Footy legend Graham Cornes in sad marriage update

South Australian footy legend Graham Cornes has shared a sad update on his 31-year marriage.

Graham and Nicole Cornes on their wedding day on October 3, 1993. Picture: Ray Titus

Graham Cornes and his wife, Nicole, have turned the page on their “passionate love story” – but the devastated SA football legend is hoping that it’s “not the end”.

The glamour couple have separated after nearly 31 years of marriage and the shattered footy powerhouse hopes it’s only temporary.

Confirming the shock separation after being contacted by The Advertiser, Cornes said: “It was a passionate love story I never thought I would have and I hope it’s not the end.

“Nicole, like a lot of women as they grow older, realised there was more to life than catering for their husband’s every need.”

Graham and Nicole on the red carpet at the 2018 Australian Football Hall of Fame Induction Dinner. Picture: AAP Image/Joe Castro

The couple at West Side Story’s opening night in 2011… their wedding at Prince Alfred College chapel came two years after they met at FIVEaa.

The 76-year-old SANFL legend and Crows inaugural coach is 22 years older than his wife and mother of his three daughters, Amy, Charlize and Gia. She is also stepmum to Cornes’s Port Adelaide premiership-winning sons, Kane and Chad.

Nicole Peterson was just 23 and Graham, whose middle name is Studley, was already twice divorced when they married in October 1993.

Graham celebrates Nicole’s birthday in 1999.

And at the Adelaide Grand Prix cocktail party in 1993.

Their wedding at Prince Alfred College chapel came two years after they met at FIVEaa, where Nicole was a young receptionist and Graham was the station’s headline star.

“I didn’t know who he was,” she told The Advertiser in 2009.

“I used to confuse him with John Farnham when I was little. It was the blond hair. My Nanna loved Graham Cornes so much – she was a Bays supporter – she named her dog Cornesy.”

But Nicole said she knew “within two months of being with him that he was the man I wanted to be with forever”.

Graham proposed on the night of South Australia’s State of Origin clash with Victoria. Fresh from coaching SA to victory at the MCG, he took his future bride on a romantic horse-drawn carriage ride to Fitzroy Gardens, where he asked her to marry him.

Nicole, a former union legal officer, stood as the ALP’s candidate for Boothby in the 2007 but lost to Liberal Andrew Southcott.

Originally published as Footy legend Graham Cornes in sad marriage update