Playing the fame game: How DJ Carey became the GAA’s first superstar

In the week of the 2003 All-Ireland hurling final, DJ Carey’s complicated relationship with fame reached a lurid reckoning.

Rumours about the breakdown of his marriage had been circulating for a couple of years, or more, and for most of that time they were untrue. It was nobody else’s business, but Carey’s life was forever orbited by stories, and in newspaper interviews he was always happy to address the latest round of tittle-tattle. Sometimes he would even bring it up, taking a scythe to the briars and nettles of local gossip, without ever getting to their roots.

During that summer though, the story gained altitude, and 48 hours before the All-Ireland final The Mirror broke ranks. Quoting Carey’s sister, Catriona, they reported that his marriage was over.

“Look, it happens every day to lots of other people,” she said. “What is the big story? What is the big deal? He’s a GAA star, not a pop star.”

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Halfway through the piece The Mirror claimed that “at least one Sunday newspaper was planning a major exposé on the hurling legend’s private life”. It seemed that the gun had been fired on a race to the bottom. The Evening Herald splashed on the story, summoning a tone of offended decency: “Marriage Torment Of Hounded DJ” ran the front page headline, over claims that the Kilkenny County Board were “seething” over “dirty tricks”, and the player’s family were “livid” about the “prying media”.

The second episode of Eamon Dunphy’s short-lived Friday night chatshow on TV3 aired that night, with Liam Griffin and Ger Loughnane among his guests.

In his opening monologue Dunphy pleaded with the Sunday papers for restraint.

“It’s not too late to row back,” he said, leaving his audience wondering if he knew something that they were not yet privy to. Nearly eight minutes of the programme were devoted to hand-wringing about this intrusion on the life of an amateur sportsman and his family. In the GAA, nothing like this had ever happened before.

Despite fevered speculation over the weekend the Sunday papers had nothing to add to the story, and yet the marital status of the Kilkenny captain dominated the build-up to the biggest hurling game of the year.

The Sunday World, which had been successfully sued by Carey a few years earlier, published a warning letter they had received from Carey’s solicitors, “suggesting that we were going to dish the dirt on the player,” according to the paper’s editorial.

In an interview a year later, Carey said that he had hired “security guards” for the week building up to the All-Ireland final, spooked by what he had been told about the sudden shift in the media’s attention.

“What was happening,” he claimed later, “was that reporters and papers were on the streets and in bars, offering money for stories about me. Cash to come up with a story. I found that mind-boggling, and scary – going after a small fry from rural Ireland because he had a profile in an amateur sport.”

True or false, these were the stories that were flying around.

“Some downmarket British tabloid may have been trying to rake up some salacious muck on the great hurler, but it wasn’t the Sunday World,” continued the leader piece.

The Sunday Independent splashed with the story, alongside a handsome front page picture of Carey’s former wife and their two children, but not including Carey: instead, he appeared in a head-shot in the body of the text. Inside, they ran a long analysis piece.

“It is hardly surprising,” the paper said, “that our fascination with celebrity has now moved a step further to encompass the stars of Gaelic games, stars who have mobilised in recent years to demand a bigger slice of the GAA’s multimillion euro business . . . But it is unprecedented for a GAA player to get the same treatment as a multimillionaire Premiership footballer.”

The only player, though, who could conceivably have commanded such attention was Carey, the GAA’s first superstar. The coverage of his private life in the days leading up to the All-Ireland final smacked of voyeurism, and yet the broad constituency of rubber-neckers would have included both the appalled and the helplessly curious.

In the GAA, Carey was not only uniquely compelling on the field, but he was endlessly visible off it. His appearances on page one and page 25 of The Sunday Independent on the morning of the 2003 final were augmented by unexceptional references on the sports pages, and a quirky appearance on page 50, wearing an Irish rugby shirt in an ad promoting GOAL’s jersey day.

At the beginning of that summer, Carey was one of six intercounty players who had signed a boot deal that was expected to run into turbulence with the GAA; he turned up at the promotional launch to be its face in the media coverage. During the championship, he appeared on a nationwide billboard campaign for McCoy’s crisps.

What kind of money was involved? On the week when AIB agreed to appear before an Oireachtas committee to answer questions about their €7.7 million write-down on original borrowings by Carey of €9.5 million, his commercial income from his playing days are incomparable in scale. And yet, in his time, no other GAA player was as successful in that sphere as Carey.

In the same year, 2003, he released a video of his life story, simply called DJ.

Among the endorsements on the sleeve, Dunphy wrote that “in a hundred years’ time, people will be talking about DJ as a mythical figure”. Eddie Keher, one of the all-time great forwards, wrote that he was “very honoured if people mention me in the same breath as DJ Carey”. The film was broadcast as part of RTÉ’s True Lives series, and DJ was the best-selling video in Ireland for eight weeks.

That year, of all years, Carey seemed to be ubiquitous in the public eye. By then, he wasn’t half the player he once was, but his bewildering brilliance had illuminated the game for a decade, or more, and his crossover marketability was magnetic still.

Within months of the story of his marriage break-up, Carey appeared on the front page of the RTÉ Guide, with his new partner Sarah Newman, the business woman and television personality. They had filmed an episode of the RTÉ holiday programme No Frontiers, in South Africa, and had been interviewed by the broadcaster’s in-house magazine to promote the show. In the event that nobody knew about their new relationship, it was now the backdrop to one of RTÉ’s most popular early-evening programmes. Why not?

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Fame was thrust upon him first, long before he sought to control it, or cultivate it. In the spring of 1989, when he was still a teenage schoolboy in St Kieran’s College, Carey made his debut for the Kilkenny seniors.

One of his classmates, Adrian Ronan, had made a similar breakthrough, and on the morning of a league game they were featured on the sports pages of the Sunday Independent, photographed in their school uniforms, sitting behind a classroom desk. It was a cute picture, and a harmless interview, but it was extraordinary exposure for a couple of teenagers.

Carey learned to live with it. For generations, fame in the GAA had very few sides. Certain kinds of businesses were always inclined to hire high-profile intercounty players, and one of Carey’s first jobs after he left school was for an oil company with a long history of recruiting GAA stars.

By the time he set up his own business, DJ Carey Enterprises – selling industrial detergents and a selection of other hygiene products – Carey was just 23 years of age. His fame was integral to the business plan; his name was bound to open doors.

His profile, though, had already caused degrees of separation from his peers.

“He mightn’t be as close to the rest of the team as he would like,” said an unnamed county board official in a Sunday Tribune profile, a week before the 1992 All-Ireland final.

“There is a kind of wedge driven there, which is not his fault. I think it’s the same with other big names in other counties. It’s because of the publicity and the attention that he gets. I think he’s embarrassed by it all. He is well liked, but he’s not able to become just one of the lads.”

Carey understood quickly that fame was tricky and occasionally toxic. Because he was being asked to go here, there and everywhere, to do this, that and the other, rumours started to circulate about how much he was being paid for medals presentations or coaching sessions, or cutting the ribbon on a new supermarket. Soon the perception grew that he was hungry for public appearances, of all kinds.

Carey fought those flames for many years. He would bring it up in interviews, and plead that he never sought a penny from a club to attend one of their functions, or conduct a coaching session with their kids; if he was available, he said, he would go.

“The odd day you’d get petrol money or diesel money,” he said in a 2004 interview. “Then, more often than not, you’d get a trophy that’s probably worth a 100 quid or more, which is big money. But you’d prefer to have got the money’s worth because you’re after going there, and I don’t care, you know, unless you’re born into money, like, a few bob for everyone comes in handy.”

Carey, though, was very open about his desire to see GAA players monetise their public profile, either with the GAA’s existing sponsors, or others in the corporate sector. Those relationships have been normalised since, and the GAA has accounted for them in their rules, but at the height of Carey’s playing career it was an area of ongoing conflict. Where did amateurism end and ‘shamateurism’ begin?

Carey was one of the players who consistently canvassed for change. Among the GAA’s rank and file, it was a volatile and sometimes explosive issue. The stance of Carey, and some other famous players, would have been a minority position for a long time, and it would have been interpreted in many ways.

He said once that he received about 25,000 letters begging him to come back when, at just 27 years of age, he had announced a sudden, unfathomable retirement early in 1998.

But when he changed his mind a few weeks later, one of the stories in circulation was that he had been paid to come back. The Kilkenny County Board decided to organise a press conference, so that every question about his going and coming could be aired. “Kilkenny refute Carey ‘cash for play’ rumours,” was a headline in the following morning’s Irish Independent.

“People were talking about me getting money for coming back,” he said in a Sunday Times interview a year later. “I had family sitting in the stand [at matches] listening to opposition supporters shouting, ‘Pull across him, he’s getting paid for it, he deserves it.’ It is so stupid.”

On the issue of players building relationships with the corporate sector, though, Carey was adamant. When Kevin Moran’s sports agency, ProActive, organised an Irish launch in 1997, Carey was one of a handful of GAA players to attend. Entering into an arrangement with a professional agency would have been in breach of the GAA’s rules on amateurism at the time, but Carey and others were committed to breaking new ground.

“Someone has to pioneer the thing,” he said at the time, “someone has to be first. We’re the high-profile players of today, so we’ll do it.”

Carey was a founder member of the Gaelic Players Association, and when they entered into a deal with the Marlborough recruitment company in 2000, Carey was one of 10 players to sign up. That year, Kilkenny won the All-Ireland and Carey was named Hurler of the Year for the second time. On the field, off the field, he had reached another summit.

By the beginning of 2003 Barbara Galavan was handling Carey’s interaction with the corporate sector. She had been part of U2′s management team for 17 years, and was the producer of his video. Unlike any other player in the history of the GAA, he needed somebody to handle requests for a piece of his profile.

His fame was different. When the WGC American Express golf tournament was staged at Mount Juliet in 2002, Carey had dinner with Tiger Woods.

A couple of months later, the Leinster coach Matt Williams asked him to speak to the players before a Heineken Cup match against Montferrand, at a time when Leinster had an appalling record in France.

“It was someone from another sport that everyone respected,” Leo Cullen said years later.

Just once in a while, his fame was simple.