Paul Lewis: Rehabilitation the key, not results

Sports stars are most often fine people - driven but still self-effacing, keen adherents of the input-outcome-achievement equation and who tend to be decent folk with a firm grip on the earth.

But life at the upper reaches of such stardom can produce that repellent sight: the out-of-control sports star with too much money, an arrogant attitude and little or no regard for other people; with a curious belief that they can get away with lurid or anti-social behaviour simply because they are famous.

Until now, it has been possible to look elsewhere and point at the excesses of others. New Zealand rugby throws up its share of offenders but they tend to be one-off, unthinking laddish stuff, rather than serial offenders with a serious 'star' burn-out of the mental circuits.

Most rugby players still tend to avoid the public gaze, whereas the antics of some English Premiership footballers are legendary for their I-don't-care, look-at-me abuse of women, drinking, gambling and big-noting. There are similar instances in US baseball and girdiron.

The NRL is perhaps the closest in this part of the world to the strange business of sports stars with too much money and not enough common sense.

Former Canberra Raider Todd Carney is about to be forever remembered for being daft enough to take a picture of himself naked on someone else's phone, taken full frontal at the bathroom mirror. The phone was later passed to a 23-year-old woman, who recognised Carney and made public that he had been photographing his appendage.

Carney, after a series of drink-related incidents, had his Raiders contract terminated and is now playing bush football somewhere in Queensland. But he has been negotiating with the Roosters and, before the bathroom mirror business, was close to finalising a deal that might yet see him back in the NRL.

Why? Why do such people continue to be employed? Carney is not alone in being dumped from one NRL team for behavioural reasons only to be picked up by another.

That's because Carney is talented. Not PhD material maybe, but the kind of game-controlling five-eighth or halfback the Roosters need.

So you get a sense, watching the shenanigans of NRL players, that at least some of the excesses of superstars elsewhere are starting to take root in this part of the world.

Perhaps the syndrome is best illustrated by the Charles Haley and Michael Irvin stories - key members of the Dallas Cowboys during the 1990s, one of the most notable runs of success this glamour NFL team has ever had.

Haley, a defensive end, is the most successful player in NFL history. He is the only player with five Super Bowl rings (with the Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers). But he is not a member of the NFL Hall of Fame.

In his remarkable book Boys Will Be Boys, Jeff Pearlman chronicles how the Cowboys' success was built on the foundations of "an insane asylum; a place where anything went and all deviant behaviour was tolerated, if not embraced".

Haley was, said Pearlman, famous among his peers for being, in layman's terms, "nuts".

He was taking medication for manic depression but often ditched the meds. His most common ploy involved his penis. Haley was reputed to be, er, built. We're talking, as the Australians say, a baby's arm holding an apple.

He was very fond of it. He would wave it at fellow players, making obscene suggestions. He would masturbate in public, often at team meetings. On his first day at camp, Haley arrived for a defensive film session dressed only in a towel.

"The next thing you know, Charles is lying naked on the floor in front of the screen, entertaining himself," said team-mate Tony Casillas in Pearlman's book.

Haley once cut a hole in the roof of a team-mate's car and urinated on the steering wheel. He once went to the toilet in the middle of a team meeting, returned and threw the used toilet paper at the coach.

So how did a guy like this survive? Five Super Bowl rings, that's how. He could play. But that's why he is no Hall of Famer.

Irvin is. He was inducted even after a chilling episode where Irvin, a talented wide receiver, plunged a pair of scissors into a team-mate's neck because the other player had the effrontery to have his hair cut ahead of Irvin, who claimed he should have gone first because of seniority.

The cut took 18 stitches and the Cowboys hushed it up, paying off the team-mate, according to Pearlman's book. Irvin continued to play. The Cowboys continued to win.

This all happened towards the end of a crazy era where Irvin and Haley lived life at "100,000 miles an hour", dragging team-mates with them on a fast-living trip which included women, drugs and the infamous White House - a house where they took their mistresses and other women. Irvin secretly taped his team-mates.

They hired limousines to ferry girls to their training sessions. Irvin was found by police one night with strippers, cocaine, marijuana, drug paraphernalia and sex toys.

"Do you know who I am?" he greeted the police. He turned up in court in a floor-length mink coat - the time identified by many as the day the Cowboys' successful era began to crash and burn.

Irvin seemed destined for an early death after football but found God and his acceptance speech at the Hall of Fame has been noted as one of the greatest in US sporting history.

With tears flowing down his cheeks, he recanted his past life, apologised to his wife for years of violating her trust and made his two sons stand up while he told them not to be like him but like the other Hall of Famers.

That's the point, really. People like Irvin can rehabilitate themselves. But sport has an obligation to the Haleys, Carneys and Irvins of this world.

They must step in, help the player to reform and 'out' his excesses, not cover them up or look the other way in the name of winning.

NRL, take note.