Ex-NRL player turned beloved ‘BookTok’ star reveals his dark drugs, gambling and alcohol battle – and admits he used to ‘hide in the toilet’ to keep his love of reading secret

Former NRL player Luke Bateman has opened up about the dark side of his sporting career, revealing a gambling addiction and regular drug and alcohol use left him hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt despite earning $400,000 a year.

The former Canberra Raiders player was just 21 when he earned the enormous salary and was living the life he had spent his childhood dreaming about.

But Bateman, now 31, told The Imperfects podcast that reaching the NRL failed to give him the sense of fulfilment he had expected. 

Within several years, gambling had become an addiction, drugs and alcohol were a way of silencing the ‘noise’ in his head. He was borrowing money from almost everyone around him.

‘I finished my NRL career with absolutely zero dollars. And I was in probably about $250,000 worth of debt,’ he said.

Bateman said he had earned $1.2 million before tax over three years, but increasingly gambled away his salary and eventually maxed out credit cards with limits as high as $20,000.

His experience was a dramatic contrast to the image of sporting success he had chased since his teenage years.

‘I have everything that I’ve ever wanted. I have everything everyone always told me symbolised success. I was living my dream and I thought, well, if this doesn’t make me happy, nothing will,’ he recalled thinking at 23.

Now years removed from that period of his life, Bateman has found an unlikely second act as a passionate reader and online book personality – publicly embracing an interest he once went to extraordinary lengths to hide from his teammates.

‘I just needed silence’

Bateman grew up on a farm in rural western Queensland and realised at 13 that playing in the NRL could become a genuine possibility.

‘I didn’t grow up around authors. I didn’t grow up around writers. I didn’t grow up around anyone in the creative arts. It was either – you be a farmer or you be an NRL player.’

He achieved the latter, but recalled feeling strangely empty after making his debut.

‘I remember my debut game and I was sitting on the bus,’ he said.

‘I remember sitting there and being like, “Oh, nothing’s changed”. There was no real joy. There was no real satisfaction.’

He began chasing the next marker of success – a bigger contract, a property, a better car and a nicer home.

‘I need to fill this hole within me because all the stuff that I thought would fill it isn’t filling it. The hole just kept getting wider and wider and nothing would fill it.

‘My main addiction was gambling. It was the thing I was powerless to. It was the thing I could not say no to. It was the thing that was just destroying my life.’

He said alcohol and drugs later became another way to escape how he was feeling.

‘They were the things that numbed me to it. They were the things that brought me silence because I had so much noise in my head,’ he said.

Bateman said that by the end of this period he was using party drugs including cocaine, MDMA, ecstasy and speed on weekends, alongside drinking.

How a $400,000 salary disappeared 

Bateman’s gambling escalated further after a season-ending knee injury in 2019. He said about 90 per cent of his betting took place from his bed, sometimes continuing until 3am.

At first, his substantial monthly salary allowed him to conceal the extent of the problem. 

When he lost his money, he would borrow relatively small amounts and repay people when his next pay cheque arrived. But the amounts increased from a few hundred dollars to thousands. Eventually, his debts were larger than his monthly salary.

‘I was just lying through my teeth. I had this house of cards built up. I deceived and manipulated everybody,’ Bateman said.

He borrowed from his parents, siblings, partner, friends and people at his football club, inventing different explanations for why a professional athlete earning hundreds of thousands of dollars needed cash.

The shame of being broke while everyone believed he was wealthy only compounded the problem.

‘I can’t be broke. I’m meant to be the wealthy one,’ he recalled thinking. And the more money he owed, the more he gambled hoping to recover his losses.

‘I’d lost everything’

By the end of his career, Bateman said the consequences extended far beyond his bank account. His relationship had ended, friendships were strained and he owed money to people closest to him.

Eventually, he called his mother and admitted the extent of what had happened.

‘Mum, I’ve lost everything. I have to come clean about it all,’ he said to her.

Bateman described being deeply depressed during this period and struggling to get out of bed. He felt as though he was playing a character whenever he left home, only to collapse once he was alone again.

‘It was like wake up, put on the mask of Luke Bateman, go out and do whatever I had to do, come home, take that mask off. I would cry for hours just laying in my bed at home,’ he said.

At 24, he reached a crisis point. His mother stayed on the phone with him for hours during one particularly dangerous night, an experience Bateman said he largely regards as his mother’s story because he remembers the period as a ‘fog’.

‘I was in survival mode every single day. I love my mum. I literally wouldn’t be here without my mum.’

The long road out 

Changing his life wasn’t immediate. Bateman spent 2020 trying to address his gambling, describing his progress as ‘one step forward, one step back’.

After a major relapse in 2021, he finally agreed to enter rehab – something his mother had been encouraging him to do for 18 months.

His parents then presented him with a plan that would completely remove him from the life he had been living. He would leave football and Brisbane, disclose every debt he owed and return to western Queensland.

His parents would clear those debts, leaving him to repay everything directly to them while working with his father in the timber industry.

At that stage, Bateman estimated he still owed about $150,000. Rather than feeling controlled by the arrangement, he described it as an enormous relief.

‘I’m so lucky because there are so many people who are in that same position that I was in who don’t have parents that love them or are able to do that for them,’ he said.

He spent four weeks in a detox facility before returning home and beginning the slower process of rebuilding his life. Bateman said honesty became one of the most important lessons from his recovery.

‘Someone who loves and cares for you needs to know exactly what you’re going through. That is step one. You have to do the work yourself, but you don’t have to do it alone. I would even say don’t do it alone. It’s near impossible to do alone.’

The secret life he hid from teammates 

Long before gambling and professional sport consumed his life, however, Bateman had another escape: books.

Growing up in what he described as a ‘hyper-masculine’ environment, he felt there were parts of his personality that didn’t fit comfortably into the world around him.

‘Books for me were always the place where I felt belonging and they were where I felt acceptance,’ he said.

While sporting autobiographies appeared acceptable among the men around him, Bateman preferred fantasy stories filled with ‘dragons and witches and wizards’. He also loved romance novels.

As a teenager, he became so self-conscious about being seen reading that he would wait for other students to leave school before slipping into the library.

‘The bell would ring and everyone would leave, and then I would sort of just hang around and then I’d duck into the library, get my book and take it home where no one would see me,’ he said.

When he moved away at 18 to pursue professional rugby league, the secrecy continued. Living in a share house with other footballers, Bateman would read alone in his bedroom. Away trips were even more difficult.

‘I would hide my book in the bottom of my bag and then I would read my book in toilets. I was so young. I was so scared. I just wanted to belong. I didn’t want shame. I didn’t want the other boys taking the p*ss out of me.’

The contrast with Bateman’s life today is striking. The former footballer has since built a sizeable online following talking openly about books, including the fantasy and romance genres he once feared being caught reading.

He described books as the place where he never had to perform the version of masculinity he believed the outside world expected from him.

‘I had to go into the world and I had to be a character that would be accepted and fit into that world,’ he said.

‘Then books were the place where I just got to be me. They were my safe harbour where I just got to go, I got to take off all the armour that I had to wear in the world and go, “I belong”.’