Australian rules: Star's deceit exposes an ugly hypocrisy

BILLY ADAMS reports on how a sporting legend broke Australia's most sacred moral code and less significantly, it appears, his wife's heart.

The talkback radio caller boomed, "First September 11 and now this," displaying a level of despair matched only by his lack of perspective.

The voice was reacting not to a horrifying world-changing event, but the story of a sporting great caught with his pants down.

Cheating on your wife doesn't normally spark the sudden downfall of a star.

Playing away barely raises the eyebrows in the testosterone-charged atmosphere of professional sport.

But Wayne Carey, captain of the North Melbourne Kangaroos and Australian Rules football legend, committed a far more heinous crime.

He was found in a toilet with the wife of his best friend and vice-captain during a birthday party at the home of another team-mate. Even worse: the husband caught them, as other players and wives looked on.

In this sordid soap opera of lust and betrayal, the reaction of Carey's team-mates has been most telling. His crime was not to cheat on his wife but to cheat on his mate.

Thirty-year-old Carey had broken the sacred Australian code of mateship.

Ostracised by his fellow players, the man regarded by many as the greatest the sport has seen was dumped by a club he had almost single-handedly held together for the past decade.

"If Carey had been having an affair with the wife of a player from another club, his team-mates would have cheered his performance and praised his virility," said Ray Chesterton, a columnist with Sydney's Daily Telegraph.

In New Zealand and anywhere else outside Australia, it's a case of "Wayne who?"

Even in Sydney, which now has its own successful AFL team, the Swans, some people wondered how a Booker Prize-winner could get involved in such an unpleasant affair.

But Melbourne, a goldfish bowl of a place where passions for aerial ping-pong run as high as any rugby obsession across the ditch, is in a state of shock.

Outraged parents were said to be removing the number 18 - Carey's number - from their kids' blue and white Kangaroos tops. Child psychologists were being asked for advice on how the news should be best broken.

The story dominated the nation's media and the leader of the Labor Party, Simon Crean, a Kangaroos' supporter, offered his help.

The Melbourne tabloid Herald Sun devoted 11 pages to Carey's exit, prompting one commentator on a more serious tome to note: "Only to those on the periphery of Australian footy did that 11th page seem a little unnecessary."

But then there is something strangely irresistible about a celebrity sex scandal. And they rarely come juicier than this one.

"The biggest story in the history of the game was unfolding before us," wrote the Herald Sun's Scott Gullan of Carey's announcement he was quitting the sport. "It might not quite be in the, 'Where were you when JFK was shot?' league, but in a town such as Melbourne, it was close."

When a young woman died two years ago in the hotel room of another Aussie Rules legend, Gary Ablett, media coverage was muted by comparison.

Twenty-year-old Alisha Horan was a besotted fan who went on a drinking binge after being seduced by her hero. Slumped on the floor of Ablett's room in the Park Hyatt, she succumbed to a drugs overdose. Ablett was there, but too addled to provide any worthwhile assistance.

Ablett was so good they called him God. Carey, tall and dark with square jaw and chiselled good looks, is known simply as The King.

Or was. It is less than a fortnight since Carey, his wife Sally and 80 others arrived at the home of club tough man Glenn Archer for a party celebrating the 30th birthday of his wife, Lisa Archer.

The party was packed with players and their wives, including Anthony Stevens, his wife Kelli and their baby daughter, Ayva.

Sometime after 10.30pm the relaxed, happy atmosphere disappeared.

Troubled by his wife's absence, Stevens, 30, went searching.

There are varying accounts of what followed. One says Stevens found his wife and best mate together in the bathroom. Others say he was waiting outside the door when the pair emerged in a dishevelled state.

The two men were involved in an angry confrontation but Carey denied any wrongdoing until the following Wednesday when Kelli, 28, confessed the four-month affair to her husband.

An emergency team meeting was called and the players decided by a majority vote they no longer wanted to play alongside their captain. That night a tearful Carey announced that his 244-game Roos' career was over.

The fallout has been astonishing. Sally, Carey's teenage sweetheart and wife of only 14 months, spent three days under sedation in a psychiatric hospital. She later returned to their home town, Wagga Wagga, to be with her family.

Carey also went back to Wagga, where he is a local hero, but his manager was so concerned about his charge's mental state he was put on a round-the-clock suicide watch.

The contrast to when he left the town in rural New South Wales as a 15-year-old could hardly have been more stark. Recruited by the Roos, who saw a superstar in the making, Carey was made club captain at the age of 21 and led them to two premierships over a glittering 13-year career.

With seemingly unparalleled strength, skill and aggression for a centre-half forward, Carey's fans marvelled at not only his remarkable agility and kicking boot, but an ability to take a game by the scruff of the neck, when it most mattered. He was one of the best, if not the best.

Off the field, his ability to attract beautiful women became almost as well known.

He met Sally McMahon at a party in Wagga when he had just turned 20 and she was 17. Their long relationship was finally sealed at their wedding in January last year.

But there had been tough times, none more so than six years ago when Carey pleaded guilty to indecent assault after grabbing a woman's breasts outside a Melbourne nightclub.

He escaped conviction as Sally and his team-mates, demonstrating selective morality, rallied behind their leader.

But not this time. Carey had gone too far. The Careys and the Stevens socialised together, holidayed together, even bid for a prime spot of land together.

On the field Wayne and Anthony had gone to war, arm-in-arm. Stevens was a groomsman at Carey's wedding. Now Carey had committed the ultimate betrayal.

An anonymous letter writer to the Sydney Morning Herald got to the nub of the matter: "Everyone knows you don't shag your mate's wife. Shag your mate's sister and you may live to talk about it, but his missus ... it's just not on! You can drink his last beer, kick his dog, crash his car but his missus is off limits. Every Australian male learns that, one way or another, way back in the schoolyards."

The size of a sportsman's brains may often be a matter of debate, but history suggests that a more sensitive part of anatomy is the one which gets him into most trouble.

In the macho world of the football codes such misdemeanours are usually kept firmly behind closed doors or hushed up. When they do fall into the spotlight careers can be devastated, reputations destroyed.

Wayne Carey joins a long list of sporting heroes who have risked all for the sake of the most basic urges.

Whether it's Mike Tyson's intolerable behaviour in a hotel bedroom or Shane Warne indulging is some phone sex with a nurse, the public reaction is usually one of horror.

Ordinary guys in extraordinary lives. The majority of Carey's 30 years have been played out in the public spotlight, his gaze constantly distracted by drooling admirers and hangers-on.

Inevitably he has been held up as a role model off the field as well as on it. The public humiliation of the last fortnight has blown apart his once seemingly invincible persona. The arrogance and aloofness noted by many of his peers was missing when he returned to Wagga where his manager said he was "in a bedroom, can't sleep, crying his eyes out".

As Warne and many others have proved, such blows are not necessarily fatal.

Carey, the AFL's first and only million-dollar player, will pay a heavy price in the short-term. Lucrative personal contracts with Nike and a pay-TV channel are under review, and PR experts say his reputation will never recover.

But the door has been left open for a possible return with another club next season. On the wrong side of 30, and recently plagued by injuries, a year of recuperation could do him good.

But Carey is concentrating on his personal life. Does he want to save his marriage?

"Yes I do," he told one reporter. "But it's something ... what Sally and I do should be private between her and I. I love Sally and I hope it all works out. I've got to tell her that to her face. I don't have to let everyone know that I love Sally. I've got to convince her rather than everybody else."

Sally has not ruled out a reconciliation. In her only public statement so far she indicated that the couple would be sitting down to discuss their future.

Her father, Terry McMahon, may be harder to convince. "If you wanted [it] that bad, you would go to a knock-shop wouldn't you?" he said at the height of the furore. "You wouldn't take your best mate's wife. You must be rotted in the brain when you had the world at your feet - your whole life, your marriage."

In rural Victoria a similar process is underway as Anthony and Kelli have also returned to their home towns to salvage their relationship.

The King may not be dead, but a legendary career, two marriages and a famous old working class club - which it's feared will disintegrate without its talisman - stand on the brink.