WAYNE Carey was first introduced to football when his father was doing time at Mannus prison near Tumbarumba in country New South Wales, his second stint ‘inside'.

Carey was eight. He'd never had anything to do with the game before then. Growing up in Wagga, he did what most other Wagga primary school boys did and that was play rugby league.

His father didn't take him to play any sport. Most days, Kevin Carey could be found in one of Wagga's many pubs - The Black Swan, The Riverina, The Turvey Tavern, The Royal Hotel and, the only one that was open on Sundays, The Shanty out east on the Sturt Highway. Often, that's where he got into trouble.

And when that trouble landed him in Mannus, three of his five children, including the eight-year-old Wayne, were sent to stay with their aunty Pam and uncle Bob Causley. Luckily, they happened to live about 50 metres from the gate to the McPherson Oval, home of the North Wagga Saints.

Aunty Pam signed him up to the club, he was given a pair of hand-me-down boots from his cousin, Paul Cox, and then he was off and running. His love affair with the game blossomed from the time he had his first kick and Saturdays soon became his favourite day of the week.

He played for the Under 9s which started at 8am and sometimes backed up and had a game with the Under 10s if they were short. He'd run the boundary line for the Under 14s and then, if they were playing at home, man the scoreboard for the Under 17s. He'd be given a pie and can of Coke as reward for those jobs but never told anyone he'd happily have done them for nothing.

Before the seniors played, he'd sneak into the changerooms and admire the players' oiled up biceps, inhale the smell of Deep Heat in the air and listen to the coach's address rattle the rickety walls of the sheds. He loved the Saints' big No.1, Laurie Pendrick, a hard man who was hated by opposition supporters.

It wasn't long before Carey's talent emerged. One day his big brother, Dick, said he'd give him a dollar for every goal he kicked in an under 10s game against Lake Albert. But when the final siren sounded and the boy had finished with 15 goals, nine behinds from the centre, Dick found he didn't have enough money in his pocket to make good on the wager.

When his father got out of jail, footy became Carey's refuge from the madness that often engulfed his home.

For Kevin Carey could often fly into a rage; in fact, he was known far and wide as The Toughest Man in the Riverina. Those rages caused his mother, Lynn, who in the preceding years had had her nose slit open, cheekbone broken, been shot at and nearly drowned with a garden hose, to eventually flee Wagga with her four children - Dick, the eldest, stayed behind - on a train.

A year or so earlier, when Dick was 16, he had hatched a plan with his mother to stop the beatings and the misery. He waited in the darkness behind the kitchen door with a .22 rifle, ready to shoot his dad when he got back from the pub. That night, though, Kevin Carey stayed with his girlfriend, a decision that surely saved his life.

Lynn Carey had heard about women's refuges in Adelaide that cared for battered wives so that's where she headed. But after a few months, Kevin tracked them down and tricked her into letting the kids stay with him in Wagga over Christmas. She didn't see them again for seven years because he told her he'd kill the three children - Sharon, the eldest daughter, was allowed to return home - if she ever tried to reclaim them.

Anyway, that's the background to Carey's childhood and his introduction to football. And an explanation for the reason he embraced the game, and the security it gave him, as closely as any child ever embraced a teddy bear.

That journey which started at McPherson Oval 31 years ago will tonight reach a destination of sorts in the Palladium room at Crown Casino. For that's where Wayne Carey, dual premiership captain and seven-time All-Australian, will be inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame.

Some people will undoubtedly still holler about Carey's inclusion among the game's notables. Not because his footy wasn't ever good enough to be ranked alongside the likes of Whitten, Hart, Reynolds and Bunton. But because his behaviour hasn't always accorded with what the sporting world expected of its champions, or indeed what society has deemed acceptable.

And they might have a point. The flare-ups are well documented: in 1995, he grabbed a woman's breast in King St at 5am. Seven years later, he had an affair with Kelli Stevens, the wife of his great friend and vice-captain, Anthony Stevens, which resulted in him resigning from North Melbourne, the club that became the family he never had.

After his inglorious exit, and the ensuing media frenzy, and frenzy is perhaps too mild a word for the way in which he was pursued, Carey descended into a slough of despair and depression. He turned to drugs and his thoughts often turned to suicide.

During this period of self-sabotage - cocaine had joined alcohol on his list of self-prescribed medication - Carey and his girlfriend Kate Nielsen had an altercation in a Miami restaurant which created headlines, and ended up with him spending 19 hours in Miami Dade Prison. And then there was the time he was capsicum sprayed by police in his Port Melbourne apartment after a three-day bender.

So, hardly what you'd call a glowing off-field CV.

When the arbiters of Hall of Fame selection, all good people and true, all with perfectly intact glass houses around them, weighed up over the past two years whether Carey fitted the selection criteria, which included the nebulous question of ‘character', they gave him the thumbs-down, like some Roman emperor sitting high in the Colosseum.

Personally, I'd argue it's remarkable Carey has turned out as well-balanced and even-tempered as he has. His childhood, indeed most of his young adult life, has been so dizzyingly dysfunctional that it's unreasonable to judge him by the same standards accorded other young footballers who (usually) came from loving families and perhaps went skiing in winter, or maybe even holidaying in Queensland.

Not to suggest Carey has a mortgage on hardship. But he got his first football when he happened to win one as a prize for taking out the Saints' Under 12's best and fairest. Until then, and I know this sounds like a Monty Python skit, he used to kick a woodchip around the backyard with his younger brother, Sam, on Saturday mornings.

To be given the captaincy of an AFL club at the age of 21, then be the public face of the club at a time when he had no role models in his life and no idea of how to carry himself in public, let alone speak in public, was a ridiculously big ask.

All he really knew about was how to play footy, drink beer, fight, meet women and have a good time. That other stuff - the public relations, image making, branding and spin - belonged to a world of which he was blissfully ignorant.

He never knew how to treat the media - and he certainly never understood how to court the footy writers and use them to his advantage. They were the enemy, and to be treated as such. And to this day, he remains wary and distrustful of anyone with a pen or microphone in their hand.

When his memoir, The Truth Hurts, was published in October last year, the publishing house, PanMacmillan, organized a gruelling publicity campaign which involved half a dozen interviews a day over two or three weeks throughout Australia.

Carey was not looking forward to the ordeal. The first interview was slated in for Neil Mitchell on 3AW, a long-time critic. Carey wanted to face off with Mitchell straight away, figuring if he could handle that, he could handle anything that was to be thrown his way over the next few weeks.

But flying down from the Gold Coast to Melbourne the day before the publicity tour began, the plane hit a serious pocket of turbulence. So bad was the aircraft lurching that two woman passengers behind him began to sob, and his publicist sitting next to him also began to panic. Someone shouted: ‘We're going to crash'. Carey was the only one in the cabin with a smile on his face. He thought to himself: ‘You beauty, the plane's going to crash, I'm going to die and that means I won't have to do any interviews.'

For all his flaws, for all the troubles he's encountered - and caused - over the past three decades, football was the one constant. The one place he felt safe; his sanctuary against the world. The place he used to puff out his chest, and feel like he was indeed The King. When surrounded by madness, as he often was, it was the thing that kept him sane.

Now he is to be recognized as one of the game's elite. And more than the two premierships, All-Australian selections, four best-and-fairest awards and captaincy of the Kangaroos' Team of the Century, Carey says tomorrow night will be the highlight of his career.

This article first appeared in The Age on June 3.