Football's female groupies 'on the prowl'
THEY'VE always hovered behind the scenes, where cameras don't film and mates don't talk.
Splashed in perfume and fake tan, they totter in high heels and short skirts, to prowl bars and nightclubs for their latest targets, and to beg introductions to future marks.
They are the young women who offer themselves to AFL players. When a player reciprocates interest, they will slip away with him in the night, for a forbidden embrace or grope - usually with no strings attached.
It sounds like a fantasy world of flattery and fawning unknown to the average Australian male.
Yet Wayne Carey, in last year's confessional The Truth Hurts, referred to such female attention as a "fringe benefit".
There was never a shortage of women, he wrote. Commonly known as "groupies", Carey called them "star f---ers".
"If your eyes met with theirs more than two or three times in a short space of time, then you knew she might be interested," Carey wrote.
"It was almost like a game . . . they were almost predatory at times in the way they hunted down their prey. I've had complete strangers come up and say to me and say, 'I want to f--- you tonight'."
Carey's assertions are backed by a woman who went public last year with claims she'd slept with up to 200 AFL players, the Herald Sun reports.
Now 32, she rationalises a sexual past, in a playful tone, that upends conventional measures of morality - if men can claim "notches on the belt", she says, why can't women? "I was an easy get," she says. "And I wouldn't take any of it back."
A former AFL player tells the Herald Sun about nightclub liaisons and random encounters. He says women deceived their boyfriends to be with him.
Sometimes, he didn't even need to be awake to partner up. There were 15 or so times when he was roused in his bed to discover a naked female squirming beside him.
"I'd flick on the light and say 'Who are you'?" he says.
"I'd look at them and if I liked what I saw I'd go through with the action. If I didn't, I'd say I want to sleep."
There were the strangers who demanded immediate physical congress.
Their faces are hazy. Their names? No idea.
Six hundred women in all - give or take 100. Or so he thinks. He can't be certain.
He played AFL when the sport exploded down commercial and marketing avenues that defied its amateur origins, and when footballers became more Hollywood than Hoppers Crossing.
"Enough women view Australian rules footballers, in this town, in a light that casts them as movie stars," he says.
"I could never understand the fascination. But as a young single man, I thought 'great'."
Footballers and casual sex. The pairing is as natural as yin and yang, or black and white.
Tales abound of illicit encounters starring this or that footballer.
They are currency for the masses, and a source of envy to the strangled machismo that lurks within Australian men enveloped in everyday drags, such as a mortgage.
Take the rumour that a high-profile Melbourne-based player was set a quota by his teammates several years ago - bed 100 women in 100 days.
The player rose to the challenge, apparently. The task was completed well within time, or so the story goes.
Whether the player's reputation is enhanced or sullied by such tales, and whether it is even true, depends on who you ask.
Yet such tawdry concepts are not new or confined to football.
A contemporary speaks of an Australian batsman's desire to bed 100 women on an overseas cricket tour decades ago. The most talked about century of that player's tour, it's now said, had little to do with cricket.
Tiger Woods, Shane Warne and Carey have shown the myriad dangers of celebrities who chase casual sex - especially now, when media scrutiny and technology can turn last night's toilet rendezvous into this morning's breakfast show topic.
The ex-player quoted above agrees he was lucky, given he wasn't always as careful as he should have been. "There comes a time with young men who are that persuasion where if they have enough to drink, and the situation gets them motivated enough, the lack of prophylactic protection on hand is not going to stop them," he says.
He could easily have hit woes similar to the two St Kilda players this week accused of sleeping with a 16-year-old girl, who says one of them is the father of her unborn child.
There was nothing illegal about the liaisons and, apart from the players' AFL status, nothing especially unusual - after all, teenage girls get pregnant all the time.
But the episode invites a fresh focus on the lifestyle of footballers who are anointed a role model status they don't necessarily want - or deserve.
The AFL has distanced itself from the controversy. But all players are drilled in women's issues through "respect and responsibility" sessions.
Educator Lea Trafford once counselled players, through AFL Players' Association programs, on strategies to negotiate sexual advances of women. Her curriculum, entitled "Risky Business", canvassed celebrity pitfalls.
It covered unexpected scenarios, such as claims from the US that women saved condoms after sex with sport stars to use the sperm for fertilisation.
She speaks of some AFL players as country kids bathed in sudden fame, who were pampered like "prized greyhounds".
Trafford recalls an ex-girlfriend who had a one-night stand with an AFL player to get pregnant.
"We know it is a badge of honour for women to be going out with a footballer," she says.
"We know it is also a badge of honour if you have a baby with a footballer, even if you don't end up with him."
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