Born 1 September 1883, he was a 168cm rover known for his trademark red cap and widely regarded as the best player in the game in the era 1900-1920.

He made his VFL debut at 18 and from 1901-06 played 109 games with Fitzroy, then known as the Maroons, for 12 finals, four grand finals and two premierships in 1904-05.

The third Fitzroy 100-game player and the second to complete the 100 game/goal double, he kicked 144 goals in his 109 games, with a best of six in the 1905 semi-final.

He won the Fitzroy best & fairest in 1903, was the club’s leading goal-kicker four times, and in five years in a row from 1902 finished 7^th-5^th-3^rd-5^th-6^th in League goal-kicking.

He was best afield in the club’s 1901 grand final loss and a key figure in the 1904-05 flags, and twice represented Victoria before stepping away from the then VFL at 23 after the 1906 grand final loss.

His exit for ‘private business reasons’ was one of the biggest football stories of the times.

But he had done enough even then to win a spot on the interchange bench in the Fitzroy Team of the Century, chosen in 2002.

The history books are littered with commentary suggesting there was nothing between Trotter and triple Brownlow Medallist Haydn Bunton. Both were superbly balanced, explosively quick, strong overhead and blessed with the ability to kick with pinpoint accuracy.

Trotter was especially revered because he kicked equally well with both feet.

Jack Worrall, star footballer, Test cricketer and ‘father’ of football coaching, and later a highly-revered newspaper columnist, wrote of Trotter: "At a big circus show a performer is placed inside a canon, and at a given signal is actually shot out of it. When I see Trotter roving for Fitzroy, my thoughts turn to that fellow being shot out of the gun, for that's how Trotter comes out of the pack." 

So good was Trotter that it has long been a mystery how he, and others from his era, have not been included in the Australian Football Hall of Fame.

Having left Fitzroy without a clearance, he played three years with Essendon in the VFA.

He later played three years with East Fremantle in the WAFL, kicking five goals in their 1911 grand final win and captaining the club in his last season in 1912, and turned briefly to umpiring before the outbreak of World War One.

Having served abroad during the hostilities, at 33 he played in the famous Pioneer Exhibition Game in London in October 1916 between two teams of Australian servicemen as a fund-raiser for the British and French Red Cross.

He died aged 75 in Willagee, Western Australia, in 1959.