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It’s audacious and bold, but it all makes sense. AFL clubs have successfully converted Irish footballers, basketballers have made the conversion and won, teenaged athletes with a leap, pace and endurance have been turned into Australian Rules players.
Sydney has even tried a Canadian rugby international with no exposure to Aussie Rules, although the Mike Pyke experiment is still in the laboratory.
But few of the converts who have made it in the AFL could be better credentialled than rugby league international Karmichael Hunt.
And none have made a bigger impact before they even start playing.
After playing Aussie Rules briefly as a teenager in Queensland, Hunt reached league’s pinnacle, playing 10 Tests for Australia, 11 State of Origins for Queensland and an NRL premiership for Brisbane, all by the age of 22.
The skills he used to get that far in rugby league can be well suited for Aussie Rules.
He can tackle, find gaps under intense physical pressure, handle the ball with 120kg monsters charging at him, and skip out of the way. He can jump and he can kick. The skills just need to be tweaked a little.
Some of the best football brains in the AFL have little doubt Hunt will succeed for new club Gold Coast when it enters the league in 2011.
While players have spent a century crossing between rugby league and rugby union and back again, it’s taken that long for the AFL to dip into league.
It was just never really considered an option at the elite level, but as both games evolve and their players morph into similarly shaped athletes with some common skills, the jump across the divide is narrowing.
It’s unlikely to stop at Hunt as AFL clubs have only just begun casting their recruitment nets wider to find suitable athletes with the potential to learn.
The AFL’s draft camp is not about kicking and handballing, it’s about the vertical jump, agility test and beep test. An athlete can be taught how to kick and handball, apparently.
With Hunt, the Gold Coast have not only got an athlete who can kick a bit, but one who has excelled in the world’s toughest football code.
Gold Coast recruiting chief Scott Clayton believes Hunt is more advanced in Aussie Rules skills than any of the AFL’s Gaelic football converts, which includes Brownlow Medallist Jim Stynes and premiership player Tadhg Kennelly.
All footballers, of any code, are now a target.
League internationals like Greg Inglis, Billy Slater and Israel Folau are touted as standout potential AFL players, while rugby union needs to also be on guard to ensure towering second rowers don’t become giant ruckmen or bruising centres aren’t converted into hard running back flankers.
But AFL clubs and league and union players might sit back for a year or two to see how Hunt adapts before the floodgates open.
The AFL has already nibbled a little at rugby league’s talent pool in recent years.
Sydney has tapped into its bloodlines with Kieren Jack, the son of former Australian Test fullback Garry Jack, and Paul Bevan, the great-nephew of league legend and team of the century winger Brian Bevan, both regular first graders.
Swans premiership defender Lewis Roberts-Thomson came to the game after playing rugby union at his Sydney private school, and Pyke is getting the occasional game.
In the 1970s, Greg Brentnall was one who went the other way.
Brentnall was one of hundreds of kids in Wagga Wagga playing both league and Aussie Rules on the weekend. He played a VFL reserves game for South Melbourne as a 16-year-old but three years later, with the Swans still chasing him, he joined Sydney rugby league club Canterbury-Bankstown.
Brentnall won a premiership with the Bulldogs as a pioneering fullback, played for Australia and changed the game with his high marking of bombs and his drop punt.
Today, every kicker in rugby league uses the drop punt.
“I just preferred league, the running aspect of the game, and I thought it suited my skills better,” said Brentnall, now a development manager for NRL club Melbourne and chairman of the Victorian Rugby League.
Fifteen or so years later, Paul Kelly spent his Wagga weekends the same way as the young Brentnall – but chose Aussie Rules.
Kelly ended up playing 234 games for Sydney, was an inspirational captain, won a Brownlow Medal and is now regarded as one of the Swans’ greatest ever players.
“I’d equate Karmichael to Paul Kelly who came into the game at 16 or 17,” Brentnall said.
“They had to do a hell of a lot of work on his kicking when he first came in because he had mainly a rugby league background.
“But what he brought to the game was pretty special with the defensive side of his game and his courage. He took it to a new level.”
Could Hunt have a similar impact on the AFL with his league skills?
“It’s a huge risk, but he’s got all the skill sets to compete at that level,” Brentnall said.
“But the game’s changed so much since I was playing. The skill level has changed – now you’ve got to be able to hit a target with a drop punt every time.
“He’s certainly aggressive, he doesn’t shirk the contest. He’s an explosive athlete, he’s got tremendous skill, he’s got great awareness and being able to read where the ball’s going to be. Whether that translates to Aussie Rules remains to be seen.”
At 22, he has the time.
But it’s not just footballers from rival codes being converted.
After representing Queensland as a junior basketballer in a career which looked destined for the NBL, Kurt Tippett took up Aussie Rules in 2005, was drafted by Adelaide a year later and is now a crucial, and exciting, part of the Crows’ forward line.
And as a Gold Coast local who comes out of contract at the end of next season, he could well end up begin a teammate of Hunt’s at the new franchise.
Before Tippett, Dean Brogan won an NBL championship at the Adelaide 36ers in 1998 before joining Port Adelaide with whom he won the 2004 AFL premiership.
Brentnall said the AFL’s key to nabbing people like Hunt was that he was given a taste of Aussie Rules as a teenager and league must combat that.
“That’s what I hope our people get out of it, that we try to spread our tentacles into unknown places like Melbourne and Western Australia and South Australia and give kids a rugby league experience early so then they can make a choice at a later age.
“It may be a wake-up call from our point of view that we’ve still go to spend plenty of money.”
The AFL wins hands down in that regard.
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