At the start of the 2017 AFL season Gary Ablett’s CV contained items including but not limited to the following: 288 league games; 7,221 of the most beguiling disposals in the game’s history; 378 goals of varying complexity and historical importance; two life-affirming, drought-breaking premiership medals; two of the most convincing and deserved Brownlow medals; five league AFLPA MVP awards from his peers; five club best and fairest awards; eight All-Australian jumpers. And just for the sake of something exotic: three leading goal-kicker awards.
All of this Ablett achieved without a single noteworthy behavioural indiscretion or scandal at either of his two clubs. He did it as the embodiment of work ethic, dignity, humility and dedication, while stretching the parameters and possibilities of his sport.
He also did it while hauling around on those hunched, muscular shoulders the greatest burden of expectation placed on any player in the game’s history. That same phenomenon made a footballing J.D. Salinger of his brother. Selfishly, we shrugged that this was simply life for the sons of a man unflinchingly referred to by millions of people as “God”. Ablett’s father, whose mythical name he bore and whose sporting genius he was cruelly asked to match, also stood as the game’s most glaring cautionary tale.
Yet Gary Ablett Junior pulled off the seemingly impossible: he filled the holes in his father’s resume and lifted a city. He never buckled, and he could only ever be broken by injury. Slowly but surely he achieved greatness, then rarely dropped below its impossible heights. On days when he was merely brilliant, like the rest, it just reminded you how staggering he was at his best.
What we have done to him in return for all of this is, against all odds, far harder to fathom than the feats themselves. Last week, for the sin of an anaemic 16-possession game in Gold Coast’s heavy loss to GWS and the admission he was almost done at the Suns, we piled into Ablett as though he was morally deficient – just another money-grabbing millionaire sportsperson mailing it in.
In sport, when you are close enough to perfect, it is inevitable that a certain number of onlookers will get sick of zigging along with platitudes and want to zag by picking you apart. In the last decade Gary Ablett has suffered as much as anyone from the contrarian, hot-take leanings of sports media. His only rival in this field is Lance Franklin, another player of both measurable and immeasurable greatness who is resented for the wage attached to his jaw-dropping athletic feats, and whose wondrous and unpredictable performances no other player could conjure.
Where Franklin has worn constant gibes over his commitment, lifestyle and physique, Ablett is pilloried for offences as ephemeral and contestable as bad body language and suspect leadership abilities. Such insults are tailor-made for the present environment of microwave umbrage, because the burden of proof rests with the victim. Ablett must still show us otherwise with games like his sticking-it-to-the-critics role in the Suns’ upset win over Hawthorn on Sunday.
Instead we might ponder what, at 32 years of age and with injuries having frustratingly curbed his genius for the last three years, we should really still expect of this champion, and why. If you’d taken the tone of football media coverage last week as gospel, you’d assume Ablett’s only interest was getting what he selfishly wanted: a return to his old club, Geelong. What nobody stopped to consider was the warped and uncaring world a man lives in when the same fish-bowl, small-town life that spelled disaster for his father looms as blessed relief.
This weekend just gone, Ablett put in the kind of performance that has never been more than a game away; 36 possessions, 10 clearances, eight inside-50s, two goals, and no small part in one of the more unexpected 86-point AFL wins in recent memory. The rider was most telling. Suns coach Rodney Eade started his post-match comments by mildly lashing the Melbourne media for their long-distance pot shots at his side generally, and his superstar Ablett specifically.
Then, in his own way, Eade kind of got in on the act himself: Ablett’s performance “was not to his normal excellent standard”, he said. This was partly true. A 61.1% disposal efficiency rating wasn’t great, but it was also thematically consistent with everything else happening in the game. Such back-handers are just business as usual; life being Gary Ablett.
Focusing solely on statistics has never accurately captured Ablett’s abilities, but it does provide lots of micro-revelations. Statistics tell us that his subpar game against GWS two weekends ago – the one that led to the chorus of negativity to which he would “respond” against the Hawks – probably only seemed so disastrous because in his 98 other games for Gold Coast, you can count on one hand the number of times Ablett has dipped below 20 possessions. That’s fewer than one per season. You’re more likely to suffer a tyre puncture on the way to the ground than see Gary Ablett play a bad game.
What has really happened to Ablett in the last three years is what every player, godly or not, dreads: his body has succumbed in a manner his spirit never would. Until injuries first hit, Ablett’s sporting greatness wasn’t spasmodic, it was achieved with relentless, barely human consistency. He was the game’s most beautiful machine.
Opponents couldn’t tag him or match him, only hope the ball occasionally eluded him. To watch Ablett in the flesh was as compelling and moving as great art, because each new moment of inspiration was veiled in pathos; you were constantly reminded of you-know-who, and that the opposite of such blinding light is darkness. Perhaps we should keep such images in mind as a man who has delivered such lavish sporting gifts wearily approaches the only footballing act he can’t hope to master or defy: the end.
