AFTER a brilliant but ultimately unrewarded career in which he consciously delayed gratification for the premiership that never materialised, Nathan Buckley finally has his chance to "smell the roses" after being inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.

The Collingwood great's previous individual awards had been tainted somewhat by team failure.

When Buckley won the Norm Smith Medal after being adjudged best-afield in the 2002 Grand Final, any personal pride he felt was far outweighed by the disappointment of a heartbreaking nine-point defeat at the hands of the Brisbane Lions.

The following year, when he shared the Brownlow Medal with Adelaide's Mark Ricciuto (another inductee tonight) and Sydney's Adam Goodes, Buckley sipped water as he prepared to lead the Magpies in that week's Grand Final rematch against the Lions, which the Magpies lost in infinitely more crushing fashion, by 50 points, with Buckley himself producing a rare mediocre performance. He regards it as his worst day in football by some distance.

Buckley didn’t win a premiership - the only blot on his sensational playing career - but that hasn’t diminished his standing in the game.

Eddie McGuire - the Collingwood president and unofficial president of the Nathan Buckley Fan Club - has often trumpeted Buckley's claims to the title of the Magpies' greatest player.

McGuire's argument is logical. Legendary Collingwood coach 'Jock' McHale rated Bob Rose as the best Magpie he saw. Rose, in turn, regarded Buckley as the best he had seen.

McHale died in 1953, and Rose in 2003, so between them, save for a handful of winters, they had basically witnessed the entire history of the club, and its greatest champions.

Strengthening the Buckley-is-best argument is the opinion of Rose's younger brother Kevin - himself a premiership player and McGuire's presidential predecessor - who believed Buckley perhaps even surpassed "brother Bob" as a player.

It's a belief backed by an overwhelming weight of evidence.

In a career spanning 15 seasons (1993-2007) and 280 games (20 with Brisbane and 260 with Collingwood), Buckley accumulated an honours list bettered by few in the history of the game.

Among the gongs, he won a club record six best and fairest awards, a Brownlow Medal, claimed two other top-three Brownlow placings (he received 178 career votes - the best for the Pies, and fifth in history), won the Norm Smith Medal, captained Collingwood a record 161 times, was a seven-time All Australian (three times as vice-captain), and captained Australia's International Rules side.

The bare statistics of Buckley's AFL career are also remarkable - he averaged 24.6 disposals (18.1 kicks, 6.5 handballs) and a goal a game, amassed 40-plus touches on seven occasions, collected more than 30 kicks 10 times, and at least 25 kicks on 38 occasions; astonishing, considering three of his past four seasons were plagued by injuries that often limited his mobility.

Fittingly, in his first year of eligibility, Buckley has now been inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.

Buckley's story is one of constant evolution: from a predominantly outside player into one of the most complete and damaging midfielders ever seen; and from an abrasive character who berated teammates at training and in games into a more compassionate leader who, in time, became regarded as one of the AFL's best captains.

As has been well-documented, it's also the story of a father wanting the best for his son. Buckley's father Ray, a Vietnam veteran and a former ruckman for SANFL club Woodville (where he played alongside Malcolm Blight), was unapologetically hard on his only boy.

However, Buckley credits this tough love for his success as a player and, indeed, his place in the Hall of Fame.

Buckley's almost nomadic upbringing shaped his famous (at times, infamous) intensity. He estimates that by the age of 13 he had attended 13 different schools around the country as the family followed Ray's football coaching appointments.

He says he had to be upfront and, to an extent, in-your-face so he could make friends and fit in. Such haste would become both a strength and a weakness.

The Buckleys spent a lot of time in Darwin, where young Nathan was exposed to the instinctive, skilful brand of football played by local Aboriginal boys.

Almost overnight, footy became all too hard and Buckley almost quit under his father's coaching at under-16 level. He briefly took up tennis, prompting Ray to send him to boarding school in Victoria: Salesian College, Sunbury, which had a strong football program.

Unbelievably, Buckley was the smallest kid in his last two years of high school.

Even more astonishing, he initially struggled to get a game for the school side.

But due to his father's urging, and a welcome growth spurt, Buckley made a quantum leap at Port Adelaide, where he made his senior debut at 19 in 1991.

The following year, he became the hottest property outside the AFL, winning a Magarey Medal (the SANFL's equivalent of the Brownlow) and a Jack Oatey Medal (best-on-ground in the SANFL Grand Final), sending AFL clubs into a frenzy as they fought for his services.

Of course, after announcing his intention to join Collingwood for the 1993 season, Buckley reluctantly started his AFL career with the then Brisbane Bears.

In his debut season, Buckley won the inaugural AFL Rising Star award and finished runner-up in the Bears' best and fairest, before being controversially granted his wish to be traded to Collingwood.

Somehow the Magpies had pulled off a recruiting coup, and it was largely due to the Machiavellian-style plotting of Graeme "Gubby" Allan (now football operations manager at Greater Western Sydney), to whom the Pies have been ever grateful.

Asked for his thoughts on what made him a great player, the 38-year-old Collingwood coach-in-waiting goes back to the most basic, key element: his love of the game.

"(I) had a real passion to play and to train and be involved in footy in every facet that I could … (which) enabled me to work hard and take advantage of any opportunity that came my way," he says.

"If you haven’t got a real passion for it, then I think you get lost in the environment.

"But I had a singular focus of being as good as I could at footy, and contributing as much as I could to the club."

Throughout his career, Buckley was dogged by the perception that he showed too much "singular focus". Halfway through his first season in Brisbane, he was burdened with the unflattering nickname "FIGJAM" (F--- I'm Good, Just Ask Me).

Buckley and many of his teammates dismiss the notion, but it persists to this day.

"I did carry a confidence in what I had to offer," he says. "It all stemmed from the work that I believed I'd done.

"Every footballer needs confidence in themselves. A high self-esteem helps… It doesn’t always happen, though; some of that's a mask (because) you don’t want other people to see that you’re fallible."

For most of his career, Buckley appeared inflallible.

For a period from the late '90s to the early 2000s, he was regarded as a virtual one-man team. The Pies were struggling and it appeared Buckley had to be best-afield for them to even have a chance of winning. It was an unhealthy situation.

"I don't think the individual focus benefited the club at all," he says.

"There was a lot of pressure that came with it, (but) I didn’t shy away from it because I was always comfortable having that responsibility …

"It probably steamrolled there for a period of time where it was too much about an individual and not enough about the team …

"We weren't successful until there was an even contribution from everyone."

It was no coincidence, either, that Buckley produced what he regards as the best football of his career in the 2002-03 period.

"When you’re playing in a good team, I think your best traits come out and your weaknesses are buffered a little bit, no matter who you are," he says.

For Pies fans, and the man himself, three Buckley games of that period stand out, each of them against the Brisbane Lions, the best side of the era.

The first was in the Pies' season-defining three-point win at Docklands in round eight, 2002. Buckley had 31 disposals, kicked two goals and received three Brownlow votes. He says it was his best experience of the mystical "zone" for three quarters, by which time he'd had 28 touches.

Then, of course, was the 2002 Grand Final, Norm Smith Medal after being adjudged best-afield.

Buckley had 32 touches, including a game-high 28 kicks, and drilled a stadium-shaking goal from near the boundary 55 metres out.

Some believed Lions skipper Michael Voss should have been awarded the Norm Smith Medal. But in Buckley's book, All I Can Be, Voss admitted: "For about 10 minutes in the third quarter, Bucks smashed me … He took his game to another level and elevated his team … No one bloke can win a game, granted, but Bucks was certainly 'the man'."

After the game, forlorn teammate Scott Burns told Buckley, "I've always wanted a teammate of mine to win the Norm Smith because that means I'll have a premiership medal around my neck."

Buckley says Burns' comment perfectly summed up his own feelings of despair.

Buckley nominates as his best game the 2003 qualifying final under lights at the MCG, which Collingwood won by 15 points.

Voss sensed Buckley's mood when they shook hands for the coin toss.

"Bucks was on," Voss said in All I Can Be. "I could see the fire in his eyes."

Buckley recalls it was a huge occasion for the Pies after being soundly beaten by the Lions four weeks earlier.

"That was a great win, and one that I felt like (I'd) played a strong part in … ," he says. "(But) ultimately, it didn’t really count for much."

Malthouse finds it impossible to select one Buckley performance ahead of the rest.

"He had such a long career and such an even career, and that's the hallmark of a great player: their consistency," Malthouse says.

"It's easy to say the 2002 Grand Final … but I don't think that was exceptional because he played at a high rate like that for most of his career …

"I'm a hard marker of players in finals (and) he's a Norm Smith medallist. That says it all."

In All I Can Be, published in 2008, Malthouse also offered the following lofty praise: "No other sportsperson - and that includes the likes of Michael Jordan, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods - has inspired me more than Nathan Buckley.

"I don't use the word 'champion' unless it's warranted, but he was an absolute champion."

In the same book, Malthouse said Buckley was the best all-round player he had coached.

"You could play him at centre half-back, and in his prime - when he was 23 to about 29 - he could pay at centre half-forward. He could also play at full-forward, half-forward, as a sweeping half-back, and we all knew how good he was in the midfield.

"He could create goals, kick goals and repel goals. It wasn't a bad package to have at your disposal."

Malthouse regarded Buckley's greatest strength as his concentration.

"I don’t remember too many players who have been able to cope with constant tagging and just have an absolute focus on the football … so his opponent had to be a very good footballer to beat him," he says.

Another of Buckley's renowned strengths was his kicking. In fact, he is regarded as one of the greatest kicks in history. He didn’t boast a copybook kicking technique (he almost interlocked the fingers of both of his hands over the front of the ball, and ran in a slight arc before kicking across his body), but he generated a rare combination of power and precision.

Such was his excellence of execution that he never seemed to miss a target. And he often went for difficult targets, too.

Kicking has always been a key part of the game, but even more so now with teams trying to kick holes in defensive zones and presses.

In his brief time out of the game as an assistant coach at the AIS-AFL Academy, Buckley devised a kicking test - named the Buckley Kicking Test - that was adopted at the AFL Draft Camp to give AFL clubs a better gauge on kicking skills on both sides of the body and over different distances. Buckley was usually pinpoint on both sides over any distance up to 60-odd metres.

"I've been talked up a lot about it, but early days I was a good long kick, I was a strong kick, but I wasn't necessarily a good kick," Buckley says.

"In the mid-90s, if you could kick the ball 50-60 metres with penetration, that was actually quite damaging in that era; it didn’t really matter if it hit the target, you were must kicking to a contest more often than not.

"But today's football is so pinpoint, so precise. In 10 kicks, you’re probably not going to do the same kick twice - you've got to come around the corner a little bit, or chip it, or loop it, or punch it. The defence has got so good that the skill of kicking has got to have improved to get through it.

"Darren Jarman was the best kick I ever saw.

"There was plenty of guys that probably went for safer targets that were (regarded as) more efficient kicks than I was. I liked to go for the hard target, probably a little bit too often … That was one area where I was prepared to take a few risks."

An area that wasn't a strength initially, and was always a subject of refinement, was Buckley's leadership. He readily admits to setting unrealistically high expectations on teammates and being too harsh with his feedback. Over time, he learned to soften the message, albeit only slightly.

"I reckon the intensity that I carried through a lot of my career - and I carried just as much at the end as I did through the early stages - was counter-productive early on, both for my own wellbeing and for the team and the club I represented," he says.

"(I) was just too hard, too full-on. You can have a real will to win and a competitive edge and still smile and enjoy your experiences, but it took me a while to come to grips with that, or to realise that. And I don’t reckon I ever really fully got there, even by the end of my career.

"I was always delaying gratification and waiting for an opportunity to smell the roses that never came."

Buckley also constantly, and consciously, modified his game and his body to suit trends in the game.

"The game changes and evolves, and you have to develop with it …" he says.

"(I'd) think, 'Where's the game going to go? Where do I need to develop? And where do I need to improve?'

"If you stayed the same player, you’d only last four or five years, if that."

He bulked up, eventually too much, and lost some of his agility and durability; and then slimmed down, eventually too much also, and lost too much strength and explosion away from contests.

It was a constant balancing act but, apart from these two extremes, he generally found a happy medium.

In the end, though, Buckley's once seemingly indestructible body began to let him down. After his best season, the Brownlow year of 2003, it was virtually all downhill, with hamstring problems ultimately bringing an end to one of the great careers.

A final great feat of resilience was his effort to make it back for the last five games of 2007, when he threw caution to the wind in one last bid for a premiership.

He wasn't anywhere near the Buckley of old, but he was a solid contributor. The Pies went down by five points in the preliminary final to eventual premier Geelong, but if they had won, they would have been without their skipper, who had torn his hamstring once again.

He says it highlights "how fragile the existence of a footballer can be", and "how you need to strike while the iron's hot … when you’re physically and mentally at your best".

Malthouse hails Buckley - the man who will take over his job at the end of the season - as "one of the best footballers ever", and clearly "sits very comfortably" in the Hall of Fame.

Buckley views his induction as a chance to thank everyone who has helped him along the way.

"All of these people … have moulded me in some way," he says.

"I appreciate anything that anyone's ever done for me and (I) hope that I've been able to take advantage of that and do them proud."

Buckley says his coaches complemented each other perfectly and came into his career at the right time: John Cahill (Port Adelaide) encouraged all-out attack, Robert Walls (Brisbane) brought a defensive aspect to his game, Leigh Matthews demanded hardness, Tony Shaw played him in a variety of positions, and Mick Malthouse turned him into the complete player.

And Buckley hasn’t forgotten the life lessons learned from his "old man".

" I could have missed out on 20 years of experience at AFL level - as a player, as a coach, as a person (in) the media - if he hadn’t have pushed me along the way when I needed it most," he says.

"As a young father now of a four-year-old (Jett) and a two-year-old (Ayce), you think about how you’re going to parent your kids, and it's that fine line between being hard and being loving, and I don’t know if I'm going to be able to reach the same balance that the old man did … He did a great job."

Ray Buckley is understandably elated about his son's induction. However, he point-blank refuses to accept any credit for Nathan's success.

"This needs to be put into perspective," he says. "This is Nathan's achievement, and Nathan's alone.

"Sure, I helped get him a start, but without doubt, this honour is a reflection of all the work Nathan put in to make himself the player he became.

 "And I'm very proud of him."

Pies fans hope Buckley senior will have plenty more to be proud of in coming seasons.