AT THE Melbourne Comedy Festival this year, local funny-guy Kieran Butler presented a show called Collingwood Ruined My Life. The centrepiece was a goofy hip hop number called Song for Chris Tarrant.

With typical Magpie pessimism, it lists a cavalcade of players who have won premierships after leaving Collingwood for other clubs. It predicts that, having departed Pie-land for Fremantle, Tarrant will soon win a Brownlow, a premiership flag and a Coleman Medal to boot.

If all that sounds unlikely, just wait till Butler reaches the chorus, and his repeated punchline: "If there's a chance of a fight/ he'll be a role model and stay in for the night."

At this point, the suggestion is, rightly, a joke. Even with the Dockers struggling, Tarrant seems a better chance of taking home a flag this year than curbing the anti-social behaviour that got him in trouble again at a Darwin nightclub last weekend.

Chris Judd has said that footballers should not be expected to be role models — which seems laughable from a man who seems to wear that mantle effortlessly. But Tarrant is a different story. He has always been a reluctant footballer and an even more-reluctant role model.

He is not the first. Kevin Sheedy remembers Wayne Beddison as a talented player who was never sure if he wanted to be a big-league footballer. After only 10 games and 18 goals in 1983, Beddison threw it all in and rejoined his father on the farm near Dimboola.

Still a farmer, he was not keen this week to discuss his former life, despite the lapse of more than two decades.

"It's not something that I've spoken about a lot and not something I really want to," he said. "I don't know how talented I was, but the trouble I had — and I blame you guys (the media) a bit for it — was the limelight.

"Look at Ben Cousins, look at Wayne Carey (and) how many papers he sold. It's not for me, I'd rather stay out of it. That's how I've always been. I don't like talking about myself."

In a similar vein, Tarrant told The Age in 2003: "I'd much rather go out and no one know me; I'd much rather just sit there and not one person in the place talk to me about footy, but I know it's not going to happen."

Tarrant's former coach, Tony Shaw, remembers a kid with massive talent who loved to play but struggled with public recognition and the burden of responsibility.

In 2000, AFL teams were going crazy for leadership. Management and organisational theory was leaching over from corporate life to the AFL, and clubs such as Hawthorn put their players through police-run leadership courses.

At Collingwood, former airforce man and leadership expert Ray McLean was brought in. The old system of captain and vice-captain was morphing into leadership groups packed with backline, midfield and forward-zone captains.

Tarrant didn't want a bar of it. Shaw said he was forced to sit down and talk to his young charge because he refused to participate in attempts to set a new leadership structure and was sabotaging the coaches' plans.

"He wasn't accepting and didn't want to be involved with the group as they tried to instil a set of values … he just didn't accept it and kept making out that he was someone different."

Shaw believes Tarrant's handling of that situation relates to his various off-field indiscretions. "Any kind of authority and any pressure put on him by authority, he just couldn't handle it.

"I don't think he could handle the pressure and when he does things wrong, it's because of that. He doesn't know how to get away from it, and he can't hold it together or stop it."

By 2000, Shaw was gone, replaced by Mick Malthouse, when Tarrant walked out on Collingwood and went back to Mildura. Unlike Beddison, he was not allowed to go. In the modern game, clubs have invested too much in a player to let him walk away. Tarrant was wooed back.

But Shaw believes Collingwood's determination to keep Tarrant led to compromises # that were bad for the team.

"He was a protected species for too long. They thought they had him under control and then three months later they sacked him," he said.

Shaw was not surprised to see Tarrant leave and revealed that he told Collingwood president Eddie McGuire to get rid of the club's star forward almost three years ago.

"I thought it should have happened earlier but I just believe that time had come."

It was probably the August 2006 nightclub brawl in Port Melbourne for which Tarrant was fined $5000 by the club that caused Collingwood to lose patience, but Shaw suggested that previous indiscretions were tolerated by the club in the hope of turning Tarrant around.

Ironically, he said, it was the club's leadership group that finally tired of him. "Collingwood said he'd matured, but I heard other things behind the scenes and they protected him," he said.

"Other things were going on and the playing group knew it."

But while he hopes that Tarrant can find late-career stability on and off the park, Shaw said he had no sympathy for AFL footballers who did not want to be role models.

"Some of them don't want the responsibility, but if you have the life that they have, and they are going to take the money, then you have got to have some responsibility. They get opportunities that no one else would. They get to live their dream and millions would do it for free."

He remembers, during his stern chat with Tarrant in 2000, asking the young forward to stop disrupting attempts to set up a leadership culture. If he did not want to be a part of it, Shaw told him, he should keep quiet, go out and play each weekend. In the remaining four weeks of that season, the former coach recalls, Tarrant showed his best form in Shaw's time at the club.

"I think he's just a player," Shaw said. "He doesn't want to be involved in the organisation, the leadership … the character groups. There's a lot of leaders in football now. But he's never wanted that."