Tim Paine’s journey to hell and back: ‘My whole life has been about me’
Former Test skipper Tim Paine thought losing his cricket career to a sexting scandal was the worst thing to ever happen to him. Then his wife told him their marriage was over.
It’s the eve of his 37th birthday and Tim Paine has found himself hiding in the toilet cubicle of a suburban cricket ground, crying as quietly as he can. His second XI Tasmanian teammates on the other side of the bathroom door are too young for all this; photographers with their prying lenses have surrounded the building, anxious to capture every tear and pass it on for public consumption.
Some are privileged to suffer only a private disgrace. Others are chosen by the gods for a more public humiliation, the particulars of their shame announced in front-page headlines.
A week earlier, Paine had become the second consecutive Australian Test captain to resign tearfully in front of the cameras. Paine had given up the Test captaincy after lurid text messages he’d exchanged with Cricket Tasmania employee Renee Ferguson in November 2017 became public. Paine begged forgiveness from fans and especially from his family. “It breaks my heart to know how much I’ve let them down,” he said.
Cricket Australia had been aware of the “sexting” since the early days of Paine’s captaincy. An internal investigation by the sporting body’s Integrity Unit and Cricket Tasmania’s HR department had cleared him of any professional wrongdoing. It had been deemed a private issue. Paine was told to go home and sort things out with his wife, which he did. Yet at that point, only one shoe had dropped. Awaiting the inevitable fall of the other was an agony that lasted for four years. Cricket Australia had successfully kept the story quiet but when that ultimately failed, the crisis managers arrived and Paine was told he should resign from the captaincy.
What started in tears ended in them.
Paine had been appointed captain after Steve Smith was removed amid the fever of recriminations – complete with emotional press conference – immediately after the sandpaper crisis in 2018. With his coach Justin Langer, Paine rebuilt the reputation of the national cricket team and restored its relationship with the public. Together they retained the Ashes for Australia in 2019. And yet the captain was gone before the start of the 2021-22 Australian summer, the coach at the end of it.
Paine’s life veered off course when a story broke under the headline “Australian Test Captain Tim Paine Engulfed in Sexting Scandal” in the Herald Sun on Friday November 19, 2021. The story published allegations that the cricketer had sent a string of text messages to Ferguson, a former receptionist at Cricket Tasmania. Ferguson had later been fired over allegations she stole from her employer – a matter still before the court.
Paine’s texts, sent when he was Brisbane, and Ferguson’s replies were explicit and embarrassing, with Ferguson saying “we are both f. ked if this gets out”, while adding that she was “a vault” [of secrecy] and would “never repeat anything”.
The scandal was intensified by several things: Paine was married; his brother-in-law was also texting Ferguson; and she claimed that a photo the cricketer sent her of his genitals was unwelcome. Paine has sworn the text messages that made their way into the public domain were not a complete record of his exchanges with Ferguson. And he denies the picture he sent was unsolicited, describing the exchange as “consensual”.
Paine resigned the captaincy at a snap press conference on the Friday afternoon in the immediate aftermath of the revelations; he had been advised the previous evening in a phone hookup with Cricket Australia and its advisers that this was his only option. And yet in the days that followed, Paine tried to hang on to his routine, and the futile hope of resuming some normality. He was still a member of the Australian Test team. His kit for the Ashes was waiting for him in Brisbane, where he would pull on the wicket-keeper’s gloves and resume living out the Australian dream on the cricket field, albeit no longer as captain.
The second XI game at Lindisfarne was a warm-up ahead of the first Test. He just had to get through it, get on the plane and get back to doing what he does best: keep wickets. The game was a safe space. He’d climbed into his car on Monday morning and had stopped at the Sandy Bay shopping centre to grab a takeaway coffee, as he often did. Exhausted from lack of sleep, he wandered in a daze towards the cafe, but the sight of people inside had spooked him. He’d turned on his heels and dashed back to the car with his head down. “I couldn’t face people,” he recalls.
“You think the whole cricket thing is your life - until it’s not”
Paine had played seasons with a finger so badly broken he couldn’t do up his shirt in the morning; he’d played against England in soiled trousers when there was no time for a dash to the toilet; he’d played since he was four, and he joked that he’d still be playing grade cricket when he was 50 because it was as essential to his existence as oxygen. Now he was struggling to breathe, and to reconcile the path that had led him to this point. He had, in that change room at the Lindisfarne cricket ground, a moment of something approaching clarity. He had put cricket ahead of everything else and it had cost him everything. “I was just like, ‘What the f. k am I doing, why am I here? This is not the most important thing in your life any more, and it should never have been’,” he says.
Paine climbed into his car at the end of the match and told the Tasmanian cricket authorities he would not be available for the one-day game later in the week. He rang Langer and told him he wasn’t coming to Brisbane for the first Test of the Ashes. And then he pointed the car back towards the shaken home he shared with his wife Bonnie, a nurse, and their two small children. News crews had set up at the front door and back.
There was little relief in the torturous months that followed. He couldn’t eat and he couldn’t sleep. At times he was completely helpless, unable to look after himself, let alone his two small children, who had no idea what was going on. Bonnie would escape to their nearby beach house to get away from the cameras. A photographer hired a boat and moored it metres from the back deck of the hideaway. She would, at some point in the coming weeks, come to the conclusion that the damage to their relationship was irreparable and the marriage was over.
“That’s as hard as it gets,” Paine says now, his voice catching. “You think the whole cricket thing is your life until it is not and then you’re like, ‘Shit, what else have I got?’ and you haven’t got that either. That was a kick in the guts. That period of my life, our life, still upsets me. I don’t like talking about it, I don’t like going back over it. It was bloody hard, but it was harder to see Bonnie trying to deal with it … it wasn’t because of her actions, she was within her rights to do that at that stage and I would probably have done the same.”
Twelve months later and the scars are apparent in the pauses Paine takes to gather himself as we speak. He’s been to hell but now he’s back. He has salvaged his marriage and found the courage to return to cricket – even if he remains somewhat camera-shy and anxious in public.
Earlier this month he gathered his kit and headed to Hobart airport with the Tasmanian team as it set out for Brisbane and the first game of the Sheffield Shield summer. The weekend before that he’d played with the University of Tasmania Cricket Club. The club was a place that had nurtured him since primary school and had remained a constant in his life. And somehow the Uni kit had survived when emotions had consumed him last summer and he had stuffed the Australian and Tasmanian “coffins” – kit bags – and all the embossed and branded gear into a bin. “I was broken at the time,” he recalls. “One day I was in the garage and I saw the Cricket Australia bag on the shelf and the Tasmanian one next to it and became overcome by the urge to throw them out. Everything went – but fortunately my club kit was in another room and it survived.”
Still nervous at the thought of being seen in public, Paine was cheered by the encounters he had with strangers in Hobart airport when the Sheffield Shield side flew up to Brisbane. “People were wishing me good luck and saying that it was good to see me back,” he says.
I’ve helped Paine to write a new book, The Price Paid: A Story of Life, Cricket and Lessons Learned, about his circuitous route to the captaincy before his fall from grace. He wanted to tell the story of what he concedes was a “pretty unlikely career”. Simply put, it’s his tale of “going from a kid in Lauderdale who played a lot of backyard cricket like every Australian kid, to this bizarre story of making my debut at Lord’s with Steve Smith all those years ago [2010]”, then a “long, awful battle with injury” that seemed like the end for his career. Paine had given up on cricket in early 2017 and agreed to take a job with cricket equipment company Kookaburra – but at the last-minute intervention of former captain and fellow Tasmanian Ricky Ponting, he changed his mind and returned to the game.
Paine’s return to the Australian team in 2017 blindsided everybody in the game. Seven Tests and a centimetre-square piece of sandpaper later, he was the Australian captain. His elevation to this position at age 33 was one of the stranger turns of events the game had witnessed. People had been stunned when he was named in the Ashes and the decision prompted outrage toward the selectors; former Test star Stuart MacGill was the cheerleader of a scathing reaction on social media, while the papers said Paine’s recall showed just how badly Australian cricket was going that it had to return to a player who wasn’t in the best XI for Tasmania at the time. “I diffused the situation quickly by saying I was as shocked as [the critics] were,” Paine writes in the book.
Writing with Paine wasn’t a demanding task. He is good company and a good storyteller. In the early days we’d sit in the window of the cheap and cheerful Sandy Bay bakery, drinking soup and talking about that remarkable journey, occasionally interrupted by friends from his cricket club or neighbourhood kids who’d give him a wave through the window.
Even then, as captain, he’d already laid out a modest retirement plan that consisted of getting up before the kids, dropping into the studio to talk sport – he loves all sport and has an opinion on every topic du jour – and then, with a whole day left, maybe picking up some extra coin working with the local cricket team. Many former Test captains demand extraordinary amounts for their work sponsoring products, commentating or appearing at corporate conventions, but Paine insisted he would be happy with a low wage and a low-key lifestyle in Hobart with people he knew. A bowl of soup and a bread roll at his local cafe – his favourite lunch – was a meal priced to suit a pensioner’s budget. His frugality was infamous among team mates.
But the book, like his cricket, was put on ice last summer after the sexting scandal blew up. And until recently he had shown no sign of re-emerging. He was not in a good place.
“I was just like, ‘What the f. k am I doing, why am I here? This is not the most important thing in your life any more, and it should never have been’”
When we finally resumed writing in April after a five-month break, the tone of our meetings was vastly different. We huddled in private corners of Hobart, Paine with his hat down and voice lowered. He still had a haunted air, but he was determined to finish what we’d started. “I was a bit uncomfortable with continuing,” he explains now. “Obviously the book has another twist now, a few more chapters I wish we didn’t have to write. Twelve months ago it was a great story and now it is a great story with something I wish had never happened.”
Paine recalls how cricket had always come first; he even left his wife with her dying father to play the Boxing Day Test. It’s an episode that reflects the choices sporting professionals so often make. “Another of those times when I wasn’t there for her,” he writes.
“My whole life has been about me,” he admits now. “I’ve never been like that on purpose; I think sometimes it’s a consequence of the job we do and I probably let it get the better of me, I let it become my life and I dropped the ball.
“I never thought I wasn’t putting my wife and family first, but when I took a step back it is ridiculous that I couldn’t see how selfish I was, how much in my own bubble I was. I remember Bonnie saying something to me years ago and I was thinking, ‘What is she talking about? I’m a good husband, I do everything’, but I see now I was hopeless. I wasn’t a horrible person, but everything I did was centred around me and what I needed to do. And now I probably am – no, I am – completely the opposite.
“I don’t know if I could play international cricket the way I am now, maybe I would be better, but I have always been the sort of person who thought they needed to be fully immersed, that’s the way I’ve done it. I didn’t know any other way.”
Paine seemed to hit rock bottom last summer. He wasn’t eating or sleeping. He shed tears and weight, and stopped going to the gym. When he did eat it was junk food and bad coffee from a drive-through. He struggled to function. “I couldn’t control my thoughts,” he says. He couldn’t listen to the radio for fear of hearing his name, couldn’t listen to music because a lyric or a familiar tune would trigger his anxieties, couldn’t watch the cricket for obvious reasons. He would look at the kids and it “broke his heart”. “I’d screwed it all up,” he admits.
People thought it a good sign when he started running again, but he says it was a form of self-harm. “I was trying to hurt myself,” he admits. He ran every hill he could find, and in Hobart there’s plenty; he thought his heart would surely burst from exertion and maybe it wouldn’t be the worst outcome. He told himself he was “a piece of shit” who deserved to be punished.
“Initially I was just concerned with losing cricket, but that soon became the least of my concerns. It was shocking. I’d be sitting at home thinking of the memories we’d had in it, about the kids and everything Bonnie and I had created, and to think I’d messed that up was horrible. It was sickening and then it got to the point where I thought why bother even trying.” Eventually, though, the couple sought relationship counselling and slowly began to find some equilibrium. “I changed my thinking,” he says. “I shut up and just worked on becoming the person I wanted to be and should have been and slowly things turned around. Our relationship is much better now.
“At one point I considered myself literally the best wicketkeeper in the world, but I still had a coach … in terms of being a husband and a father I didn’t get any help at all and I didn’t think I needed any. You’re just expected to do these things …
“It’s hard at times when you’ve got young kids and you’re trying to be an international cricket captain, but I got help to develop some different skills and some consistency around the way I behave. If you told me to speak to someone 12 months ago I would have thought you were an idiot. I’m not here to preach about it but I see the benefits. It’s helped me and it’s helped us.”
I ask Paine about the years he spent living with the fear that the sexting episode would become public. Was the fear worse than the reality when the story broke last November? “I became Australian captain soon after [the sexting] and I knew then that if it came out it was going to be a big story because that is how the world operates. [But] the intensity of it surprised me a little because living in Tassie you’re often shielded from that. To have media outside my house, front and back, for two weeks, was pretty confronting – and certainly for Bonnie, who is not a sports person or fan really. For me to have put her through all this still makes me sick. For something that was a private issue to become so public is pretty hard for someone who is innocent of anything but on the wrong side of it. It was hard enough for me but it was harder for her.”
After Paine’s text messages became public Bonnie said she had forgiven her husband but was frustrated to have a private matter they’d dealt with years before made so public. Paine doesn’t want to comment in detail on the incident (there was never any suggestion he had a physical affair with Ferguson), but does press his view that while the sexting was wrong, it was consensual. “It upsets me that I did it, it was a stupid thing to do – it caused so much pain to the people I love – but I will deal with that. What I did was send a consensual text, and the fact it was what it was and it has been reported a complete other way sits really uncomfortably with me,” he says.
Paine lives 200m from his local cricket club, where former team mate and good friend Damien Wright is coach. A few months ago, Wright managed to lure Paine down to the new indoor net facility. The routine was comforting, and Paine began to test the water about playing back with Uni. Tasmania is a small place and soon they were asking if he’d think about some state cricket. His ambitions, like his fantasy about a post-cricket life, remain modest. Returning to the game is a form of therapy. International cricket is out of the question; he was ignored when Cricket Australia announced its contract list earlier this year, and is playing for match fees alone in state cricket. “You are a long time retired and my last cricket memories weren’t great, so I thought, ‘Why not train, see how I go and if I get a game for Tassie I can finish the game with some good memories’,” he says.
“It got to the point where I thought why bother even trying”
If Paine hadn’t stood down as captain he would have led Australia in last year’s Ashes and played his first Test ever at the Bellerive ground, not far from his family home. His former team mates reached out early in the summer and invited him to catch up with them in the change rooms, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The Paines escaped town when the cricket came to it. “I didn’t want to watch Test cricket, it made me feel sad because of the great memories I had and that I wanted to be there. The other side of it was how it all finished – cricket triggered that and I tried to stay as far away as I could for a while.”
Recently, he has attended the weddings of both Nathan Lyon and Pat Cummins, who took over the captaincy. “I am thrilled for Patty, he is a good mate of mine, he is a great man, he is a good leader and he was earmarked; he was always the obvious choice,” he says. “He has started brilliantly. That’s just Patty though – pressure doesn’t seem to get to that man. It helps when you are the best player in the world.”
Paine firmly believes that David Warner is the right man to captain the One Day International side now that Aaron Finch has stood down. As for David Warner’s lifelong captaincy ban over the sandpaper scandal, he says: “For some reason he is still being punished for it and I don’t understand that. Dave said a few weeks ago that he thinks it is a culmination of him being the voice a few years ago of the MOU dispute [the bitter pay row in 2017 between Cricket Australia and professional players].” Speaking before the matter was due to come up at a Cricket Australia board meeting last week, Paine says: “I think they have a chance to do a good thing and overturn it now.”
He adds: “Especially now when you are looking for a white ball captain, you need one, he is probably the best candidate and if you watch him bat at the start of this summer he looks like vintage David Warner, he’s fit as a fiddle, he’s got plenty of cricket left in him if they incentivise him to do so; otherwise we have to lose him to all the franchise leagues around the world.”
Shane Warne was Paine’s most outspoken critic during the last four years of his career. The late cricket great was, however, one of the many who contacted him when the scandal broke. “At the end of the day family is the most important thing,” Warne texted him. “F. k everything else.”
The Price Paid: A Story of Life, Cricket and Lessons Learned (Pan Macmillan, $49.99) is out on Tuesday.
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