When time ran out for a man called "God' This goes back to 1983 and the composing room of Albury's daily newspaper, the Border Morning Mail. One of the compositors played for the Ovens and Murray League team, Lavington, and was relating his adventures of the previous Saturday. He had been tackled by this new bloke playing for Myrtleford, Ablett. What stayed with him was that there seemed to be a good deal of malice and muscle in the contact. Gary Ablett played for keeps. The compositor came, as it now turns out, from a family of football blue-bloods, the Lappins, of Chiltern, in north-east Victoria. Two of his young cousins now play in the Australian Football League: Matthew Lappin, today for St Kilda, and Nigel for the Brisbane Lions. Rob Lappin was my first - indirect - contact with Ablett. The next was also hearsay, although this more wondrous. Myrtleford were about to make their exit from the Ovens and Murray finals on a saturated Wangaratta Showgrounds oval. Ablett's goodbye was typical: a kick from the centre of the ground which went between goal posts high and laser straight. No-one else in that game - or in any that he has played since - had the rare combination of timing and brute strength to propel a ball like that. Neither could anyone propel their bodies forward or upward as Ablett did. For the best part of 10 years he seemingly defied the laws of gravity and somehow kept the laws of life at bay as well. In his prime, ex-St Kilda and now Sydney Swans full-forward Tony Lockett was once likened to a jumbo jet taking off as he rose for a mark. Similarly, Ablett - sometimes called "God' by fans - was like a launched missile and never less than breathtaking. "That's not a mark, it's a party trick," Dennis Commetti, the Channel 7 football commentator called, after one such grab by the Geelong star. Several reasons exist why football emerged from the doldrums of the mid-80s. One was that the then Victorian Football League's administrators raised the horizons of their audience, taking their league to Perth and Brisbane. Another was the non-aligned had found a reason to go to games again - Ablett. And as much as fans of the Cats revelled in their team's improved fortunes, they more often turned up just to catch a glimpse of what Ablett might do. Geelong recruiting officer Bill McMaster thought there were many who would go home after a game satisfied with an Ablett cameo, regardless of the result of the match. In that way, Ablett enjoyed a grip on public sporting affections as no-one other than Bradman and a few racehorses had previously been able to do. Perhaps "enjoyed" is the wrong word. Worshiped would be closer to it. At heart, Ablett was a simple, occasionally hoonish, son of the Victorian town of Drouin, whose love of solitude and fishing was tolerated, even protected, by his club. His deterioration in form owing to the fact his body was on the way out put the writing on the wall I for one could see it but dared not to believe. It took 12 months of speculation, but unfortunately Ablett's football career was declared beyond salvage by Geelong. |
