Hawthorn champion and premiership hero Dermott Brereton has made a sad and disturbing admission about the deteriorating state of his body.

The former glamour forward, who played in five flags for Hawthorn during a glittering career throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, says he is often in crippling pain and sometimes in tears.

“Some mornings my beautiful partner Julie has to put on my shoes and socks for me,” Brereton said during a function at the MCG.

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“With the pain in my spine, where they put in a cage inserted there, I can’t reach. I just can’t put on socks and shoes.

“Some days I have to walk down the stairs sideways because I haven’t any cartilage — bone on bone, that is — for 40 years.

“Some days I can’t shake hands with other men, and if they do so, I fear they’ll re-open some of the broken bones in my hands from defenders’ spoils and from when (a rival player) jumped on my hand deliberately.

“Some days I have to crab my way down the stairs because my often half-a-dozen times reconstructed ankle will not flex any more.”

The pain Brereton detailed belies his often happy-go-lucky exterior and jovial commentating style.

It’s also taken a heavy mental on the former AFL wrecking ball.

“Some days I double up from rancid heartburn from the endless dosages of (painkillers and anti-inflammatories),” he said.

He said indomethacin or Indocin “used to rip the guts out of you” and he had also poured into his body large quantities of Brufen and Voltaren over the past 40 years.

“Some nights I sleep very little because of the arthritis in my shoulder joints. That’s from decades of lifting as heavy weights as I could, purely because the position I played required it,” Brereton said.

“Some mornings, I pathetically allow myself to become melancholy and even teary over the degeneration and the physical toll that football has taken on my body.

“I often ask myself, in that moment of true misery, when I can’t move, that moment of weakness, I’ll ask myself, ‘Was it worth it?’.

“And the answer’s always the same. I’d do it all over again, exactly the same again.

“Maybe next time, though in the next lifetime, I might go a little harder.”

At the end of 1993, Brereton joined the Sydney Swans for the 1994 season and then played 15 games for Collingwood in 1995.

He finished his career with 211 games but will always be remembered as a Hawthorn great.

In 1999 he was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame and he has since become a highly regarded football commentator.