If you grew up in Kilkenny, as I did, during the county’s long years of hurling supremacy, DJ Carey was about as celebrated as it was possible for a mortal man to be celebrated.
I was not myself a particularly avid hurling fan, at least not by the standards of the city I grew up in; my big sporting heroes – Andre Agassi, Boris Becker – were more remote figures, and you were significantly less likely to see them having lunch in Langton’s on a given Sunday. But the fact that you might see DJ Carey having lunch did not diminish the sense of his greatness, any more than the divinity of the Greek gods was diminished by their descending from Olympus for the occasional carvery lunch among mortals.
It was, in a strange way, when I left Kilkenny to go to university in Dublin that I really got a sense of the strength of the association between the county and its hurling team; no sooner would I mention that I was from the place than I would be thrust into a conversation about hurling, and typically petitioned on whether the county’s dominance was “bad for the game”. It might have been bad for the game, but it was certainly good for Kilkenny. To be from Kilkenny was to be proud – automatically, almost congenitally proud – of its supremacy in the sport of hurling. And at the very centre of that was DJ: a true magician of the game, one of the greatest to ever do it.
No more. It’s hard to think of a sporting legend whose reputation has fallen so low. There are, it is true, your dopers – Lance Armstrong, for instance, or the entire country of Russia. But such people are more straightforward villains, merely cheats, or suspected cheats. And there are certainly those who have been accused of more serious crimes than Carey: your McGregors, your Tysons, your Oscar Pistoriuses. But Carey’s post-hurling career puts him in a strange and depressing category: a sporting legend turned conman.
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In works in fiction and in film, the archetype of the conman often appears as a kind of amoral anti-hero, whose schemes and swindles are characterised by a kind of disreputable grandeur. It is with good reason that we speak of con artists; the successful confidence man (or woman) is engaged in an act of hybrid narrative creation: part author, part actor, part thief.
The hero of Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can is not Tom Hanks’s dogged FBI agent Carl Hanratty, but rather Frank Abagnale jnr, the real-life con-artist played by the young Leonardo DiCaprio, whose ingenious swindles and daring escapes make the film so wildly entertaining.
The most unsettling aspect of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels is not the frequent brutal murders committed by her conman-protagonist Tom Ripley, but the queasy brilliance with which Highsmith forces the reader to admire the audacity and skill of his schemes, and even root for their success.
But the reality is something different, sadder and more sordid.
It’s hard to imagine having even a perverse respect for a man who lied about having cancer in order to extract sympathy, and large amounts of cash, from wealthy victims. (This week, he pleaded guilty to 10 of 21 charges of defrauding people.) The image of Carey that will likely endure is not any of his countless inspired and exhilarating moments on the pitch, but the fake hospital selfie he sent to one of the moneyed marks he was attempting to fleece: lying in bed, looking thoroughly wretched, and with a smartphone charge cord up his nose, secured in place by a plaster.
This, unbelievably, was one of the greatest Irish sportsmen of all time – not to mention one of the great Kilkennymen.
There are wider questions to be asked about all this, of course. It’s worth considering, in particular, why so many people were willing to give a renowned and beloved sportsman the benefit of the doubt, despite not knowing him well – a question that seems, at first, to contain its own answer, and then, when you think about it, suddenly not to.
It’s worth asking, too, about the extraordinary special treatment Carey received from AIB, who all but wrote off his debts of €9.5m. And there is surely a deeper story to be told here – psychological, personal – whose grim complexities will likely come to light over time.
Thinking about DJ and his strange disgrace led me to YouTube, and to a compilation of his greatest moments as a player. There’s a moment from a game in the early 1990s, when Carey scores an elegant point against Cork, and the camera lingers a moment on a group of young boys in the front row of the stand, bouncing and grinning at the thrill of what they’re witnessing.
Something drew me back: I replayed the clip and paused on the boys. With an uncanny jolt, I recognised one of them as the younger brother of a childhood friend, captured unaware in a moment of joy, his face glowing in the reflected light of an ephemeral magic.
It was a beautiful thing, that magic, and it’s strange and sad to think what became of it.
