He played 55 games with Fitzroy (1985-87), 138 games with the Bears (1988-96) and seven games with the Lions (1997). And was an assistant-coach of the Lions’ 2001-02 premiership sides.

From the Hickey Park headquarters of QAFL club Wilston-Grange to the MCG, and venues large and small right around the country, he’s seen it all. Good times and bad. Happy times and sad.

A qualified builder since 1996, he joined the elite competition at a time when Queenslanders lived for the Saturday afternoon “VFL Match of the Day” telecast as 12 Victorian teams played pretty much every Saturday at 2pm, with an occasional Friday night game.

He lived the life of a part-time footballer, saw the transition to professionalism, the early years of expansion, and the growth of Australian football in Queensland to a level which 40 years ago he only dreamed of.

It all began for the young boy from suburban Grange when the 1984 Queensland side, coached by ex-Fitzroy player and subsequent Bears coach Norm Dare, played pre-season games against St. Kilda at Kedron and Collingwood at Mayne.

He was an immediate star, and had high hopes after Fitzroy’s Keith Weigard introduced himself to him in the Queensland rooms at Kedron and spoke of a move south, but McIvor never heard from him again.

His first AFL trial was at Hawthorn. It didn’t go well. “I went with Tony Smith from Morningside who later played at Sydney. I played in an internal trial wearing a borrowed pair of boots that were too small. I was terrible.”

He was all set to go to Perth with brother Ross to play with Claremont in the WAFL when the Fitzroy interest was rekindled. He has no recollection of how it happened but suspects Dare, later named Queensland Team of the Century Coach, had a little to do with it.

Then, out of the blue, McIvor got a call from David Parkin, who at the time was coach at Carlton and had a close connection to Claremont.

“I was in the front room at home when the old red phone rang. The guy on the other end said it was David Parkin, and I immediately thought it was my old mate Russell Maxwell playing tricks again,” he recalled.

But it really was Parkin trying to convince McIvor to go to Perth. The shy young lad, without a manager and wishing clubs would ring his father instead, was brave enough to say ‘thanks but no thanks’.

His decision was backed by three key Queensland football people who would always be close confidants and advisers ... Dare, ex-Collingwood star turned QAFL boss and State selector Andrew Ireland and Grange legend Barry Clarke. So Melbourne it was.

At Fitzroy McIvor met another man who became a great friend and mentor ..  coach Robert Walls. Even if, as McIvor puts it, he threw the 18-year-old Queenslander into the deep end.

“My first senior game was against Hawthorn (in Round 6) in 1985 and originally I was going to play on Jason Dunstall in his debut. Wallsy said “you know him best – you’ve got him”. But in the end the Coorparoo junior didn’t play, and instead McIvor debuted on the wing on 1983 Norm Smith Medallist Colin Robertson.

“Wallsy used to give me all the shit jobs .. Against North I played in the back pocket on Phil Krakouer, at fullback on Gary Ablett Snr against Geelong, at half back on Wayne Johnston against Carlton, back on the wing against Footscray and Doug Hawkins.

“He’d say ‘just keep touch and they’ll lead you to the ball’. It was bloody tough but it was great learning.”

He played 11 games under Walls before Walls went to Carlton at the end of 1985 in what turned out to be a coaching swap with Parkin. The first thing Parkin did when he got to Fitzroy? Confirm with McIvor’s decision to shun Claremont 12 months earlier was “absolutely right”.

In his second season at Fitzroy in 1986 McIvor played all 22 home-and-away games and the last three finals in Fitzroy history, and finished runner-up to Paul Roos in the best & fairest. In ’87, as Fitzroy slid to 11^th on the 14-team ladder, he played every game again and won the best & fairest.

The ’86 elimination final against Essendon at Waverley was a special memory because a big chunk of players from both sides ended up at the Bears – McIvor and Bernie Harris from Fitzroy and Roger Merrett, Geoff Raines, Mike Richardson and Frank Dunell.

“I remember walking out of the rooms to go down the race … Parko grabbed me and said ‘watch out for Merrett at the centre bounce … keep your bumper bars up’. True to form Roger left it until the third or fourth quarter. I’d just about forgotten the warning by then .. until his big moustache filled my windscreen. A year later we laughed about … great mates, great people.”

At the end of ’87 came a big moment in McIvor’s career that has never been fully explained. It was his move ‘home’ to Brisbane, who had joined the competition that year with West Coast.

“As sad as it is to say now, there is no doubt in my mind all these years on that Fitzroy didn’t want me. They were always going to trade me,” he said. “They’d done it to others in the past and they were going to do it to me … just to help pay the bills.

“Right through the (1987) season I spent a lot of time with Roosy (Paul Roos) and Perty (Gary Pert) and they were always talking about contracts. Not their own but players at other clubs. About who was chasing who and whatever was going on.

“I said to various people (in the Fitzroy administration) what’s going on with my contract .. do you still want me? What am I doing? But I got nothing.

“It had been such a tough time. Fitzroy had no money and were hanging on by a thread. Everything was done on the cheap. In the week of the ’86 preliminary final there was talk we’d be moving to the Gold Coast or Tasmania. I remember sitting on the floor in one of the offices with (teammate) Michael Gale and saying ‘how good would it be on the coast – we could go surfing all the time.

“At the end of the (1987) season I got a letter from the club (Fitzroy) saying they’d overpaid me, and that I had to give back the bonus I’d received for winning the B&F.”

As Fitzroy dawdled other clubs showed interest in the emerging star. Especially the Bears.

“One day I was sick and Fitzroy sent the club doctor Garth Dicker over to give me a jab. What he didn’t know when he arrived was that (Bears Football Manager) Shane O’Sullivan was there too, hiding in a wardrobe in the bedroom.

“Under the rules at the time if a club matched the offer to a player from another club they would at least get paid a transfer fee. I’d not received anything from Fitzroy until I was in at the AFL signing the paperwork to go to Brisbane.

“At the last minute I got an unsigned letter on Fitzroy letterhead saying “we match the offer”. I wish I kept it .. it’d be gold today. But by then it was too late.

“Parko rang me the next day saying how sorry he was … that meant a lot to me,” McIvor said, having added Parkin to his list of much-admired mentors. “He is a great man … from a footy perspective and off the field too.”

So in 1988 McIvor joined Warwick Capper, Rodney Eade and Roger Merrett as reinforcements for a Bears side that had won six games in their first season under Peter Knights.

They won seven and eight games in years two and three while living a crazy, nomadic life. With most players still living in Brisbane, even though the club was based at Carrara, they trained at various different QAFL grounds – a different one most weeks - and drove to the coast to play.

McIvor was an immediate star, finishing 3^rd and 2^nd the B&F under Knights in 1988-89, and 4^th under Dare in 1990. Along the way he found another mentor in ex-Collingwood captain Mark Williams, who had been the Bears’ first signing and was the club’s inaugural vice-captain.  

“I can’t remember the occasion but I remember a game against Hawthorn at Carrara when everyone desperately wanted to win for Choco because he’d been such a positive influence on the entire group. And although it was at Brisbane’s expense it was great to see him win a flag with Port Adelaide (in 2004). Indirectly he helped me get into coaching.”

As fate would have it, McIvor was reunited in 1991 with Walls when the 1987 Carlton premiership coach took charge of the Bears.

It was the start of the good times that would eventually follow. The move from Carrara to the Gabba in 1993 was critical, and finally people in the State capital became invested.

Sadly, recurring injuries restricted McIvor to 15 games in 1991-92, but after finishing 10^th in the B&F in 10 games in 1993 he flourished again in 1994-95 in what turned out to be Walls’ last two seasons in charge. He was 6^th in the B&F in ’94 despite missing two games, and 8^th in ’95 despite missing four games.

McIvor and Walls were close, and fortuitously their second stint as player/coach ended on a big high. The Bears’ first final was Walls’ last game at the helm – against Carlton at the MCG. McIvor, playing at centre half back, was a standout as the underdogs from the north pushed the eventual runaway premiers to the limit.

“I loved Wallsy. He’d give you a kick in the arse if you got ahead of yourself, and he’d put his arm around you if you needed a cuddle. You loved him or you loved to hate him. But whatever happened, you always knew he was on your side,” McIvor reflected.

The team improvement continued in 1996 but McIvor’s body let him down again. He played only nine games under new coach John Northey in a year in which, on 4 July, the Brisbane-Fitzroy merger was announced.

It was all new in 1997 and in Round 1, on 30 March, McIvor played in the first game of the Brisbane Lions against Adelaide at Football Park. At 30 he was younger only than 32-year-old Michael McLean in the Brisbane side, but he was one of his side’s best in a 36-point loss.

Sadly, McLean’s day finished with his first kick. He spent the rest of the day nursing an injury on the bench in what ultimately was his 183^rd and last game.

McIvor played six of the first seven games that year before he, too, fell to injury. He was stranded on 199 games until he was finally cleared to play his 200^th and last game against North Melbourne at the MCG in Round 19.

Just the second Queenslander behind Dunstall to play 200 games, he retired at the end of the ’97 season and was honoured with the club’s first post-merger life membership.

After one year off McIvor moved into coaching. He did his Level 3 coaching certificate in Melbourne, coached a winning Northern Raiders Under-16 side in 1999 which included AFL draftees Robert Copeland, Mitch Hahn, Jamie Charman, Luke Weller and Daniel Pratt, and was a part-time skills coach at the Lions.

And he was a full-time assistant coach under Leigh Matthews as the Lions pushed to within the brink of the ultimate success in 2000 and won the flag in 2001-02.

In typical McIvor fashion, when he decided it was time to leave after the second Brisbane flag, and knowing his ex-Fitzroy teammate turned North Melbourne premiership player John Blakey was heading to the club, he left an old pair of runners under his desk, with a note inside which read ‘good luck filling these shoes’. He never did find out if Blakey got it.

It was the end of a football journey which had flourished after McIvor was Queensland Teal Cup Under-17 captain, B&F winner and All-Australian in 1983, and a senior State representative at 17 in 1984.

He represented Queensland 14 times, was vice-captain under Dunstall of the Queensland side at the 1988 Bi-Centennial Carnival in Adelaide, and played for Victoria ‘B’ in 1989.

In 2003 he was named on the wing in the Queensland Team of the Century, and in 2008 he was an inaugural inductee to the Queensland Football Hall of Fame.

Along the way McIvor made another ‘connection’ which has outlasted all his football friends and mentors … his wife of 32 years Adrienne Rainbird.

She was a world-class 400m track runner in her day, and they met in the gym at the University of Queensland, where the Bears would train in the early days.

Asked if he’d impressed her with his form, McIvor replied: “No – she impressed me. She was doing these power cleans, which was unusual for a female, and doing them much better than I could ever do them.”

The couple have six children – Isabelle (32), Liam (31), Ruby (22), Sonny (18), May (16) and Joe (14) – and two granddaughters – 12-month-old Eilish and five-month-old Laurel to Liam.

Why the big age gap between Liam and Ruby? Because that was when Adrienne, whose mother was from Northern Ireland, went back to running and, despite excelling all over the globe, fell victim to what McIvor labelled “the ultimate Irish joke”.

She was one of the top pair of runners in the Irish 4 x 400m relay team chosen for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. They were tipped to qualify for the final and, looking to conserve their best two runners, left them out of the heats.

What happened? They failed to qualify. So Adrienne didn’t actually get to run in her ‘home’ Games, although she did back up at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

Now Adrienne is looking at running in the Masters, while Scott, busy building homes with McIvor Constructions and with four children still living at home, is just doing whatever it takes. Just like he always has.

McIvor doesn’t reflect fondly on the early years of the Bears and the demise of Fitzroy. “When you look back they couldn’t have done a worse job if they’d tried to stuff it up, especially when you look at the concessions and assistance the Suns and the Giants were given. But it’s fantastic now to see what football in Queensland has become, and the role my clubs have played.

“As Wallsy used to say ‘tough times don’t last but tough people do’.  I’ve had the privilege of three great club stories … 40 years, five premierships, seven grand finals … a 12.5% success rate and the equal best record of the modern era. Clubs with 130 years and 16 premierships have the same success, and we had to get overcome a lot more obstacles and challenges.

“Not bad for a supposed AFL backwater.”