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the media to his performance in the ring (not to mention his identity as an
African American male; see Sloop 1997). In the case of high-profile HIV-
positive athletes like Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson and Greg Louganis, the stuff of
scandal is provided by the positioning of sexuality within elite sports culture.
The mere fact of being gay can be scandalous within this culture, as Justin
Fashanu, the first soccer star to ‘come out’ and the first million-pound black
footballer in Britain, discovered to his cost. He hanged himself in May 1998,
largely ostracized by his footballing peers and facing allegations in the USA of
the sexual molestation of a minor.
An especially striking case that illustrates how off-field behaviour can be
massively newsworthy is that of Wayne Carey, the most famous Australian
Rules footballer of his generation, who resigned from the North Melbourne
club that he captained in 2002 after the public revelation of his affair with
Kelli Stevens, the wife of his vice-captain, Anthony. This ‘Downfall of a King’
(Who Weekly 2002: 27) represented a double transgression, a ‘betrayal’ of both
marital vows (Carey was also married) and of the compact between club-mates
(the expression is used advisedly, given the strong male bonding in team contact
sports). In a city where ‘footy talk’ dominates discourse in season (and not
uncommonly outside it), this resulted in more ‘morning after’ stories in one
Melbourne newspaper devoted to the Carey scandal than to the 11 September
2001 destruction of the World Trade Center (Robinson 2002). The Carey case
also revealed something of the temporal rhythm of the sports scandal – in the
space of a few weeks, coverage of Carey in Australian newspapers went from
low-key (the scandal broke just before the start of the football season) to ubi-
quitous and then quickly subsided (Robinson 2002). This effervescence of scan-
dal is obviously temporary, but all the ‘data’ generated by it is a cultural
resource that can be quickly recalled and redeployed, as occurred in February
2003 when Carey, now reconciled with his wife Sally (as Stephens was to his)
and playing for a new club in a new city (Adelaide), found himself embroiled in
a scandal involving a ‘luxury’ hotel room, a party, various women to whom he
was not related by marriage, and a spa. After a few days of intense media
coverage of the incident, a young woman withdrew allegations made on radio
that she had photographed Carey falling off a bed, drunk and naked except for
a T-shirt, and that she had seen him kissing a blonde woman (McGuire 2003:
3). Her story and retraction were told to New Idea magazine, which had
‘reportedly paid Sally Carey AUS$150,000 for an exclusive interview that
appeared in the previous week’s edition’ (McClure 2003: 8). At this point
the story petered out – until the next opportunity to reactivate the scandalous
potential of the sports celebrity.
In general terms, scandal cannot be contained within the sports world even
where it emanates directly from sporting activity, nor can the heroic mythology