Chris Rattue: What shall we do with a drugged-up Sailor?

There is a new corporate fad in America which involves back-checking the CVs of people who have attained high positions.

It has brought a few down and the most popular concoction or half-truth is the claim - presumably by men only - that they played on the college football team. This being America, maybe the women are all cheer-leaders.

I guess the chief defence for those who have had the helmet lifted on the truth involves stretching both the imagination and the size of the playing roster beyond the bounds of the college yearbook.

The thought of a puffing executive type convincing a prospective employer he spent his youth rampaging towards the end zone is a good laugh, although those who have lost their careers through embellishment may be struggling to find the humour.

Which brings us to Wendell Sailor, lost careers and what you can see on a CV.

At the moment, the C on Sailor's CV stands for cocaine, and also curtailment, as one newspaper put it, of his career.

Yet New South Wales rugby didn't need a super-snoop to check on Sailor's football credentials, and much more. It was all there, in the newspaper files, and required only limited reading between the lines.

Sailor was a brittle but blockbusting wing in league, a giant of the backline with a superstar x-factor that crowds loved - or loved to hate - and promoters adored. He has been much the same in rugby.

Yet New South Wales hardly needed a microscope to find that in both rugby and league he almost certainly exhibited problems involving alcohol abuse. They bought the full package.

The words "nightclubs" and "drunk" - and associated personality flips and regret - feature prominently in the off-field controversies that have dogged the career of Sailor, who quit Queensland for New South Wales this season.

There is evidence that the Wendell Sailor people liked at 3pm might be one to flee from at 3am. And so Waratahs coach Ewen McKenzie is standing by the man, but not his actions.

My very brief dealings with Sailor, during his league career, tally with McKenzie's description of the man. He was charming and fully quotable, although you could never claim to know someone on such scant evidence.

Yet New South Wales were overly optimistic, naive or maybe blinded by sport's relentless search for trophies and dollars if they believed that by shifting homes, Sailor's fundamental problems exposed by four previous incidents would disappear.

"One indiscretion doesn't take away a friendship," Waratahs vice-captain Phil Waugh was quoted as saying this week, perhaps not linking the cocaine result to incident number five, a drunken nightclub fracas in February which saw Sailor sent home from South Africa and banned for three matches.

A couple of indiscretions shouldn't affect the friendship either, although - sensitive as this subject is - a better incident count may indeed be the best help Waugh could give his mate.

Sailor clearly has a problem, and the Waratahs and Waugh shouldn't be surprised that it has reared its head again, this time in the form of a positive A test for cocaine.

There are enough sports and entertainment star biographies out there to know that the roar of the crowd falls on deaf ears when the centres of attention are dealing with personal problems while trying to perform the superhuman acts the rest of us crave to witness.

The greatest disasters also have a strange way of occurring on the doorstep of the greatest occasions.

The pressure to succeed - from within and afar - in these circumstances, the need to address fear of failure under a public gaze, can actually make the situation worse.

Why, the Waratahs fans in particular might ask, does Sailor go anywhere near a drug that is bound to end up in a test tube and send him hurtling out of the picture just as the team are loading up for the semifinals? Is football, his interesting life, not enough of a buzz? Why his irrational craving for more? Exactly.

Already, the Sailor stories have concentrated on the destruction of a career and the potential loss of a massive income - that is the scoreboard and the bank account, the heart and soul of the sports business.

"Speaking out could be his best hope of keeping the cash flowing," an Australian journalist wrote yesterday, although as the affable George Best would have attested, speaking out can have stuff-all to do with your fortunes in every sense of the word.

There are ludicrously famous sportsmen whose names have travelled much farther than Sailor's - the Bests and Maradonas and the rest - whose stories might suggest to Sailor that he has much more to lose if this is a deep-rooted problem.

Having lived a life in the spotlight, where there is plenty of fuel for the ego yet also where it can be hard to know whom to really trust, Sailor may actually face a tougher time than the rank and file who have travelled this path.

If the problem is as it seems, then it is fair to point out that if denial isn't the mother of addiction, it's definitely in the same family, according to the experts.

Sailor, as of yesterday, was considering contesting the cocaine result, looking desperately for a way out. But the stories contain a jumble of this defiance mixed with regret expressed to teammates.

For all that we may mock American ways at times, their sports franchises show far more awareness, support and guidance for stars who show drug and alcohol problems, with programmes involving counselling and rehabilitation assistance.

And what of Sailor and hope? If this latest jolt proves severe enough, if Sailor can somehow see the truth of his situation and get the help he needs, away from the confines of sport, he could yet look back on this apparent disaster as one of the best things to happen in his life.