When I finally got him alone, a woman approached and said she needed Michael for a photo on the other side of the room. I said, “If you take him over there he will never return”. People stick to Michael Long like burrs to woollen socks. And why wouldn’t they? How often do we get the chance to stand in a circle with someone who changed the character of the game in a way that impacted hugely not only on the AFL but Australian society at large?

Nicky Winmar’s lifting of his jumper at Victoria Park in 1993 provided an iconic image that will live as long as the history of Australian sport is discussed, but it was Michael Long’s stand two years later that actually changed things. In 1995, the prevalent notion within the culture of the game was still that what was said on the field stayed on the field, besides which there was no difference between being called a black c--- and being called a white c---.

But there was. One term triggers images of a bloody, unfinished history and the other doesn’t. Michael Long insisted on the matter of racial abuse being resolved once and for all. In political terms, the critical factor in the case was that the footy public – an overwhelmingly white constituency – swung their support behind Long, the black man. His victory signalled a wholesale change in the culture of the game that many people, myself included, never expected to see. In so far as our game has a Mandela figure, it’s Michael Long.

I eventually got a word with him 90 minutes after the appointed time. He was sweating, he was working hard, but he was upbeat. I’ve seen him when he’s not. In 2006, I saw how a visit to some slums outside Cape Town got to him. A person who is as sensitive to the world as he is, who reads people as finely, is always going to do it hard, particularly when he’s confronted each and every day by the grimmer aspects of his people’s lot.

One of the reasons Michael Long won in 1995 was because the television cameras captured his sincerity. This is a person who can speak from a depth that transcends race and goes straight to the issue of human decency. In 2004, he brought Prime Minister John Howard to a meeting by beginning to walk from Melbourne to Canberra. “Where’s the vision for Aboriginal Australia?” he asked. He has this gift with simple speech.