gold Coast player Darcy MacPherson.

MacPherson had blown out his knee in the 1986 Reserves finals and had undergone an experimental knee reconstruction using an synthetic fibre in what was a pre-cursor to the ‘lars’ reconstruction method made famous by Swans premiership player Nick Malceski.

Despite his knee woes MacPherson was one of the eight players from the 36-player list who joined the Bears. He played seven games in ’87 before his knee gave out again.

Others who joined the Bears were Phil Walsh, a former Collingwood and Richmond utility who became a 60-game Bears player from 1987-90 and their first club champion before coaching the Adelaide Crows, and Chris Waterson, an Essendon offering who played 37 Bears games in 1987-88. Plus Melbourne’s Cox (1 game), Collingwood’s Gary Shaw (6), Fitzroy’s Chris Stacey (3), North Melbourne’s Rick Norman (1) St.Kilda’s Robert Mace (1).

Hawthorn’s three nominees, including Dalrymple, hadn’t tasted senior football, while Fitzroy‘s Murray Browne and Geelong’s Peter Johnston were reportedly still under contract. North’s Mark Frawley was found to be ineligible because he’d missed the Reserves finals through injury and hadn’t played in the seniors.

The full list of players offered by the clubs was:

Carlton: Michael Aitken, Peter Kenny, Bruce Reid.
Collingwood: Tony Burgess, Sandy Hyslop, Gary Shaw.
Essendon: Dean Bailey, Chris Waterson, Nick Walsh.
Fitzroy: Murray Browne, Michael Coates, Chris Stacey.
Footscray: Graeme Cordy, Darren Kennedy, Rod MacPherson.
Geelong: Peter Johnston, Michael Leneghan, Russell Mitchell.
Hawthorn: Simon Dalrymple, Stephen King, Sean Ralphsmith.
Melbourne: Darryl Cox, Andrew Dale, Darren Louttit.
North Melbourne: Mark Frawley, Doug Koop, Rick Norman.
Richmond: Andrew Cross, Graeme Landy, Phillip Walsh.
StKilda: Tom Crebbin, Rene Kink, Robert Mace.
Sydney: Robert Capricoli, Graham Jones, Mark Whitzell.