40 years ago, Gary Ablett Sr, Greg Williams and Mark Jackson all played their first game for Geelong

Forty years ago this weekend, two VFL rejects emerged from the bush and plunged back into the big time with Geelong. SHANNON GILL looks back on how the legends of Gary Ablett Sr and Greg Williams began.

Shannon Gill

@ShannonGill13

7 min read

March 29, 2024 - 6:00AM

Forty years ago, future legends Gary Ablett Sr and Greg Williams, and clown prince Mark Jackson, all debuted for Geelong on the one day.

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Two incidents from a practice match in 1984 are etched in the memory of Geelong players and administrators of the time.

“Mick Turner was our captain,” says then-Cat Damian Drum; later Fremantle coach and state and federal parliamentarian.

“And he says to us, ‘Did you see that bloke from Bendigo, Williams? He was at the boundary throw-in and pointing where he wanted me to be. The next thing, he goes in and wins the contest, shoots out a blind handball 15 metres out of the pack, and it lands right where he said it would’.

“So the second time that happened, we started to understand just how good this Greg Williams bloke was.”

Greg Williams arrives at Geelong for the 1984 pre-season. Picture: Bruce Howard

On the same day, Cats finance boss Ken Gannon was taking interest in another player.

“Gary Ablett was just blitzing it and we hadn’t negotiated a transfer fee for him from Hawthorn yet,” Gannon recalls.

“We didn’t want to pay a fortune, so we had to send a message down to the coach Tom Hafey, ‘Get him off the ground Tommy, whatever you do, take him off’. His price was going up by the minute!”

A week later, the league saw what had the Cats so excited.

The human highlight reel of Ablett Sr’s power jumping, kicking and sprinting, juxtaposed with Williams’ redefinition of the handball, like a conductor leading an orchestra.

Rejected by their first VFL clubs and relegated to country footy, 40 years ago this Sunday the two future football forces aligned when Williams was named in the centre and Ablett on the wing for their first senior games for Geelong.

Twelve years later, they would again be selected together: this time in the AFL’s Team of the 20th Century.

In the context of 1980s and 1990s football, the inauspicious introduction of Williams and Ablett in that Geelong practice match was like seeing the Beatles as the house band at the Cavern Club in Liverpool before they ruled the world.

Picture: News Corp Australia

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Ablett had played six games for Hawthorn before being deemed more trouble than good. He wound up playing in Myrtleford. Williams had been cut twice by Carlton in pre-season training and sent back home to Bendigo without making the list, let alone playing a game.

Too fat, too slow was the feedback, yet ‘Diesel’ always had faith once Geelong answered his handwritten letter asking for another chance.

“I still had a lot of confidence in myself and I thought I could make it. I was as fit as I’d ever been after two pre-seasons with Carlton and another with Hafey (at Geelong),” Williams tells CODE Sports.

“The fitness gave me more belief and I felt a lot better at Geelong. It was that big country town sort of thing.”

The first impressions of the two future legends couldn’t have been more different to their new teammates.

“With Gary, it was, ‘Wow, this bloke’s an athletic freak’. That was evident from day one,” Drum recalls.

“In the warm-up sprints, this bloke would be four metres in front without trying, and then the balls would come out and his skills were just out of this world. It’s like, ‘Shit, what’s going on here?’

Williams, meanwhile, was not blessed with the same striking physical gifts.

“Greg was built like a weightlifter; strong thighs, short body, thick arse and a bit podgy. How he became a superstar footballer is quite a phenomenon,” Drum says.

“So nobody saw what we had with Greg. He was just another guy floating through our pre -season training program to see if he could get a chance. But it only took one intra-club practice match and some of our best players were singing his praises in total disbelief.”

Gary Ablett at VFL house in 1984, awaiting his application for a clearance to Geelong.

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Hawthorn finally signed that clearance for Ablett on the Thursday night before the first game of the season, with Geelong coughing up $60,000.

It was a bargain.

The Cats took on Fitzroy, a finalist the year before, and as well as Ablett and Williams, controversial full forward Mark Jackson had also landed at Geelong to debut in the hoops.

An intoxicating package of talent, aggression and controversy had just been transplanted into a middling team and Kardinia Park would never be quite the same.

“It was a unique meeting of the minds,” Gannon says.

The controversial Mark Jackson aso made his debut for Geelong on the same day as Ablett Sr and Williams.

The game was not broadcast – only a few grainy highlights can be seen in the Round 1 replay wrap on YouTube – but its legacy lives on today through the deeds that followed.

Jackson kicked nine goals with his usual outrageous antics.

Ablett ran riot on the wing, picking up 20 kicks, taking eight marks and booting three goals. One astonishing highlight features in the surviving video where he takes off, gathers the ball on the bounce among a group of players, swerves and scorches the turf like the Road Runner foiling the Coyote on his way to a goal.

In the middle, the less-heralded Williams set up the whole 49-point win by amassing 38 possessions and polling three Brownlow votes.

The consensus best players in the newspapers read: Williams, Ablett, Jackson.

That two virtual unknowns could step into the VFL and dominate in that fashion directly from playing county football is still staggering today. Williams never cloaks himself in false modesty, but even he was surprised.

“How easy is this?” he laughs now.

“No, I surprised myself that I got so many possessions in my first game. I’d had games in the country where I’d done similar but to do it at that level, it was pretty exciting.”

“I was just happy to be playing but I went really, really, well. A lot better than I thought I would.”

Of course, with anything related to Ablett, to a lesser extent Williams but certainly Jackson, there was a postscript of controversy.

Amazingly, all three players ended up at the VFL Tribunal on Monday night. Ablett and Jackson were both reported for striking, while Williams was up as the victim of a striking incident.

Jackson was cleared but Ablett copped a three-week ban.

Gary Ablett was suspended after his first game for Geelong.

Gary Ablett giveth, Gary Ablett taketh away.

It would be a familiar refrain for Geelong fans in the future but at the time, the Geelong players couldn’t contain their excitement.

“Two or three games in, it becomes evident that we’re going to be a fair bit better than last year because we just got these two blokes that have just walked in off the street practically,” Drum says.

Ablett was shoehorned into the Victorian team weeks later and booted eight goals. A bona fide superstar from that day, he won Geelong’s best and fairest (the only of his career) that year.

Later in 1984, Gary Ablett played for Victoria and kicked eight goals.

Williams was named the best first-year player in the league despite only playing 12 games due to a knee issue. After the injury, Geelong’s season ran off the rails and they missed the finals. Yet that only fuelled Williams.

“By now, everyone realised how good he is,” Drum says.

“But when he came back the next year, he was now winning our 400m time trials. We’re looking at him going, ‘Where’d this come from?”

The next year, Williams won best and fairest along with the peer-voted award of league players’ MVP, while Ablett enthralled fans by kicking 82 goals while drifting between the wing, half-forward and full forward.

Both picked up Brownlow 15 votes, but again Geelong missed the finals and Hafey’s time as coach was up.

Picture: Getty Images

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Just like that, the Ablett and Williams era was over almost as quickly as it started.

The Sydney Swans had been bought by Geoff Edelsten, with Hafey going as coach. The Swans offered Williams $100,000, yet he was prepared to stay if Geelong could match half of that figure.

The Cats haggled over the last $5,000, with board member and former great Bill Goggin thought to be the most vocal against the pay rise.

“Footy was the thing I was best at and I couldn’t resist the offer, “ Williams says now. “It was too big.”

Meanwhile, Jackson’s antics had worn thin after playing a pivotal role in an infamous battle with Hawthorn that saw Leigh Matthews charged by police. By the opening rounds of 1986, he too was gone.

All up, Williams and Ablett played 28 games together for Geelong, for 15 wins and 13 losses.

It looks nothing special on paper but given what each did over the rest of their careers, it’s hard not to imagine what the dynamic duo could have achieved together long-term.

Ablett kicked 1,031 goals, including three centuries, while owning the greatest highlights package of any player of the era. Williams won two Brownlow Medals and in his own more subtle way, amazed those watching with his vision and precision.

The most heartbreaking thing for Geelong fans was that in 1995, Williams won an elusive premiership with a Norm Smith Medal grand final performance against a Geelong team skippered by Ablett.

Williams broke Geelong hearts when he won the Norm Smith Medal, and a premiership medallion against the Cats in the 1995 grand final.

Surely Williams would have made a difference in one of the four grand finals that Geelong lost during the period?

“Oh hell yeah, it was always a what if,” Gannon says. “We would have liked to have had him in the 1989 grand final anyway (where the Cats lost by just a goal).”

Forty years on, Williams has fond memories of the time he went from being a country footballer to one of the nation’s best in the space of a few weeks, albeit overshadowed by his more spectacular teammate.

“It’s all good memories at Geelong,” the now-Carlton board member says. “I loved it there and didn’t really want to leave, but the Swans offered me too much money.”

The unlikely coincidence of debuting alongside Ablett still amuses Williams today.

“Even to play with Gary for just a couple of years, he’s still the best player I’ve ever seen, the most talented by a fair way and I’ve never seen anyone that’s come close to him.

“So to be in the team of the century on the bench together is pretty cool.”

Williams (centre) was named in the AFL Team of the Century alongside Ablett (who did not attend the ceremony).

Round 1, 1984: Geelong v Fitzroy, Saturday March 31

Geelong 23.10. 148

Fitzroy: 15.9 99

Best – Geelong: Williams, Ablett, Jackson, Turner, Mossop, Toohey, Witcombe. Fitzroy: Coleman, Quinlan, Barwick, Wilson, Nettlefold, Harris.

Goals – Geelong: Jackson 9, Johnston 5, Ablett, Witcombe 3, Williams, Peake, Bright 1. Fitzroy: Quinlan 6, Barwick, Conlan 3, Harris, Wilson, Pert 1.