Laidley: ‘Truth of an affair between Kelli Stevens and Carey emerged . . . shatters the club’

Wayne Carey had been flirting with trouble long before his affair with Anthony Stevens’ wife, “starting a fight here, pinching a breast there”, Roos great Dani Laidley reveals.

Mum and dad split up. I don’t know why. I won’t until much later.

All I really know is that my little brother, Paul, and I are being sent to live with nan, my dad’s mother, and pop, her second husband. I love them both. I am happy to go.

Footy has a hold of me, for sure. When I’m seven I play under-10s for the Westminster Balga Junior Football Club, wearing blue and gold. The coach cares for me and my game, and sets boundaries, enforces discipline. He makes me run hard. I win most improved player and am quietly chuffed.

Laidley’s football talent was obvious as a youngster.

On field, I run through the middle of the ground and down into the half-forward line, and very quickly learn that I can win the football in ways others cannot. I also see that I can extract the ball and burst away. They can’t catch me, none of them.

I gather possessions at will. Twice I kick bags of nine goals. The coach teaches me to play an uncompromising brand and I develop a competitive fire. Winning helps. In one three-year stretch we lose maybe three games in total, en route to a premiership every year. That kind of winning becomes something I covet, something to protect, something to fight for.

I chase hard. I tackle hard. I hit bodies hard. I think maybe I like to hurt people.

‘It’s the need to win, to dominate, to control something’: 1993

I’ve been known by a few nicknames in my life. When I first get noticed as a teenage player of some potential, it’s ‘the boy from Balga’. Later I become ‘Tunnel’.

Yet the nickname the public knows is quite different. This one is born at the Kangaroos, in my first season. We’re playing Sydney at the SCG, and I’m playing wild football, racking up tackles and giving away free kicks. I’m lunging so desperately at every contest I even register two hit-outs.

The ball is bouncing free in front of the interchange gates and I run towards it, while a nameless Swan runs in from the opposite direction. I love these moments in footy. It’s a team game but contests emerge where it’s one-on-one, me versus you. You might as well be a boxer in a ring – you can’t leave until one of you is hurt. Kill or be killed.

I cream this other guy, lay him out fairly, and charge away with the ball as though he wasn’t even there, like a car continuing on down the street after flattening a cat. That’s when the commentators notice the display I’m putting on. That’s when Peter McKenna comes up with a new term to describe me, something the public can latch on to, a verbal millstone I’ll wear around my neck forever. He calls me ‘the junkyard dog’.

Laidley was known as ‘the junkyard dog’. A reputation that followed him.

I don’t know if he means the American wrestler of the same name, or just some pit bull of the imagination, guarding rusty garbage behind a chain-wire fence. But it makes sense.

Experts talk about addiction, like my father’s to alcohol, and his father’s before him to the same substance. Right now I have no such trouble with booze, no need to smoke weed and I’ve never even seen a hard drug up close. My vice is the work, the training, the game – it’s the need to win, to dominate, to control something or someone, since I have no control over the secret that dominates my inner life.

On the field, I’m giving in to all my worst impulses, and it’s been building for a while. If I’m not the desperate animal, raging and rabid, am I even playing?

‘Rules for us and rules for Wayne’: The Carey affair

In March 2002, I walk in the door of my house and my wife is standing in front of me.“Have you spoken to Anthony today?” She means Anthony Stevens. I’m with the Magpies at this point and he’s with the Kangaroos but we’re still incredibly close. We’ve been on family holidays together. We’ve lived 100 metres apart. His wife, Kelli, is close to my wife.“I think you better speak to Anthony.”

I don’t know exactly what’s happened. And when I do know, I wish I didn’t. Last night there was a party at Glenn Archer’s house and the truth of an affair between Kelli Stevens and Wayne Carey emerged. It shatters the group. Shatters the club.

Wayne Carey and Anthony Stevens celebrate in the locker room in 1998.

Long friendships – forged over a decade in blood and sweat and laughter and tears – are suddenly over. In one evening the heart is ripped out of the North Melbourne Football Club.

The story sets a new record for engagement. It holds the front page – not the back page – of the Herald Sun for 14-days straight.

Of course Wayne is no stranger to that limelight. He’s been flirting with trouble his entire career, starting a fight here, pinching a breast there. He’s the best player in the competition, which is reason enough for an outsized ego, but in his case it’s also fed and watered, enabled by players and coaches and administrators.

Carey and Stevens clash during the Kangaroos versus Crows game at Telstra Dome in 2003. Picture: Colin Murty

When Wayne was 21, Denis Pagan would read us the riot act about our recovery after a night match.“Don’t you boys go get on the piss this weekend,” he would say. “You know there’s only one player who can get away with that: number 18.”

There were rules for us and there were rules for Wayne. He was too good to reprimand for the bad.

‘We’re all hurting’: North Melbourne 2006

This guy has been chipping me all night long. We’re playing the Saints at Telstra Dome and getting done. I’m trying to focus on that but every time I walk up or down the aisles of the grandstand I hear this supporter – a bloke in his late-30s maybe – unloading on me.

It’s getting hard to block him out but I keep myself in check. When the game ends, he hurls a few more jeers at me and I stop, and I look at him.

“We’re all hurting,” I tell him. “Please come downstairs with me and see the hurt and the effort.”

A devastated Laidley reads a statement at training after the tragic suicide of a supporter.

It defuses the tension, but he looks at the security guards behind me and in front of me and shakes his head. He doesn’t want to do that.

The whole exchange is captured on camera and broadcast nationally. It might have been a footy media talking point for a day, if that, but on Monday morning at 6.30am it becomes something so much bigger.

I get a call from our CEO, Geoff Walsh. The man from the match was hit by a train after the game. He took his own life that night at 1.15am . . . I feel sick and dizzy. Geoff meets with the devastated family and offers them professional support services, and they stress to the club that what happened at the game was unrelated to his passing.

I speak to the police and they assure me of that too. I call the parents, too, because I want to make sure they are okay, and they reinforce the same message, that their son had been ill and suffering. But I can’t shake the nausea, because who really knows.

The story breaks soon enough and the incident is quickly twisted into a bitter confrontation, with me as an aggressor.

We organise a press conference. I try to explain my devastation. I try to say sorry without assuming blame. People always talk about how footy isn’t a matter of life and death, and they’re right. I’m not equipped for this moment. Is anyone?