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approached Carey’s then estranged wife, Sally, in the hope of A Rain of Dollars beginning some form of reconciliation, he was strenuously rebuffed. As Garry Linnell reports it, ‘“You’re to blame for this,” she told Nixon. “You’re to blame, the club’s to blame, Brian Matthews I’m to blame … We’re all at fault. We never said no to him. We let him think he could get away with everything”.’ Garry Linnell (My emphasis). PLAYING GOD: THE RISE AND FALL Likewise Gary Ablett: ‘Gary Ablett had been given more OF GARY ABLETT than the keys to a city; he owned Geelong and there HarperCollins, $29.95pb, 343pp, 0 7322 7448 6 was nothing anyone wouldn’t do for him,’ writes Linnell of Ablett in the immediate aftermath of his stunning performance Steve Strevens in the 1989 grand final against Hawthorn. ‘By the start of the : A DIGNIFIED LIFE 1990s, the club would go to extraordinary lengths to protect Allen & Unwin, $29.95pb, 320pp, 1 74114 093 5 their greatest asset; it had shielded and cosseted him from the rigours of everyday life ever since his arrival in 1984 ARLY IN THE 2003 AFL SEASON, Peter Rohde, the … ’ (My emphasis). new coach of the , announced as It is something of an old story, though we tend to forget Eone of his initiatives that players should either find quickly. was similarly protected and shielded: part-time work or some similar engagement consistent with the difference was that his club, St Kilda, was no good at it their club commitments, or embark on a TAFE, university, and so moments of high protectiveness degenerated into VCE or other study programme. ludicrous public performances, as This mildly sensational proposition when Lockett threw his crutches at was designed to reduce the aim- photographers pursuing him into less hours spent by many players, hospital. But the intent was the especially the young and unencum- same, and its impact was similarly bered, loitering in malls, coffee destructive. joints and other haunts. ‘Cosseting’, over-protection, Perhaps Rohde, whose fairly shielding from everyday realities, disastrous first coaching year be- are the common, though not in- lies his articulate and intelligent ap- evitable, concomitants of a phen- proach to the game, had in mind omenon that has been dear to a problem more serious, less Australians: the naturally brilliant, graspable, than simple time wast- raw and naïve young fellow ing. Perhaps he was observing that who emerges more or less unann- modern professional footballers ounced from the bush and takes the risk becoming more and more city by storm. Don Bradman, disjoined from the people who Dougie Walters, Glenn McGrath, come to see them play; that the Tony Lockett are names that upper echelon members of a home- spring quickly to mind, and plenty grown and still highly parochial of others can be drummed up with sport can easily become exotic, rar- a bit of thought. This romantic efied, a different breed; and that, figure has died hard in a rain of worst of all, they might come to dollars and the circling spotlights, believe in their own fancied differ- flashing cameras and spurious ence, a condition known at ground accolades of the celebrity culture. level as ‘believing your own Some, like Bradman, handled bullshit’. the pressures; some, like Lockett, Of course, all manner of élite survived and eventually overcame athletes are vulnerable to this con- Gary Ablett and son head down the race them. Others, like Ablett, were dition, but, on a bigger stage, the world stage, those who destroyed by them. And then there was Bob Rose. strut because they cannot dance are soon found out with Bob Rose: A Dignified Life and Playing God: The Rise a precision and bluntness often absent from the affairs of the and Fall of Gary Ablett have, on the face of it, as little in parish, where local heroes tend to be protected from reality common as their subjects. Rose grew up in Nyah West among by the penumbra of fame, difference, privilege and awe in Mallee farmers for whom life was mostly a struggle. As a boy, which they move. he planted his own vegetable garden and sold vegetables When Ricky Nixon, agent for the disgraced , and rabbits around the district, carting his produce by bike.

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As a schoolboy, Rose did odd jobs and farm work, captained now unheard of. The most appalling family tragedy simply the school cricket and football teams and philosophically brought out another level of his extraordinary personal, accepted his exasperated teacher’s proposition that ‘sport as distinct from well-known physical, gifts and capacities. will never get you anywhere’. Strevens tells all this in an unadorned, unpretentious and Rose grew up among decent, hard-working, relatively utterly dinkum narrative that is exactly suited to the task narrow-thinking bush people in conditions that accelerated and the subject. If it has its hagiographic moments, well, maturity and put a premium on responsibility and reliability. Rose deserved them. It may be that Strevens’s description of life in Nyah West is Hagiography is not a temptation Linnell has to deal with a little over-wholesome, but it is nevertheless convincing in his anatomy of Ablett, whose manifest flaws can neither be and attractive, and, in any case, the Roses’ years of back- ignored nor diminished in importance. The aim of Playing breaking work on the ever-present edge of financial disaster, God is to examine ‘Ablett’s experiences with fame and effectively evoked by Strevens, easily balances any tend- Australia’s obsession with sport’. Denied any cooperation ency to romanticise Rose’s early years. It is easy, in short, from Ablett himself, Linnell embarks on a process of edging to understand why Rose became such a fine and exemplary ever closer to him through, in particular, a massive round human being. But there was one other ingredient, both of interviews with people who might know, or might have enhancing and potentially complicating: his phenomenal known, the man, his world, his background, anything. ‘You’re sporting ability. going to hear a lot of stories about me,’ Ablett tells Linnell And that was the one thing he shared with Ablett. Their with ‘a rare smile’. And he does. football careers were separated by decades. They played for Ablett’s pain, his lack of self-esteem, his fatal indecision very different clubs — Rose’s Collingwood tough, unforgiv- based on an inability to trust anyone, his capacity for inexpli- ing but reverential of its awesome tradition; Ablett’s Geelong cable, blind rage, his sense of an emptiness in his life, all ‘small town’, ‘haunted by ghosts of the past’, riven with emerge as layer after layer of his story is peeled away. The factions. They grew up in different bush environs — Rose’s narrative method is a sort of all-out attack: marvellous pen Nyah West agriculturally marginal, remote; Ablett’s Drouin portraits of everyone closely or even temporarily involved becoming during the 1970s ‘semi-rural’, gentrifying at one (Bill McMaster, , , Rob Astbury, end of its social and architectural spectrum, and decidedly among others); sharp, illuminating analyses of the phenom- ragtag at the other. Ablett was well embarked on membership enon of the fall from fame through enforced, peremptory of the latter when, like another Drouin boy, he was saved, at retirement (, , ); least for the moment, by his sporting skill. ‘Without boxing,’ lateral allusiveness (Marilyn Monroe and Port Melbourne Linnell says, ‘Lionel Rose might have become just another star Fred Cook, among others); team ‘cultures’ (St Kilda, blackfella in Drouin, a man to steer clear of in the main street Hawthorn), and so on. All this is done in a hard, lucid, …Without football, Ablett might have been condemned to often effortlessly vernacular prose whose only flaw is that it much the same future.’ sometimes seems to be drifting tonally in the direction of Without football, Bob Rose would have done all right, but Damon Runyon. his extraordinary gifts allowed him to make his life a little Ablett’s is a terrible story, but it is not the only dark easier, more interesting, more fulfilling. He was an unassum- note in Playing God, even if it is the most resonant. Just as ing champion at everything he did. He was, of course, one of Strevens refuses to romanticise the now legendary past in the greatest footballers ever to pull on boots; he was a tough, which Bob Rose had his hour, so Linnell is, by fairly clear scientific and successful boxer; he was a fine coach, a man implication at least, unimpressed with the corporate culture who upheld and lived by the values of ‘good sportsmanship’, of modern football, the sometimes predatory behaviour of which, sensibly, did not preclude him from running straight the media and the clubs’ ambiguous capacity for on the one through an opponent or deftly decking someone he consid- hand callousness and on the other a dangerous, reality- ered in need of a fall. The times he played in ensured that his denying protectiveness. mettle was tested by only modest celebrity. A few bob a week When Ablett turned up at Geelong to begin his league from the club, a sling from John Wren, basic help with accom- career, he was by temperament and upbringing incapable of modation and a job — they were all-important, even at times coping with the maelstrom into which his freakish abilities crucial, but scarcely corrupting and, even if they were, it would propel him. Most of what happened thereafter was his is simply impossible to imagine Rose succumbing to fame in own fault, but it was not Ablett who called himself God — the way that Ablett did. Steve Strevens doesn’t urge this view on the contrary. ‘Because someone plays football it on us, nor does he make the mistake of suggesting or imply- doesn’t make them God,’ said Alan Horan whose daughter, ing that Rose played in the ‘good old days’, when football Alisha, died on a drug and alcohol bender with Ablett. was somehow better, purer, untarnished. Linnell wants to know ‘whether football, with its pamper- Rose epitomised all that was good about the era he played ing of stars and willingness to cover up and hide their flaws in; and he survived and triumphed over its pitfalls — every- during their careers [should bear] at least some of the respon- thing from bog-muddy grounds and generally antediluvian sibility’. The question, like a footballer taking a screamer, player conditions through to a species of on-field violence hangs in the air.

Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au 18 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2003