THE first time I interviewed Wayne Carey was late one Saturday afternoon, probably in 1990. The rising, young North Melbourne forward spoke on the phone from the rooms after an early starring role. The thing that struck me about him was his apparent unease, verging on inarticulateness, within the then-foreign environment of media attention.

While Carey would have been barely 19, even by the standards of a time when footballers were less media-groomed, he was hard work for an interviewer. I remembered the unproductive and difficult nature of that interview long after I'd forgotten many more fruitful ones. My now-distant memory is of its heaviness.

It was hard to tell whether Carey was simply shy and nervous, or lacking facility with words, or in some way resistant to the idea of media interest. Perhaps it was all of these.

The season after that initial interview, I arranged a feature interview with Carey during ABC Radio's Saturday afternoon pre-match coverage. His skill was by now compelling media interest.

Such was the memory of the previous experience, I did something I don't recall ever, before or since, having felt the need to do: warned my co-commentators in advance to give the interview particular thought because I was concerned it might not be easy and could dry up. "Make sure you've got a head full of questions," I urged them. They did, and the interview went seamlessly enough without providing anything memorable.

While I didn't have a lot to do with Carey over the years that followed, I was always interested to see how any attempts to package him as a media commodity would fare. He looked good and played even better, giving him irresistible appeal and ample opportunity to gain experience within the media. Clearly, he got a lot better at it as he went along.

It always struck me as incongruous, though, when I heard media colleagues say, as they frequently did, such things as: "He's the most confident person I've ever met." He had sounded far from that during those hesitant moments in, or around, 1990. Admittedly, that was a long time ago and he was scarcely more than a boy at the time. He wasn't a confident one, though.

Even as he became a practised media performer, who could parry and thrust with some of the best of them live to air on television, I still wondered about this apparent contradiction.

I was particularly interested to hear, then, during the interview with Andrew Denton, in which Carey's sister, Karen, describe the brother she had known as a boy: "Very shy, very quiet … if you said something to hurt him or offend him, he'd cry … the person Wayne became on the football field was, I believe, almost a different person."

"The most confident person" some people had ever met, had grown from a shy, probably fearful, young boy.

How do these fragments of an identikit picture fit together? Is there cause for hope that the pieces will ever be truly integrated? Will last Monday night's experience help a damaged man towards healing? Has football ultimately helped or harmed Wayne Carey?

Discussions with a couple of Melbourne psychotherapists this week only underline the degree of the struggle Carey faces.

A recurring theme was of the damage inevitably done to his internal identity by the fractured family life he experienced in his early years. He may have grown up feeling like an object, not a person in the world, giving him little inner sense of who he is. Then, when his great talent emerged in a macho-pursuit like football, he was able to cloak himself in an external identity.

Thus was built a persona, but when the essence of the persona — playing football — no longer existed for him, as one therapist put it: "The scaffolding couldn't hold up much longer. His source of identity would become precarious."

That Carey is apparently seeking assistance is a big step in the right direction, but his restoration will require persistence. Whether a purging of his soul in front of a national television audience will aid this or not is problematic. On one hand, it may help him make sense of things that have happened; on the other, it could come to cause him regret.

As for football and its role in the life of Wayne Carey, it has at the least provided a lesser of evils. While it may have offered the disguise in which to hide his real self, it possibly protected him from something worse. A young person who grew up as he did will inevitably have felt a strong impulse to hit back at life. Football, with its physically adversarial nature, was a place where he could, in a sense, do that.

Perhaps football saved a young Wayne Carey from drifting into some other destructive pattern of behaviour.

It also gave us a glimpse of perfection. For that, he, and we, can be grateful.