Fifty years ago today, on 20 April 1968, an anxious Peter Bedford stood in front of the grandstand at the old Glenferrie Oval waiting to play his first VFL game for South Melbourne against Hawthorn.

He was 21 and after three seasons with Port Melbourne in the VFA (now VFL), had made the gut-wrenching decision to quit Port and join the Swans to test himself at the highest level.

There was no turning back. He’d left Port without a clearance and, just as Kevin Sheedy had done 12 months earlier when he joined Richmond, incurred a 10-year VFA suspension.

In his heart the multi-talented Bedford knew it was the right decision, just as he knew it was the right decision six months earlier to reject an approach from the legendary Sir Donald Bradman to play cricket in South Australia.

It wasn’t just a football decision. Not long married, Bedford had been given a lump sum of money by South that allowed him and wife Brenda to put a deposit on a house.

But still he worried. And Port officials didn’t make it easy. Especially legendary Port secretary Norm Goss Snr, father of future Swans players Norm Goss Jnr and Kevin Goss, and fellow Port powerbroker John ‘Darky’ McFarlane, a relative by marriage.

“It was an awful week leading up to the game,” Bedford recalled recently. “Norm and Darky came around home and terrorised me every night. They were saying things like ‘cricket’s your game’ and ‘what are you going to join that rotten mongrel mob for – they’re no good’. They wouldn’t let up.”

Not long before the his first game for South, Bedford got a tap on the shoulder from former Port and South Melbourne rover turned football broadcaster Tommy Lahiff.

“Tommy and Norm were great mates … two peas in a pod. He told me Norm wanted to have a word with me and pointed down beside the grandstand,” Bedford said.

There the anxious about-to-be debutant found Goss and McFarlane talking with Brenda. He thought to himself “here we go again … I’m going to get another earful”.

Thankfully, Bedford said, they didn’t. “Norm said to me ‘we knew you were going to go at some stage – we just thought we might get one more year out of you’. They wished me good luck and off I went.”

Bedford, who had played three grand finals with Port, including the 1966 VFA premiership, wore the jumper #11 for South which had been worn previously by Max Papley, grandfather of current Swans star Tom Papley.

Unbeknown to most at the time, #11 had been offered to him by South secretary Noel Brady as a lure to join the club after Papley had left South to take over as captain-coach of VFA club Williamstown.

Bedford’s debut for South Melbourne in Round 2, 1968 was one to remember.

Having missed Round 1 due to his ongoing clearance dispute, Bedford joined a South side that had beaten St Kilda by 25 points in the season-opener at Lake Oval. A 29-year-old Skilton had 42 possessions and kicked seven goals in his 182^nd game.

Opponents Hawthorn were coming off a 73-point hiding from Essendon despite 10 goals from a 22-year-old Peter Hudson in his 18^th game.

To play as second rover to Skilton was a massive thrill for Bedford. “He was my football idol just as Richie Benaud was my cricket idol,” he said.

His first opponent in the forward pocket was 25-year-old Hawk 92-gamer David Parkin. Bedford remembers it well.

“I led up for the ball and he (Parkin) grabbed me by the shorts. I said to him ‘don’t do that’ but he did it again. When he did it a third time I sat him on his backside. Parko and I joke about it these days. He’s a great fella – we’re good mates.”

Hawthorn led by 34 points at three-quarter time before South, inspired by Skilton and Bedford, mounted a strong comeback that saw the scores finish level. Skilton had 25 disposals and kicked five goals, and Bedford 16 disposals and four goals. Hudson kicked eight goals (and an equal career-high nine behinds) for Hawthorn.

And so one of the great South Melbourne careers was born.

A skilful goal-kicking rover with a fierce competitiveness and a genuine toughness that allowed him to match it with the best, despite his 178cm frame, Bedford played 178 games in red and white from 1968-76.

He won five best and fairest awards in 1969, ’70, ’71, ’73 and 75, topped the club goal-kicking three times in 1971, ’72 and ‘73, was club captain for four years from 1973-76, represented Victoria 13 times in an era when interstate football was a huge thing and won the Brownlow Medal in 1970.

He was inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame in 1999, was named alongside Barry Round and Skilton in the first ruck in the Swans Team of the Century in 2003, was an inaugural inductee to the Swans Hall of Fame in 2009, and was elevated to Legend status in 2011.

Bedford’s 10-year VFA ban was lifted by the Queen when she visited Australia in 1970, he was also named with his father William in the Port Melbourne Team of the Century.

Now 71, Bedford talks about it all as if it was yesterday. Blessed with a remarkable memory for detail and a wonderful turn of phrase, he is a Swans man through and through despite eight games at Carlton in 1977-78 in a career postscript he still cannot explain.

What happened? “I don’t know – it wasn’t my choice,” he said matter-of-factly.

Ironically, his eighth and last game for Carlton, and his 186^th game overall, was against South at Lake Oval in Round 5, 1978.  It was John Murphy’s first game for the Swans. South won by a point.

Bedford’s Brownlow Medal win in 1970 was a significant moment in football history – the last time the medal was presented on the ground.

It was presented by Victorian Governor Sir Rohan Delacombe before a crowd of 112,838 ahead of the Carlton-Collingwood second semi-final at the MCG, the 10^th biggest crowd all-time and the biggest for any match other than a grand final.

After a lunch with countless football VIP’s and past winners of the medal, Bedford ran onto the ground through a guard of honour comprising former winners and a banner specially made by the Swans cheersquad. He ran a lap of honour with the 10 club captains not participating in the grand final.

The 1970 Brownlow vote count was the first one televised from the old Dallas Brooks Hall, which had previously been the site where he had done his Form 3 schooling or ‘Proficiency’ at Parade College.

It was an all-male affair, with club captains manning their respective tally boards, turning knobs to adjust the votes for each player as they were counted. Sitting upstairs on the balcony beside South teammate Wayne Walsh, Bedford wore a brown pinstripe suit and tie – “nothing like Graham Teasdale’s velure suit,” he added quickly.

Only 23, with just three years in the League behind him, Bedford went into a count a warm favourite after winning eight different media awards, including two cars.

He’d averaged 24.04 disposals per game to rank sixth in the League behind Richmond’s Kevin Bartlett (27.23), Geelong’s Ian Nankervis (26.55), Fitzroy’s John Murphy (26.23), Geelong’s Billy Goggin (26.05) and Collingwood’s Wayne Richardson (24.83).

Also, in a phenomenal effort for a midfielder, he booted 50 goals to rank seventh overall behind Hudson (146), Collingwood’s Peter McKenna (143), Carlton’s Alex Jesaulenko (115), Geelong’s Doug Wade (74), South teammate John Sudholz (60) and Carlton’s Syd Jackson (55).

“They counted the one votes first and I wasn’t doing too well. I remember Wayne (Walsh) saying ‘don’t worry … you’ll get all the threes’.”

He did. After two single votes and four two-votes, Bedford polled five threes to finish with 25 votes to beat Footscray’s Gary Dempsey (21), Jesaulenko (20) and North Melbourne’s Barry Cable (19).

No sooner had the win been declared, Bedford was whisked away to be a guest on TV Ringside at Festival Hall, as was the tradition, and it was late at night before he got home to Garden City to celebrate with family and friends.

Several days later, too, he received a telegraph with the message “I knew that No.11 would come good”. It was from Max Papley.

The medal win closed out something of a bittersweet year for Bedford and the Swans in which, for the first time in 25 years, the club made the finals under the legendary Norm Smith.

The Swans, who finished fourth, secured their finals berth in Round 20 when they beat fifth-placed Geelong at Kardinia Park. Bedford had a team-high 28 disposals and kicked four goals as they came from 23 points down at quarter-time to win by seven points.

“We caught the train from Albert Park, which included the mandatory pit stop at Werribee and then another stop for brunch at (Geelong secretary) Leo O’Brien’s pub on the hill up the road from the ground,’’ Bedford said.

A pivotal moment came in the third quarter, when Cats full-forward Doug Wade was having a shot for a crucial goal. As he dropped the ball towards his boot an apple core came flying from the crowd and knocked the ball off its line, prompting Wade to badly miskick.

“It just spilt off his boot and John Rantall, who was on the mark, gathered it, ran around Wade and cleared it out of our backline. I reckon I’ve met about 50 people over the years who reckon they threw that apple,’’ said Bedford, disappointed three weeks later when South were beaten by St Kilda by 53 points in the only final he and Skilton would ever play.

Still, Bedford has no regrets. “I had a wonderful career and a wonderful time at South. As a young fella I considered myself a cricketer who played football, so I guess things worked out alright.”

Father of three adult girls and still good friends with their mother Brenda despite the couple’s divorce, Bedford lost his second wife Lynne on 7 April 2016.

Still living in Port Melbourne, he admits that loss “left a real void in my life”. He treasures his relationship with the Swans, attending all games in Melbourne, helping out whenever he can, and getting up to Sydney as often as possible.