Irish sporting superstar's legacy is now a pathetic image of a cheat with a charger up his nose to carry out a wicked fraud as he is jailed for faking cancer diagnosis in money scam
An Irish sporting superstar was yesterday sentenced to five and a half years in prison after he faked having cancer to con his friends and family out of £345,000.
DJ Carey, 54, who was dubbed the 'Maradona of hurling', pleaded guilty in July to 10 counts of inducing people to give him money.
An image, said to have been sent to his victims, appeared to show him with medical 'tubes' in his nose - but it turned out to be an iPhone cable on further inspection.
Sentencing Carey, Judge Martin Nolan said that Carey had been subjected to 'public odium and ridicule' and that his 'good name will probably never recover'.
Here, the Mail's Shane McGrath writes that the sporting star's legacy is in tatters and he is now just the pathetic image of a cheat.
If we believe that hurling is the best of us, a uniquely Irish artform that distinguishes us from every other culture, then DJ Carey was Ireland personified.
Nobody refined hurling's manic grace more precisely, and to such exquisite effect.
Twenty years on from his retirement, he was, until his fall, a man apart in the pantheon of the most romanticised and revered of all our sports.
An image, said to have been sent to his victims, appeared to show DJ Carey with medical 'tubes' in his nose - but on further inspection it turned out to be an iPhone cable
Carey has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for conning friends and family out of £345,000
If Christy Ring is hurling's king of kings, Carey in his prime was set somewhere near his right hand. The emergence of names like Henry Shefflin, Joe Canning and Cian Lynch may have provided rivals, but Carey's greatness was not diluted by time.
Scandal is likely to have a much more corrosive effect.
With his life in ruins and the damage he wrought on victims wrecking their dreams, too, the stain on his sporting legacy may seem a trifling matter.
But it was the power of Carey's sporting reputation that allowed him to dupe people as part of a campaign of deception described as 'reprehensible' by Judge Martin Nolan yesterday.
His contention that Carey's 'good name will probably never recover' was one of the few points of understatement in a story and trial bloated by lies, arrogance and desperation.
In another telling observation, Judge Nolan said this differed from typical fraud cases in that fraudsters tend to exploit people's greed. Not Carey: he preyed on their good nature, and his temple of lies was facilitated by the power of his name.
The very fact he was DJ Carey put him into the orbit of rich and influential people, thus allowing him to weave tales of deceit the way he once weaved impossibly graceful rings around stupefied opponents in Croke Park.
And the power of his name wasn't confined to the upper echelons. To any person, it was representative of the best of us. That was an immensely valuable tool in allowing him to perpetrate crimes that have left jaws slack across the nation.
When he finally hung up his hurley in the summer of 2006, Brian Cody, his manager with Kilkenny and the greatest coach in the history of the game, declared it a 'sad day for hurling'.
Cody isn't a man given to overstatement or rhetorical flourishes, but that simple statement was less a cliché than a plain truth.
Carey with Tess Daly in 2005. He is said to have enjoyed celebrity status after he bowed out from the sport
The greatest had departed. And for years, he was untouchable.
Like most places in Kilkenny, Gowran is defined by hurling: the playing of it, the organising of it, the watching of it.
Hurling is as commonplace and essential as oxygen, as water, and as light.
And from there emerged this brilliant talent. In a county teeming with great players and with a long roll-call of honour, Carey stood apart from early on.
He was schooled in St Kieran's College, hurling's Hogwarts, and from there broke onto county underage teams, winning a minor All-Ireland as an 18-yearold in 1988, and an Under-21 two years later.
He would eventually win five senior All-Ireland titles, in 1992, 1993, 2000, 2002 and 2003.
There would be nine All-Stars, too, as well as being judged hurler of the year twice.
Crucially, he emerged at a time when Gaelic games went from monochrome to technicolour.
At the start of his senior career in the early 1990s, All-Ireland final days were notable but nothing like the events they have become today.
There was no scramble for tickets, no days of excited build-up anywhere outside the competing counties. They didn't feel like national events.
A number of factors changed that, including bigger sponsors and wider TV access. The second half of the 1990s became hurling's revolution years as outsiders and long-dormant counties emerged to win and confound the big three of Cork, Tipperary and Kilkenny.
Yet, it was a mainstay of Kilkenny that would come to define the game's breakthrough generation as public spectacle, as an occasion that could stop a country in its tracks.
Carey was hurling in the 1990s and early 2000s, a sublime study in balance, speed and poise, all complemented by an utter ruthlessness when a scoring chance came his way.
That same capacity for cold-blooded calculation would emerge in the trial that has reduced him to a figure of notoriety.
But it seemed impossible to imagine on sunlit summer days in Croke Park that DJ Carey would ever be anything but an inspiration.
He was affable but not gregarious, a plain-spoken man, identifiably normal and understated, who was generous with his time and famed for taking as long as necessary to sign autographs for the conga-line of kids that attended his every move.
There were enormous names in hurling before DJ Carey, but he was the first where the lives of the players away from the pitch attracted almost as much attention as what they did for 70 minutes every Sunday.
So, when Carey retired briefly in 1998, apparently worn out by what hurling was demanding of him on and off the field, there followed a starburst of rumours.
One had it that he was about to try his hand at becoming a pro golfer; he was a brilliant player, and had featured in plenty of celebrity pro-ams.
Then came thousands of letters to the Carey home begging him to reconsider.
One count put the number at 25,000. With the love came more intrusive scrutiny, with the build-up to the 2003 All-Ireland final, which would provide his last winner's medal, dominated by rumours of an exposé on Carey's private life.
There was talk of legal letters and boycotts, and the day dawned and there was no story.
No other GAA player could generate that kind of interest at the time, and few have since then.
Since the emergence of the scandal that has landed him in prison, there has been much talk of no smoke without fire, the suggestion that all those years of gossip and rumour might somehow have been justified, or at least rooted in some sort of truth.
The reality feels starker. Carey was a superstar, and he came to understand what that meant, the downsides but the upsides, too.
He took a gift that seemed God-given and, after years illuminating Irish life with it, he used its legacy to criminal ends.
For a long time, Denis Joseph Carey was less a person than a symbol of national pride, the ordinary man with the extraordinary touch, the quiet lad from rural Ireland who, for a few weeks every summer, took on the powers of a god.
Now, seven days before his 55th birthday, he begins a lifetime of winters.
Never again will the late-summer sun summon memories of this slight figure bedecked in black and amber.
Never again will his name instantly set off a reel of dazzling highlights.
Instead, the image will be of a desperate, pathetic man with a mobile phone charger strapped to his nose, trying to maintain a life of lies.
The truth of his genius is now forever obscured, a footnote in a sad, rotten story.
