[4][5] Born in Narrogin, Western Australia, Cable made his debut with the Perth Football Club in the WANFL in 1962, and won the Sandover Medal as the fairest and best player in the competition in 1964.
Cable returned to Victoria in 1981 to become the senior coach of North Melbourne, a role which he held until 1984, and later worked as an assistant at the West Coast Eagles during their first years in the VFL.
If these are included, then Cable played a total of 404 senior career games, which is also the most (equal with Brian Peake) of any elite Australian rules football player born in Western Australia.
The youngest of eleven children, Cable was born in Narrogin,[citation needed] a country town in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia.
His father, Edward, born in England,[citation needed] died when Cable was six and he was raised by his indigenous mother, Dorothy a member of the Noongar people of south-west Western Australia.
[citation needed] Cable debuted for the senior side of his local club, the Narrogin Imperials in the Upper Great Southern Football League (UGSFL), at the age of fifteen.
[citation needed] After spending two years as a butcher's apprentice, Cable moved to Perth to attempt to play in the Western Australian Football League (WAFL).
[6] After being rejected by Western Australian football powerhouse East Fremantle for being "too small" – his playing height was listed as 168 cm, or five-and-a-half feet – Cable signed with Perth in 1962.
Cable's first coach at Perth was former Carlton premiership captain Ern Henfry, who alerted the Blues about the talented young rover.
[8] At the time Cable made his initial move to Victoria, North Melbourne were a struggling team, still a few years away from becoming one of the powerhouses of the decade.
During his absence, North Melbourne had managed to sign former Carlton premiership coach Ron Barassi and took advantage of the short-lived Ten-Year Rule to land the signatures of VFL stars Doug Wade, John Rantall and Barry Davis.
With Keith Greig and David Dench starting to emerge as champions, Cable decided to return to North Melbourne for the 1974 VFL season.
[9] After crashing to second-last in 1984 and only avoiding the wooden spoon on percentage, Cable announced his resignation as senior coach in Melbourne, declaring his long-term future lay in Western Australia.
On 25 October 1979, he was involved in a near-fatal accident on his property when he attempted to start a Massey Ferguson tractor but lost control of the vehicle, getting his right leg caught under the rear wheel, stripping one side to the bone.
Later, secondary infections set in, necessitating the use of heavy painkillers, with Cable said to be "hovering between life and death" and spending his time in a "twilight world of delirium, drugged sleep and excruciating pain".
Cable established a non-profit organisation, the Community Development Foundation, in 1999, aimed at assisting schoolchildren from lower socio-economic areas.
[25] His "Legend" status as well as his standard Australian football Hall of Fame membership was revoked in 2023 by the AFL Commission as a result of his sexual assault charges.
In 1993, he rode a bicycle across the Nullarbor Plain to toss the coin at the 1993 AFL Grand Final,[28] and in April 1997, he led a ride from Mandurah to Bunbury to promote a road safety campaign.
[35] In June 2023, Western Australian District Court Judge Mark Herron found that Cable had engaged in "grooming behaviour" and sexually abused the plaintiff over several years.