Australian Rules: Death and the maiden bring ruin for hero

By BILLY ADAMS

They called him God. Not Champ. Not even Legend. Just God - plain and simple.

Gary Ablett cut an unlikely Messiah. The craggy face. The big chin. The receding blond locks. The bushy moustache. Below, one of those notoriously tight-fitting, sleeveless Australian Rules Football outfits wrapped like cling-film round a pale, muscular torso.

In the famous stripes of the Geelong Cats, Ablett looked less the pin-up superstar, more a zebra on speed.

Yet he possessed style. He kicked goals from anywhere, for fun, outpaced opponents at leisure. Most of all, this man could fly.

Critics have never quite understood the charms of the game they dub aerial ping-pong, but in football-mad Victoria, nothing beats the wonder of an athlete leaping high to collect a catch as chaos reigns all around.

No one had better hands than Ablett, the only player who could induce a sharp intake of 100,000 breaths every time the ball went near him at the MCG. And no one could crash back to earth with anything approaching such supreme poise.

Others could only dream of levels which saw Ablett soar past 1000 goals in a 15-year career.

"He could do anything," recalls former team-mate Paul Couch. "He made a habit of making something out of nothing."

How the mighty are fallen. The paddock was always where Ablett felt at home, but the outside world seemed an alien arena which he failed miserably to master. And last year those two worlds collided in the most tragic of circumstances.

Ablett awoke in his hotel room to find a besotted young fan slumped on the floor. Alisha Horan was a barmaid who had been seduced by her hero only a few days earlier.

They had partied together ever since, and now she was dead after overdosing on a cocktail of drugs.

Footie fans were left numb with shock. Former team-mates and acquaintances reacted with less surprise, almost as if such a sad outcome had been inevitable.

Even during his astonishing 248-game career, Ablett had been known as a bit of a recluse. Those who like him say he is quiet. Others call him anti-social.

When Ablett walked away from the game in 1997, he had long been a troubled soul trying to deal with the consequences of fame, yet he now faced a future without the game which had sustained most of his life.

Ablett simply disappeared from the public eye, but after-dark sightings became common in the goldfish-bowl atmosphere of Melbourne. Rumour and innuendo - centreing on persistent stories of him being drunk, and perhaps worse - trailed him through the shadows.

Friends feared he was out of control. One of his former managers, Peter Jess, described Ablett's life skills as basic. He did not need an agent, said Jess, he needed a wet nurse.

Ablett's movements over the last couple of years have been sketchy, but just a few days before his ill-fated meeting with Horan, he phoned a former agent to say he was back on track.

He is believed to have at one point been digging graves, and spent six months as a tiler's labourer. Now he wanted to start earning some money from his famous name.

But no sooner had Ablett announced his intentions than he met Horan at the Westcoast Saloon bar on Geelong's main drag, Rylie St.

They already knew each other. Horan used to come to the star's house to play with his daughter when she was younger, and as a diehard teenage fan hung around the changing rooms at Shell Stadium. Aged 20 she was blonde, bubbly and infatuated. Ablett could not resist.

They drank at the bar until the next morning, and stayed a couple of nights at Ablett's home before heading into Melbourne.

Last month, Ablett told an inquest into her death that he had the "staggers" the night she died in February last year, and passed out as soon as they arrived at their hotel suite.

He awoke to find Horan having trouble breathing and, after trying to resuscitate her, called an ambulance.

He was "devastated." They had become "close friends" and were "intimate."

The inquest at Melbourne Coroner's Court heard that Horan suffered irreparable brain damage and was found to have traces of heroin and amphetamines in her blood.

Ablett was less forthcoming on what drugs were taken, refusing to answer questions on the grounds that he could be incriminated.

Although coroner Noreen Toohey found that Ablett had not contributed directly to the death, she was less than complimentary about his role.

Toohey said that Ablett, in all likelihood, took drugs and alcohol too, and failed to protect the young woman from harm.

"Had he been in a position to render assistance to Ms Horan, shortly after her return to the hotel, it is possible that she might be alive today," she said.

When the pressures of fame collide with sportsmen clearly unsuited to deal with such circumstances, chaos usually follows.

But such was Ablett's standing in Geelong that many footie fans seem prepared to forgive and forget. The same cannot be said of Horan's family, who have maintained a public silence throughout the pain of the last year.

After Horan died, Ablett checked into a depression-and-drugs clinic run by, ironically, the Assembly of God, about 200km north of Melbourne.

Today Ablett, a born-again Christian who never liked his ultimate nickname, is believed to be there again.

Perhaps he is pondering whether he really has found God.