In hindsight, he wonders whether the honour was a good thing. "I think I wanted to be my own man," he says.
At his second League club, North Melbourne, he struck an individual note straight away. He joined the Roos before the 1986 season because of a lack of opportunity at Carlton.
His first night of training with his new club was at Trinity Grammar. The Roos' coach was John Kennedy, who had made his name as a disciplinarian at Hawthorn a generation earlier.
After the players had spent more than two hours running in the heat, Kennedy ordered a race of two laps around the school grounds, a distance of several kilometres.
Honybun by this stage was staggered the players had not been allowed a drop of water during such a long session; it was the opposite of Carlton's approach, where players hydrated regularly. The ruckman's solution during the run was to take off his singlet and shoes and dive into the school lake.
"It was an act of protest," he says. "But, quite practically, it was also to get a drink."
North honchos Kennedy, John Dugdale and Greg Miller looked on in stunned silence as their recruit emerged from the water. Honybun's young teammates were agog. He lasted a few reserves matches before he was sacked. For the rest of that footy season, he played golf.
Honybun tells of his life in footy and work in a coffee shop off the top of Lonsdale Street in Melbourne's CBD. The interview detours early to a viewing of his knuckle, mangled during a match in a mining town in north Queensland when he was 19. It looks like a coral-coloured growth on his third finger.
Our interview also detours through travels with his wife and two daughters in the north of Western Australia and the recent family holiday at what he describes as a middle-class hippie camping site in East Gippsland. Honybun is renowned as great company. He's different.
During winter, he wards off the cold by wearing a long coat and a 1950s-style fedora hat to work. His emergence from Parliament train station on to Spring Street never fails to turn heads.
Despite his individuality, Honybun is expert at uniting people, especially in his workplace. Now 48, he started at the Australian Taxation Office 14 years ago with a team of one - himself. He now has a team of 65. If he were a footy coach, he would be regarded as a remarkable nurturer of talent.
Instead, he's an assistant tax commissioner in what is described as "the large business and international" area of the ATO, with a specialty in economics and tax issues relating to international businesses.
There are two sides to his role. He's an analyst of figures and a manager of people. They are skills honed during his childhood on a farm near Coleambally, about 400km from Melbourne in the Riverina district, and during his rather varied life as a footballer.
As a mid-teenager on the farm, Honybun pored over the figures that told of fluctuations in crop and livestock prices and margins.
"I loved studying the business of the farm," he says. "I was a real numbers head. Dad rarely accepted my enthusiastic advice, but it was a good grounding."
His father, as well as being a farmer, was a director of an agricultural consulting firm in Albury. He stressed to his son the importance of education. It was advice born of the uncertainty of life on the land. "Farming breeds a certain conservatism," Honybun says.
Honybun completed secondary school at Scotch College in Melbourne before enrolling in agricultural science at Melbourne University.
At 19, he deferred the second year of his course to work for a short time on the farm at home before taking off for northern Queensland. He and a mate from the University Blacks club drove a Kombi van to Mackay, where they worked on a sugar cane farm. On weekends, the pair played for Mackay City.
By 25, Honybun had played at six clubs in four states, including Carlton and Richmond. His last stop before finally settling into an AFL career in 1988 was East Devonport in Tasmania.
At East Devonport, he and a tearaway teenager called Graham Wright (who later was a star Collingwood wingman) almost dragged their club to a premiership.
Kevin Sheedy, renowned for studying tapes, saw footage of that finals series.
As Essendon was choc-full of big blokes, he recommended Honybun to his mate, Kevin Bartlett, the incoming Richmond coach. 'KB' stuck his head over the fence of Honybun's Brunswick home and asked him down to Punt Road.
"I identified with Richmond," he says. "It was almost a country footy club. There was still an old tiger skin in the directors' boardroom."
At Tigerland, Honybun wore 42, a number he could truly make his own. He had a day out at Waverley when he had a career-high 33 possessions and caught the speedy Nicky Winmar holding the ball.
The next week, a Carlton defender crunched his back to the extent it remained a problem for the rest of his career. Honybun's father's words about the insurance aspect of education came back to him.
At Richmond in the early 1990s, there were five players who were joked about as "the educated ones". Besides Honybun, there was Sean Bowden (law), Trevor Poole and Mark Stockdale (physiotherapy) and Brendon Gale, whose academic interests were wide-ranging.
At this time, Honybun and Gale reflected on their role model, Brent Crosswell, who once said it was an aim during his footy career to stay at university as long as possible.
When Honybun's back injury finally ended his career at 30, he was still studying his research master's degree in agricultural economics and tax. He worked and studied at Melbourne University for another 18 months or so, and was starting to work for agricultural consultants.
Honybun then left the university to work for consultants, often crunching data until well into the night, but it was when he joined the ATO that his interests and strengths came together.
Of the lessons he learned from footy, he begins by cautioning against impetuousness.
At Carlton, he was behind Justin Madden and Warren 'Wow' Jones in the pecking order. After five senior games in three years, he chose to make his move to North Melbourne.
His coach at Carlton, David Parkin, believed he should have stayed and kept pushing for an opportunity.
Honybun later learned the incoming coach in 1986, Robert Walls, rated him. Jones was not in the Blues' team that won the 1987 premiership. The unheralded Warren McKenzie was their second big man on the day.
At Carlton, he also learned about leadership. The Blues had many premiership players who passed on their knowledge. Rod Ashman and Geoff Southby were great role models.
Rod Austin had a wobbly kicking action but prospered because he worked hard and was an excellent team player.
Honybun also liked the inclusiveness at Carlton. A student like him was just as accepted as an electrician. "They never tried to fit square pegs into round holes," he says.
Finally, Honybun liked the raucous social life at Carlton. He knew then that he was enlivened by the energy of others.
This self-knowledge, gleaned from football clubs and the collegiate atmosphere at the university, was among the reasons he left the consultants (where he spent much time on his own) to join the ATO. "I quite like a crowd," he says.
A few years ago, St Kilda coach Ross Lyon did some research on Honybun to see whether he might become a ruck coach. Lyon put some questions to Gale, who told him Honybun was a top clubman, but he "walks to the beat of his own drum". Honybun took the assessment as a compliment.
"I think I had a good reputation as a clubman," he says. "But possibly I was a bit of an individual as well."
