I met up with him around the big, 12-foot tables at the Bays Club in Browns Bay. There are two such tables, tucked in an alcove in the only part of the bar that doesn't have a spectacular 270-degree view of the inner gulf. There used to be four, but 6.5sq m snooker tables are greedy with valuable floor space, particularly when you need to leave 2m of space all around.
Carey, 70, who is the reigning national billiards champion, had assembled some thoroughbred talent to talk to me: Molrudee Kasemchaiyanan, whose national women's snooker title is one of several notches in her belt, and her partner, Matt Edwards, who has a list of national and regional championship wins at pool that makes him well worth avoiding in a barroom. He placed 17th in the world in a 2012 event in Doha.
But all admitted, even if reluctantly, that snooker's best days were behind it.
"There's not too many young people coming up to play the game," said Kasemchaiyanan. "So it's hard to find [the big] tables unless you go to RSAs and young people don't like to go to RSAs.
"But the game's really good. You learn a lot about yourself. You have to be composed and really controlled."
Carey remembers when snooker rooms were everywhere. So do I. My second-term marks in my first year at university reflected the amount of time I spent in the one at the top of College Hill, opposite the handsome Edwardian-era Post Office.
It was a forbidding place, with concrete floors and little conversation and tables were brightly lit pools of green baize in the gloom. Carey knew that room well, although he honed his skills as a schoolboy lying about his age - you had to be 18 to enter - in one called the Green Parrot in Darby St.
"We called them billiard rooms in them days," he says. "They were real dens of iniquity too, I might add. They had everything: gambling and drinking - but in the back rooms. You would hear of banks that were going to get robbed. All sorts."
He got good enough to hurt the big guys who had hurt him on the footy field. "We played for five shillings a game when we were earning £3 a week. You could pick up a guinea a night."
It seems incredible now that the BBC television series Pot Black once played in prime time here. Snooker, with its brightly coloured balls, was a hit on newly introduced colour TV (commentator "Whispering" Ted Lowe famously said, "For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green").
"Everyone knew about it," Edwards says. Players like Dennis Taylor, the Ulsterman with the big, upside-down glasses, were household names and "everyone had their heroes".
These days the game is pool, in noisy bars on small tables where bad shots can drop and skill is in short supply. Snooker's hard, says Edwards, and "no one enjoys being useless". I know what he's talking about there.
Carey: "I think the modern child is quicker than we were. It's all fast, fast, fast. I was a butcher all my life and if I give my grandson a big piece of steak, he can't be bothered. If I give him hamburger and chips he's made. He wants quick results."
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