The man behind the name: Gary Ablett jnr lived in the public eye and stayed private

Back in 2018, I sat down with a genial Gary Ablett, who by then had achieved so much on the field that it was no longer necessary to affix “junior” to the back of his name.

The interview, a couple of weeks before the 2018 season, was tied to the son’s return to Geelong after his seven years in Tibet – in exile from football’s main street, on the Gold Coast, where he had maintained his standing as the game’s most accomplished midfielder for four or five years, taking a second Brownlow and two further gongs as the players’ most valuable player.

Ablett was relatively relaxed, perhaps because he was happy back home in Geelong. A self-described introvert, he did not feel that he had been closed off from the public.

“I think I’ve always been a pretty open person,” he said. “I’d say I’m an introvert. I like to get to know people on a deeper level and really invest into a relationship. I’m not going to give you everything when I first meet you.”

One could gain small glimpses of a private public figure from talking to him, such as his adherence (then) to an organic diet that leaned paleo, and that he trained in runners rather than footy boots.

I had been told, some years earlier, that Ablett junior (as he would remain to older media who’d covered his storied father) developed cold feet about leaving Geelong following the 2010 season, but that the die was cast – he’d accepted the offer from the Suns (effectively the AFL’s) and had to go north.

It was impossible not to ponder what lay behind the gentle, super-polite persona of Ablett, if there was any torment and, if so, what had steeled him to achieve. In decades of speaking to footballers and sportsmen, it was rare to find one who had managed to straddle affability and inscrutability, without giving up anything that was contentious, emotional or fully revelatory.

So, we never learnt exactly how Ablett had coped with the immense burdens and trauma of being the son of Gary Ablett, a player who was worshipped like no other in the ’80s and ’90s, who seemed to challenge the laws of physics, yet who was also a troubled soul who found serious trouble in his football afterlife.

We did not find out how he had steeled himself, what he had learnt from his feted – and ill-fated – father, besides the need to keep his feet in a contest.

Only a couple of footballers in the game’s history, Ted Whitten jnr and maybe Paul Hudson (son of Peter Hudson), would have dealt with the level of pressure that Ablett not only felt, but surmounted, riding it like a heavy bump and keeping his feet. Unlike Don Bradman’s son John, who c