All of DJ Carey's achievements now seem as insubstantial as a dust mote

Weaponising a universal evil blots out any past glory

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EVEN the word itself - an accursed, terrifying C-word - seems infused with a heavy, buoyancy-stealing malignancy, a verbal concrete block that condemns hope to sleep with the fishes.

Six letters that have changed the trajectory of a billion lives, two syllables invested with the dark power to sink the most weightless spirit, a terrible sickness that DJ Carey repackaged as a weapon he then fired with inexplicably, cynical malevolence.

Carey has disgusted many not so much because he shamelessly mined the compassion of so many for financial reward, but because he deployed cancer as the drill bit to excavate their sympathy.

Because he made a cold, conscious, unfathomable decision to utilise the C-word as an ATM.

Whatever evil and terrifying force took hold of this latter day Cu Chulainn, bending and warping his humanity, it carried him into a desert of integrity, where he gouged lie after lie from the inhospitable soil.

Under the spell of something demented and rotten, he lost touch with that old sense of himself as a beloved national figure, and instead exploited for financial gain the universal fears about a disease which has the shattering of lives as its reason for being.

A nonexistent cancer became DJ's grotesque, personal cash machine.

In that moment a tumour that would dwarf any sliotar, one more diseased than any carcinogenic growth, a lump that cannot be zapped no matter how frequent or intense the treatment, attached itself to his reputation.

There it will linger, its enormous dark shadow blotting out until the end of time an authentically great player's stellar achievements on the hurling field.

Carey's five All-Irelands with Kilkenny, the nine All-Stars, his consensus selection on the Team of the Millennium, all those moments of genius that electrified Croke Park, each feels about as weighty as a blade of grass, as insubstantial as a dust mote.