Thirty-six years ago the then Brisbane Bears made one of the huge recruiting coups of modern football, luring high-flying Sydney Swans full forward Warwick Capper to Queensland.

It was a massively contentious thing at the time, driven entirely by off-field forces, which made Capper, who celebrated his 60^th birthday on Monday, the highest-paid player in the game.

But only after much debate and controversy, and a story that has largely been untold in full.

Capper, whose first side will play his second side at the Gabba on Friday night, was first linked to the Bears in October 1987 via Rod Olsson, a former Geelong coach who was living on the Gold Coast.

The club had permission to talk to the 24-year-old boilermaker turned glamour boy who had just become the first Swans player since 1935 to kick 100 goals in a season.

Coach Peter Knights and football manager Shane O’Sullivan were sent by chairman Paul Cronin and owner Christopher Skase to fly to Sydney to see him partway through a weekend when the entire club was in Port Douglas for the opening of the Mirage Resort.

They offered the blonde spearhead with the trademark tight shorts and white boots a contract worth a reported $150,000 a year that would have seen him surpass Brownlow Medallist and would-be Bears teammate Brad Hardie on top of the pay list.

But talks broke down as Melbourne-based clubs proposed uniform transfer fees to protect lesser clubs from raids by clubs with greater wealth. The Bears disagreed with the move and withdrew their offer to Capper. Permission to negotiate with Capper was withdrawn by the Sydney hierarchy.

What wasn’t revealed at the time was the fact that Knights and the match committee had told the hierarchy they didn’t want Capper. Speaking 15 years later, Knights said: “Right away I said to Paul (Cronin) that Warwick wasn’t the type of player we needed. We needed someone who could win the ball in midfield and get the ball down to a player like Capper.

“He (Capper) had been great for the Swans at the SCG, where it was a small ground, just one kick out of the centre to full forward, and he had blokes Gerard Healy, Greg Williams and Barry Mitchell delivering the footy to him.

“They were renowned for taking the ball out of the centre and hitting him on the chest. Warwick was very good one-on-one in the goal square and was a good accurate kick over 30m. But I feared he would struggle on the bigger ground at Carrara, where we would need him to work further up the ground.

“But the longer we talked the more obvious it was that Paul (Cronin) was hell-bent on getting Capper. He wanted his profile and image to help draw people to the games. And that was fair and reasonable from his point of view. But I still didn’t think it would work so I took it to the match committee. They were overwhelmingly in agreement that Capper was not the sort of player we needed. But it didn’t matter. We were over-ruled,” said Knights.

On 5 February 1988 Capper quit the Swans. And in a whirlwind 24-hour deal Cronin grabbed him for the Bears. He announced the signing personally on the Skase-owned Channel 7, which in December 1987 had regained VFL television rights for five years for a reported $43million.

Cronin said: “I contacted Warwick’s management yesterday after all the conjecture and when I found he hadn’t signed and didn’t want to, I moved fairly quickly.”

Cronin and O’Sullivan had met Capper in Sydney the day before and flown him to Brisbane to meet with Skase. A self-confessed ‘lair’ who had the number plate ‘sexy’ on his sports car, was hooked.

On 19 February the Bears struck a deal worth a reported $745,000 which included a $50,000 sign-on fee and a $270,000 three-year contract for Capper, a flat transfer fee of $325,000, and a guaranteed $100,000 promotional campaign for the Swans in Sydney on Channel 7.

Skase threw a giant and lavish dinner at the Mirage Resort on the Gold Coast to welcome Capper, with only the best in food and wine, silver service and an army of waiters. Nothing but the best for the club’s new pin-up boy.

Capper went on to play 34 games in three years with the Bears for 71 goals … 18 games for 35 goals in his first season, 11 games for 16 goals in his second, and five games for 10 goals in his third, when he was dropped to the Reserves.  

His contract not renewed, he returned to the Swans in 1991 to play 13 more games for 38 more goals before his career finished at 124 games and 388 goals.

Thirty-two years on Capper ranks 111^th in all-time AFL goals but among this elite group his 3.1 goals per game average is bettered by only 22 players.

Speaking this week, Capper admitted his move to Brisbane ‘didn’t really work’ from a football perspective but he had no regrets. “It is what it is … they used me and I used them,” he said.

Having played for Southport and Queensland post-AFL, he is “living the dream” in Melbourne these days and despite being 32 years out of football is never far from the spotlight.

Having moved back to Melbourne 10 years ago to look after his ailing father Walter, who had played football in the Ovens and Murray League with the great Lou Richards and passed away in 2021, Capper celebrated his mother Nancy’s 91^st birthday last week.

He says he is happily earning “5-10k a gig” on the public speaking and promotional circuit” while also doing a regular podcast with sporting and entertainment celebrities and “a lot of charity and fund-raising work”.

Reflecting more seriously on his career, ‘Capps’ said: “I was a little different but I was lucky enough to play at two good clubs and I’m proud of what I achieved,” he said.

Fair enough. He was runner-up in the Coleman Medal in the 1986 and 1987 and is one of just 27 players among more than 13,000 in AFL history to kick 100 goals in a season.

Now he’s looking forward to his own belated 60^th party in Melbourne on 15 July, with Sam Newman, Wayne Carey, Matthew Richardson and Anthony Koutoufides among a raft of big names on the 300-person guest list. Shannon Noll, Brian Mannix, and bands Boom Crash Opera and Taxiride will provide the entertainment.

The one-time teenage idol, who played drums in a band 10 years ago, will also perform with Noll, with whom he also shares some racing interests.

Capper said he had to postpone the party due to a TV engagement which was subsequently cancelled “because they didn’t pay me enough.” Why? “I asked what Shane Warne got and said I want that too.”

Having  famously partied with Charlie Sheen and Pamela Anderson in his prime, Capper is happy just to get to 60 after a major health scare two years ago, when he was rushed to hospital with a burst appendix.

“I was lucky Lisa was there to get me there. I should have gone earlier but because I’m used to pain I gutsed it out a bit longer. The doctors said I could have got septicaemia because my appendix burst, and the infection could have got into my bloodstream …. They said it was touch and go for a bit.”

Capper was the fourth of 18 players to wear the colours of Brisbane and Sydney after ex-Swans Jim Edmond and Mark Roberts were members of the very first Bears side in 1987. Jamie Duursma (1987), Capper (1988), Matthew Ryan and Queenslander Craig Potter (1991) followed before #1 draft pick John Hutton (1993) and Matthew AhMat (1994) became the first pair to go from Brisbane to Sydney.

Dion Scott, pick #8 to the Swans in the 1988 AFL National Draft who shared a Tasmanian Football League premiership with Chris Fagan in 1988, joined Brisbane in 1993 after six games in three injury-plagued years in Sydney, before Shannon Corcoran (1997) and Queenslander Brent Green (1998) went from Brisbane to Sydney, and Adam Heuskes (1999) and Stefan Carey (2000) went the other way. Others to wear both colors have been Ben Fixter (2006), Daniel Bradshaw and Amon Buchanan (2010) and Lewis Taylor (2020).