It was ugly, but it is one of the most famous goals in AFL history: a wobbly, floating drop-punt from 35m near the boundary line at the SCG, which caused absolute pandemonium among a bumper home crowd.

It was Tony Lockett’s record-breaking 1300^th goal. And it was 20 years ago today, on Sunday 6 June 1999.

Lockett, an adopted favorite son of the Sydney Swans, broke an AFL goal-kicking record which had stood for 62 years and which many thought would never be broken.

It was the 1299-goal mark of Gordon Coventry, which had stood since the Collingwood champion, on his 36^th birthday, kicked three goals in his 306^th and last game in the 1937 grand final loss to Geelong.

Coventry, a five-time Collingwood premiership player and six-time AFL leading goal-kicker, had led the all-time AFL goal-kicking list from 1930, when he bettered the 717-goal career tally of another former Collingwood great, Dick Lee, set in 1922.

Plenty of greats had chased it and fallen short.

Richmond’s Jack Titus had got to 970 goals in 1943, and Doug Wade, of Geelong and North Melbourne fame, reached 1057 goals when he retired in 1975.

Collingwood and Carlton sharp-shooter Peter McKenna reached 874 by goals in 1977, Hawthorn champion Leigh Matthews got as far as 915 in 1985, and Fitzroy/Footscray star Bernie Quinlan got to 817 in 1986.

At the end of 1994, when Lockett moved from St Kilda to Sydney, he was 28 and had kicked 898 goals. Having gone past Richmond great Kevin Bartlett (778), Quinlan and McKenna in ’94, he ranked sixth on the all-time list behind Coventry (1299), Wade (1057), Hawthorn’s Jason Dunstall (1011), Titus and Matthews, and was ahead of Gary Ablett Sr, the high-flying Geelong champion who’d begun his career at Hawthorn, who was seventh at 840 goals.

In 1995, in his first season with the Swans, Lockett kicked 110 goals to go past Matthews and Titus and become the fourth player to reach 1000 goals.

In 1996, Lockett kicked 121 goals to go past Wade and outlast Ablett, who retired at 1031 just short of his 35^th birthday. Lockett sat third on the all-time list at 1129 behind Coventry and Dunstall at 1179.

In 1997, Lockett played only 12 games for 37 goals to reach 1166. He still trailed Coventry but had narrowed the gap to Dunstall to 34. Dunstall had also been restricted to eight games and sat at 1200.

It was a race in two but at the end of 1998 Dunstall, for a long-time considered the player most likely to break the Coventry record, hung up the boots at 1254 goals – 45 goals short. He was 34 when he played his 269^th and last game on 29 August 1998. 

Lockett, 20 months younger than Dunstall, had already bettered the brilliant Queenslander’s final mark of 1254 when he kicked nine against Geelong in Round 18. And after two finals he finished the 1998 season on 1275 from 259 games.

It was football’s burning question … could the man known through football circles as ‘Plugger’ get to 1299?

He kicked three in Round 1 against Port Adelaide at the SCG to reach 1278 but missed the next four weeks with an Achilles problem.

In Round 6 he kicked five against Fremantle at the SCG, followed by five against Hawthorn at the SCG, six against Geelong at Kardinia Park and three against West Coast at the SCG to reach 1297.

The hype was building. After a Round 7 crowd of 25,823 at the SCG for the Hawthorn game and 36,787 for the Round 9 game against West Coast, the Swans home ground was packed by 41,280 people for Round 10 against Collingwood when Lockett did the impossible and broke the unbreakable Coventry record.

Lockett’s first goal early in the game was his 400^th for the Swans and saw him become just the third member of an exclusive 400 Club alongside Bob Pratt (681) and Bob Skilton (412).

Lockett’s second goal soon after saw him draw level with Coventry at 1299, and then, shortly before quarter-time, his close mate and Swans captain Paul Kelly fired a pass to a leading Lockett. Perfectly weighted, it just eluded the Magpie defence before Lockett marked on his chest.

Kelly had long spoken about how he wanted to be the one to kick the ball to Lockett for the record. He’d done his job. Now it was up to the big fella.

The crowd hushed as Lockett set himself. Collingwood’s Mal Michael, playing his 34^th game at 21 in a career that would later see him claim three premierships with the Brisbane Lions, stood the mark.

Club and League officials had formulated a plan whereby the Sydney players would gather away from Lockett in the middle of the ground for their own safety when he kicked his 1300^th goal. And security guards would look after Lockett.

But as Adam Goodes would later reveal, all planning was abandoned when the crowd invaded the playing arena after Lockett’s wobbly drop punt had snuck inside the left goal post to bring up #1300.

Playing just his 10^th game at 19, Goodes said as soon as he saw Kelly race towards Lockett he did likewise. Everyone followed. It was mayhem but it was a well-behaved mayhem. Not threat of anything nasty. Just a lot of people celebrating a moment that was almost 70 years in the making.

As football folklore has it, among the ground invaders was a 14-year-old Jarrad McVeigh, now a 34-year-old 323-game Swans veteran closing in on 325-gamer Jude Bolton, who sits second behind Goodes on the club’s games list.

It was 15 minutes before the game recommenced and Sydney, up 7.4 to 1.3 at quarter-time, coasted to a 22.13 (145) to 14.10 (94) victory.

Lockett, in his 265^th game, kicked nine goals straight from 11 kicks to pick up three Brownlow Medal votes for the 25^th and last time. Stuart Maxfield earned two votes for 23 possessions and two goals, and Wayne Schwass one vote for 28 possessions.

Lockett, admitting later his primary emotion at the time was relief, described his history-making kick as “a shocker”. He said: “it just floated through” but added “if you’re going to duff it you might as well duff it straight”.

Certainly it was the best ‘duffer’ among the 2367 kicks which are listed in the Lockett career record.

The new Sydney cult hero took his career goal tally to 1357 before he retired at the end of the 1999 season, and added a further three goals in a short-lived three-game comeback in 2002.

When finally he declared no more the once unthinkable Coventry mark of 1299 goals had been reset at 1360.

In 98 games for Sydney Lockett kicked 462 goals to sit second on the club’s all-time list behind Pratt (681) at the time of his retirement. Seventeen years later he is fifth behind Pratt, Michael O’Loughlin (521), Barry Hall (464) and Goodes (464).

The unforgettable moment of 6 June 1999, 20 years ago today, is quite probably a moment that football will never see again.

Ten years on, as great as they were, Richmond’s Matthew Richardson (800 goals) and Essendon’s Matthew Lloyd (926 goals) retired without even getting close to 1300 goals.

And now, 20 years on, Lance Franklin is the closest among current players at 931 goals. He’s 368 goals away and he’s 32.

Richmond’s Jack Riewoldt, 30^th on the all-time list, is next best among current players at 610.  And he’ll be 31 in October.

Only one other Swans player has held the AFL goal-kicking record since the inception of the then VFL competition in 1897. And that was for all of three weeks.

The short-term badge of honour belonged to Len Mortimer, a Williamstown VFA product who kicked 289 goals in 153 games for South Melbourne from 1906-15 to rank 12^th on the club’s all-time goal list and was a member of the club’s inaugural premiership side in 1909.

He kicked three goals in Round 12, 1913 to equal the record at the time of 279 goals, held at the time by Collingwood’s Dick Lee.

Neither played the following week before Mortimer kicked one goal in Round 14 to go one in front.

There it ended. The following week, when Mortimer was held to one goal, Lee kicked three goals in his first game of the season to take back the record. He held it until he retired at the end of 1922, having kicked 717 goals.

Earlier, the AFL goal-kicking record was shared by six players when each kicked two goals in the first round of the first season in 1897, when four matches produced only 34 goals.

They were Essendon’s Norm Waugh, Tod Collins and Johnny Graham, Melbourne’s Jack Leith and Charlie Young, and Geelong’s Eddy James. Curiously, it was the only game Graham ever played.

Leith, later a five-time Melbourne leading goal-kicker and 1900 premiership player, and James, the League’s leading goal-kicker in 1897 and 1899, exchanged the record several times before both were overhauled by Collingwood’s Archie Smith in 1901.

Smith, the League’s leading goal-kicker in 1898 and a member of Collingwood’s losing grand final side in 1901, held the record until his retirement in 1902, when Leith again found himself at the top of the list.

Teddy Lockwood, who kicked 144 goals for Geelong and Collingwood from 1899-1905, then had a stint at the top of the leader board from 1904 before it fell in 1906 to Mick Grace, a dual premiership player with Fitzroy and a dual premiership player with Carlton in a 167-game career which spanned 1897-1908 and also included a brief stint at St Kilda.

Lee took the record from Grace in 1910 and after sharing it briefly with Mortimer in 1913 held it until 1930 when Coventry bettered his career tally of 707 goals.

Thereafter the record stayed with Coventry until Lockett’s famous all-time best wobbly floater 20 years ago today on 6 June 1999.