HERE'S a snapshot of Fraser Gehrig's career that tells you everything. It is round 16, 2003, St Kilda versus North Melbourne at the Docklands. Gehrig, in the first season of his reinvention as permanent full-forward, kicks nine goals, a match-winning performance in a game decided by less than a kick. Still, he refuses to talk to reporters about the performance, maintaining his reclusive stance. Oh yes, he is reported and suspended for a week, too.

Gehrig has been a man of many faces, few of which were understood by the football public since he was so loath to reveal them. The easy one to grasp was his football, which was explosive, match-changing and brilliant. The rest, we will have to ponder.

Here was a paradoxical man. For instance, as a young, hard-running winger and half-forward at West Coast in the 1990s he developed a reputation for being soft. Yet people who know these things say he had a great ability to carry debilitating injuries.

He often looked sullen or uninterested on the football field, yet his friends insisted that if anything, he was too intense.

Even as a player he had various strands: the dynamically quick half-forward and winger for West Coast in the mid-1990s, the strong full-back when he came to St Kilda in 2001, and finally, the stay-at-home full-forward from 2003 on. The ballad of the G-Train had many verses.

In the end, arthritis of the hands looked like it had got him. That and his own doubts about the changing style of game. Expected to be a lead-up forward, Gehrig's 32-year-old legs were not the pistons they once were. "Fraser talks about the changes and why it's difficult for him to go on," coach Ross Lyon said recently. "He said, 'In 2004 I used to stand at full-forward, Nick Riewoldt used to lead up just outside 50, turn around and kick it to me one-on-one. That hasn't been the case for a few years now. I wish it was, but it's not'."

Gehrig was a late first-round selection when West Coast took him from Wodonga in 1993, and the club was astonished at his athletic gifts. For instance, he broke Laurie Keene's club bench-press record, pressing 162 kilograms. In the WAFL, his club coach at Perth, David Glascott, devised a kick-out drill where all his players went to one side of the ground, Gehrig kicked to himself, played on around the man on the mark, and took off up the ground, bouncing the footy. Mick Moylan, who recruited him, rated him as faster than Peter Matera between 10 and 40 metres.

Gehrig won All-Australian selection in 1997 playing up the ground. But his form tapered and he became a whipping boy for supporters and the media anxious to find a scapegoat in a poor era for the club. The Victorian found the attention suffocating, grew homesick, and would be traded to St Kilda for David Sierakowski and pick No. 18 in the national draft.

It was a win-win deal. Sierakowski was beaten by injuries but the Eagles took Daniel Kerr with the draft pick; St Kilda extracted another seven good years from Gehrig, whose parents Fran and Graham moved to Melbourne, where Fraser's two sisters also lived. Gehrig settled and played the best football of his life, initially as full-back for Malcolm Blight in 2001, when he was runner-up to Peter Everitt in St Kilda's best and fairest.

Gehrig had grown into a man-mountain who by some accounts, still holds the league bench-press record of 172.5 kilograms. Gehrig was equipped to play the Alastair Lynch role, wrestling in the goal square, and the AFL was a few years away from tinkering its rules relating to pushing.

Grant Thomas shifted him forward part of the way through 2003 and he kicked 55 goals, then won the Coleman Medal in 2004 with 103 goals, the last man to boot the ton in the AFL. If St Kilda was irresistible that first 10 rounds of 2004 then so was Gehrig; he booted 50 goals in that streak and five in that heart-stopping preliminary final in Adelaide. Another 78 goals in 2005 and 71 in 2006, when St Kilda was in contention, proved his mettle.

Gehrig made some mistakes off the field, for he enjoyed a drink. In 2004 he was caught urinating in a public bar in Mentone, and a woman complained, although the matter went no further. Around the same time he was with longtime friend Steve Lawrence and other AFL identities in a St Kilda hotel when a brawl broke out, the result of which was a court case which concluded only last year. Gehrig was charged with assault but not convicted; the magistrate sent him off for alcohol counselling instead. Civil action is pending.

He retired at the end of last season and it was easy to imagine him whiling away his time at some suburban football match, drinking a couple of beers and chatting with mates. But in the pre-season he equivocated on his decision, and St Kilda took him back with the No. 59 pick on a low salary, happy to punt on him. But nine goals in five senior games and a trip to Tasmania to play in the VFL were a poor result. The G-Train probably realised he had been right all along about his body and the way he was feeling.

It's been quite a journey. We probably won't see him in a St Kilda guernsey again, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Better to remember him as he was.