STEVE TRAYNOR avoids the trip down memory lane by repeatedly saying he has little recollection of the past. Thankfully, there is vision of his heroics from the latter part of his eight-season, 121-game - and three SANFL premierships - career to tell the tale where his modesty takes command.

Traynor is part of the Port Adelaide story that is captured on television, the small screen that started to fill loungerooms across Adelaide in the early 1960s - and today is the biggest influence, particularly financially, in Australian football.

Port Adelaide has appeared more often than any other South Australian football club on television, starting exactly 60 years ago when Channel Seven (with the call sign ADS7) telecast the first game of SANFL football with the season-opener between premier South Adelaide and Sturt from Adelaide Oval on April 17, 1965.

"No," says Traynor, with that assertive voice developed as a policeman that can make his storytelling carry great conviction, "it all began in the Port Adelaide district. Largs Oval, 1960 with Exeter and Semaphore Central. Shown by the ABC with baseball as the preliminary game."

The Advertiser, owners of the Channel Seven television licence, announced SANFL league football's first telecast as modestly as Traynor recalls his career highlights. There was a small story at the bottom of page three of Saturday's paper. At the top right-hand corner of the same page more space is commanded by an advertisement from Dobbies offering television sets for weekly rental.

Ian Day, who died last week after a Hall of Fame career as South Australian football's first television commentator, headlined the presentation that went to air at 8.30pm with 50 minutes of play, "mainly of the third and last terms".

A week later, with Anzac Day events commanding prominence, Seven held back its vision until noon on Sunday for its World of Sport show. Television was making a slow start to its eventually powerful influence on Australian football, as noted today.

Not even Traynor was rushing home after a game to watch the replay - as became the norm for thousands of football fans by the 1970s.

"I was 21 ... I was going out (on the town) with the boys," recalls Traynor.

"And those days we had club functions or social gatherings. Television was not interfering with any of that."

That 1965 season ends with Day, in the final three minutes of the Port Adelaide-Sturt grand final that was decided by three points in Port Adelaide's favour, saying: "This must be the greatest grand final game in history."

A fortnight earlier, Traynor was the man of the moment - and the television cameras caught the moment that had previously been left to the colourful words of radio commentators and the precision of print journalists.

"There I am," says Traynor, "holding back half of Adelaide as Peter Mead - who couldn't kick more than 25 yards usually - has his free kick. I am making sure the ball goes over the line (for the winning goal against South Adelaide) while Neil Kerley is on a run-up to jump onto my back.

"And you want to roll back the vision to the end of the first quarter. The last kick - mine - from the wing, by the gate where the cricketers would come out, is against the wind for a goal."

Traynor with such tales would have been a natural for the football shows that came to television in the 1970s, after he had retired. Television, we say, made stars of league footballers as their images were carried into loungerooms across South Australia. 

"No," says Traynor, "we had stars before television. Geof Motley, John Abley, Teddy Whelan, Neville Hayes ... they were our stars at Port Adelaide before television. We always had stars from the way the game was built up on radio and in the newspapers.

"Television just made them bigger stars."

And a bigger game that today for the AFL commands an Australian record rights deal worth $4.5 billion across seven years (until the end of 2031).

The transformation of Australian football is most significant in the 60 years of television coverage in South Australia.

Originally feared as a threat to attendances, television was by the start of the 2000s seen by AFL executives as the greatest promoter for ticket sales - to the point that the league eagerly sanctioned live telecasts against the gate.

Today, there is an uproar if any AFL game is put on delay. And the vision is no longer restricted to a city's limits or to a small television screen; they are carried across the world on even smaller screens of mobile telephones.

The commercial influence of television contradicts all that was feared in the beginning with the thought of falling ticket sales at the gate. The sport is far from its 1970s demand that games - grand finals in particular - be sold out before a live telecast would be sanctioned.

That 1965 SANFL grand final - with a record crowd of 62,543 - has no advertising boards on the picket fence at Adelaide Oval. There is the very, very long canvas banners produced by the cheer squads telling of the magnificence and power of the Port Adelaide team.

It is not until 1974 - with football's move from the cricket-controlled Adelaide Oval to its own home at West Lakes - that advertising signs appear on the wired fence at Football Park, first promoting a tobacco sponsor. Today, the commercial power of television is not only noted with constantly changing signage on the boundary perimeter but also on the field, the goals posts and. notably the players' jumpers and coaches' polos.

Television has changed Australian football to provide its greatest source of income - and major exposure for sponsors. Hence, the eagerness for prime-time exposure, particularly with free-to-air television on Friday Night Football.

It was a modest start when Ian Day, Blair Schwartz and Bob Jervis first called Steve Traynor's name in a replay of a Port Adelaide game in 1965.

"It certainly has built up the game across those 60 years," says Traynor.

"There have been a lot of good commentators too ... even if for too long it was dominated by ex-VFL players."