Old mates come together for former Bears star Chris Caruana’s tough times
It is a story that typifies the struggles of life after the game and the strength of the rugby league community. One of the North Sydney Bears’ own is doing it tough and former teammates have come to his aid.
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In the Simply The Best commercial from 1993, there is an interlude from Tina Turner where glamour boy Chris Caruana has a rare speaking part.
The emerging North Sydney Bears star tells of Steve Roach picking him up “like a rag doll” and throwing him to the ground.
“And he said, ‘welcome to first grade, son’.”
But it wasn’t first grade rugby league that shook Caruana, so much as everything that came after it.
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North Sydney have not played a game for 21 years, but they have rallied behind the beloved teammate they call “Smoke” as he stages the fight of his life.
Caruana is suffering mental health issues and is unable to walk following injuries suffered in a high speed car accident before Christmas on the NSW north coast.
Former teammates Greg Florimo and Billy Moore are offering support and Caruana has told them that all he remembers from the frightening accident is “passing out” before his vehicle collided with a truck.
After undergoing a series of operations at Lismore Hospital on his knee and lower legs, the 49-year-old remains bed ridden and struggles to get up.
Doctors are hopeful he will be able to walk again, but the bigger concern is for his mental health.
Caruana left Lismore hospital after the accident to stay with his daughter in Umina, but a short time later he was admitted to a mental health hospital in Gosford — the 11th time he has been admitted to care since retiring from the NRL in the early 2000s.
Now back in Ballina with his carer Brooke Smith, a GoFund Me page has been set up for Caruana which has raised over $2000.
“He’s not really well at the moment at all,” said North Sydney patriarch Florimo.
“He now has a mental health team around him including hopefully soon, a full-time nurse who will be there to look after him for the particular needs and therapies he has.”
State of Origin great Moore says whenever he thinks of Caruana – the vibrant and quirky glue of the Bears dressing room – he can’t help but smile.
“Everyone I know has a Chris Caruana story,” said Moore. “There’s no bigger character that I’ve met in the game of rugby league.”
But the laughs haven’t come as easily recently.
“He was really happy that we put the call in. And the call was one of those calls I’m glad I made,” he said.
“You could tell he’s not in the best shape and was a little bit down, but there was still the odd glint of the Chris Caruana ‘Smoke’ as we used to call him.”
According to former Bear Ben Ikin, Caruana was impossible to explain in words.
“You didn’t think too much about Smoke, you just experienced him. And everyone who had the experience thoroughly enjoyed it,” Ikin said.
“He was always a bit of a mystery to us. He was so different and unique and you just accepted him for who he was.”
Former Norths captain Jason Taylor said most of Caruana’s stories had to be “divided in half” to find the truth. But that was the beauty of him.
“The biggest thing about him was his love of life and attitude to life and the enjoyment he brought to the rest of us just by being himself,” said Taylor.
“He always had something going on his life which was crazy.”
Premiership glory might have eluded that Bears team of the 1990s, but the bonds of mateship have not.
They were the team that supposedly grasped defeat from the jaws of victory, but the opposite can be said of the way the North Sydney old boys have responded to the plight of not only Caruana, but former Bears Matt Seers and Brett Dallas who have also fallen on hard times.
“That Bears team has a pretty good network of blokes who have each other’s back years after they played with each other,” said Jessica Macartney, from The Men of League Foundation.
Macartney believes what the Bears are experiencing is indicative of a bigger picture case study about the long-lasting impact Super League might have had on players of that 1990s era.
It was a time when the game went full-time, yet training commitments didn’t increase and players were left with a dangerous amount of money and idle time on their hands.
On the field, Caruana was fit, tough, crafty and versatile and according to Norths hooker Mark Soden, the first man he’d want next to him in the trenches.
In the words of former Norths star Michael Buettner, Caruana “graduated from the school of hard knocks” on the mean streets of The Rocks and had a tough upbringing.
Suddenly he was in TV ads with Tina Turner and earned $400,000 at the height of the Super League war.
Macartney says this year the amount of social and emotional support the Men of League has offered to ex rugby league players is higher than ever before.
“They got a lot very quickly and didn’t know how to utilise it,” said Macartney, who has been offering support to Caruana, but isn’t necessarily attributing his struggles to Super League.
“There was no education, a lot of players blew that money quite quickly. They invested in things like cars that don’t have long-term value and there was also drinking and substance abuse involved in that era. It’s also a decade when things like concussion wasn’t taken seriously. I think they’re a group that’s really vulnerable.
“And that’s across the board for Australian males. There’s a belief that suicide in Australia is peaking now, but that’s a myth. The highest suicide rate was in the 1990s in the youth age group. That same cohort is now also the most vulnerable cohort in Australia today. Males who are now aged 40-49.”
Seers spent time in prison for drug trafficking, Dallas has also battled legal and mental health issues, while teammates have kept a close eye on Caruana ever since he spoke publicly back in 2012 about living out of his car on the northern beaches.
“I have had borderline personality disorder, which is a major depression illness, for about 10 years,” Caruana told The Manly Daily at the time.
“I basically lived in a cave for four or five years and away from a lot of my great friends and that is what this illness does.
“I tried to commit suicide twice. The Lord, the Higher Being, Buddha whatever you want to call him didn’t want me to go. I’m not going to do it a third time.”
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According to Macartney at Men of League, 75 per cent of mental illness will occur before someone is 25 and if help is available at that age, sufferers should be able to manage quite effectively.
Billy Moore says nothing can change the fact Caruana didn’t receive that support back then.
But the Bears are determined to do all they can now.
Moore says he struggles to reconcile how from a team of brothers, things have worked out so differently for some.
“There’s nothing tougher, actually,” said Moore.
“To know someone you played with and you love has suffered and is suffering. Yeah, to me it’s a big disappointment.
“You almost want to have that crystal ball to (keep them in) that time when they were happy and life was good.”
Follow this link if you’d like to contribute to Chris’s recovery: https://www.gofundme.com/f/please-support-ex-football-player-chris-caruana