Paul Vautin’s life in rugby league is being retold in a new Fox League three-part series that begins Tuesday night and runs across the next three weeks, with the former player, coach and television personality front and centre. In an extensive Face to Face interview with Yvonne Sampson, one of the sport’s most treasured icons says his own story still sounds improbable to him.

“If someone was to ask me ‘tell me about my life?’. I’d say it has been a surprise,” Vautin says in the interview. That surprise, the series makes plain, started long before the premierships, the coaching and the media profile. He grew up in Brisbane as a red-headed, freckled-faced teenager who by his own account “didn’t amount to anything” as a young player at 10, 12 and 13, when “no-one took any notice” of him and he was “a battler”.

Vautin says he played rugby league on and off through his junior years in Brisbane, then stopped for two years before returning to the game at 16. A mate, Kenny Rose, called because West Mitchy needed players, and Vautin asked his father what he should do before trying out again. The answer was simple: “give it a go, and if you don’t like it don’t worry about it”.

That decision changed everything. In his first trial return match at Redcliffe, his father counted 46 tackles, and Vautin says that was the moment he knew where he belonged. “From there I knew that rugby league was going to be my sport,” he says. That year he signed with Wests Mitchelton for $100 for the season, and his tackling style quickly helped him stand out in the Brisbane competition.

The three Face to Face episodes trace the full shape of a career that moved from local obscurity to the top of the game. They revisit Vautin’s first on-field interactions with Peter Sterling, Arthur Beetson and Wally Lewis, the influence of coaches Frank Stanton, Jack Gibson and Wayne Bennett, grand final moments and the brutality of rugby league in the 1970s and 1980s, and the rough edges of his later years, including being pushed out at Manly and his final playing seasons at the Sydney Roosters.

Family, too, runs through the story. Vautin credits his father, George Vautin, as one of his biggest influences and says his tackling was drilled into him with a simple method: “My Dad taught me to tackle and it was ‘hips, slide, lock’. They can’t go anywhere,” he says. His mother, Leila Vautin, was often on the sideline with an umbrella, trying to fend off the critics who came his way.

The new series lands at a moment when Vautin’s place in the game is already secure, but it gives the record its human spine. The answer to the question at the heart of the interviews is not that he was destined for greatness from the start. It is that he was not, and that is exactly what made the climb worth watching.