Glasgow-born Bob Edmond was a 10-game Carlton footballer who in later life as a super heavyweight lifted his way to two Commonwealth Games silver medals for Australia.

And yet after all these years Edmond sometimes wondered whether he made the right career move.

“Looking back as an old man now I think I had an absolute passion for weightlifting but not much ability, and I had no passion to play football but a lot of ability,” Edmond said, “and I’ve often wondered that if I’d put the same level of passion into football for the ability that I had I might have been all right”.

“But that’s the way it works. I played football for Carlton, I represented Australia 21 times and I’ve been around the world.”

The older brother of former Footscray captain Jim, Edmond is one of two Carlton footballers known to have been born in Scotland. Cathcart’s Henry McPetrie, a five-game player in the club’s maiden VFL season of 1897, is the other.

Bob Edmond competing for Australia. (Photo: Supplied)

That Edmond managed to even handle a footy, let alone chase it at league level, is nothing short of remarkable, as the man himself explained.

“Our family came to Australia from Scotland in 1963 and I never played football until 1967,”Edmond said. “But I remember Jack Wrout and Ron Barassi coming to the house and saying ‘We want to recruit you’ so down I went – as simple as that.”

Very much his own critic, Edmond rather harshly described himself in football terms as “ordinary”.

“I was big, I was strong and I was fast, but I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. My passion was for weights,” he explained.

For the record, Edmond represented Australia in the Super Heavyweight division of weightlifting at the 1976 Summer Olympics and finished in seventh position. He then competed at the 1978 Commonwealth Games,  also in Canada, winning a silver medal with a lift of 322.5 kg.

Carlton’s own then tried to take another medal at the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games and again finished with the silver, with the gold going to fellow Australian, the Port Lincoln tuna fisherman Dean Lukin.

Edmond’s connection with Carlton lapsed somewhat when he parted company in the Premiership year of ’68, but he was the life of the party at the club’s recent 150^th Celebratory Dinner at The Plenary.

In truth, he was never going to miss it. As he said: “I haven’t been involved with the club for a while, I’ve done other things, but when you’re a Carlton player you’re always a Carlton player”.