Australian cricket star Glenn Maxwell reveals amputation fears after broken leg

Chris understood me, we got on really well, and it just so happened that he coached Fitzroy-Doncaster.

It wasn’t clear what sort of player I was going to be. I was on Victoria’s radar through age-group cricket, and they liked me as a middle-order batter who bowled off-spin. My club, Richmond, thought I was going to be an opener who bowled medium pace. I could see this tension costing me opportunities to advance to the next stage, and Chris, in a canny play, saw a chance to recruit me from the classroom to his club. I remain a proud member of the Lions more than 15 years later.

On an occasion like his birthday, I’d normally have a few beers, but with the England one-dayers starting that Thursday I decided to drive instead. The night played out as so many others have – a handful of pals, wives and partners, a couple of kids floating around. Chris’s son Lachy had bought him a beer pong set as a gift, so we were throwing table tennis balls around and generally talking a lot of shit.

I’m stressing this family-friendly vibe when introducing Ben Waterman to the story. For a long while I’ve been reluctant to put his name into print, but if we’re telling the story then we have to do it properly. I had known Ben nearly as long as I had Chris – Ben was also a teacher of mine in my second year of TAFE. And he was also a teammate; a big fast bowler at Fitzroy-Doncaster who I played alongside plenty of times. On the subject of keeping me humble, nobody does it better. I’m sure to Ben I’ll always be an annoying 19-year-old, so I can’t help setting out to play the role, and he fires right back.

Loading

Truthfully, I can’t even remember the details of our volley of barbs this Saturday night, but whatever was said I decided to chase after him. It wasn’t a thought-out plan but it probably would have ended in a wrestle and some foolishness. Ben took off, I was in hot pursuit, and as I reached him he turned back to track my progress and slipped.

We weren’t sprinting on a tennis court, as per some reports, we’d just stepped onto some synthetic grass. Because I was so close to him and running, my foot skidded out as well. His tumble took him across my left leg. Fast bowlers can end up as big lads after giving the game away, and this is the case for Ben. Any pleasure I ever took in telling him so, karma paid it back in spades.

Under his frame, my leg snapped. I shrieked. “I’ve broken my leg!” I said, and knew without a doubt that it was true. “Please tell me you’re taking the piss?” said Ben, my poor friend already full of panic as he found his feet. If only. I’m glad Vini was around the other side of the house with everybody else and didn’t see the first moments, but she certainly heard the aftermath and came straight over. I asked for an ambulance; it was panic stations.

Clearly, everyone at that party knew that as much as this would have been awful for anyone, it carried the added weight that my body in perfect shape was my living. There were a lot of tears. Ben was devastated; he could barely look at me. I was laid out on the ground with my foot propped up. From then, things came to a standstill.

It turns out that 9.30pm on a Saturday is not a good time to get yourself injured, because that tends to be when everyone else is doing it too. There wasn’t going to be an ambulance swinging by to rescue me in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne – the 000 operator said it could be 90 minutes away. Rain had arrived, every cricketer’s nemesis – my friends had to put up a small marquee on top of me. It was grim. My trouser leg was tighter by the second as the ankle and foot swelled in a way I’d never seen before.

Loading

In no state to do it myself, I asked Vini to start calling around. We couldn’t reach the Australian team doctor, not unreasonably on a Saturday night, but we did get onto Trefor James, the former team doctor at Victoria. After explaining that we had no bead on an ambulance and that by now my foot had practically exploded out of the shoe, he was keen for us to take charge of matters ourselves. He arranged for us to be taken in at the Epworth in Richmond, about 45 minutes from Bayswater, and said that Vini should drive me there.

Somehow my mates carried me to the car and manoeuvred me into the back seat. We got to hospital far earlier than we would have otherwise, but the trade-off was acute pain flashing through the break with every bump and turn. Three-quarters of an hour felt an eternity with my foot dangling from the leg.

At the hospital I didn’t jump the queue because I’m a cricketer, but the level of pain got me seen right away. It wasn’t long before we had a look at an X-ray that confirmed what I knew, even if Vini didn’t. I had done a good job of destroying my lower leg, not just snapping one bone but shattering pieces of it in the process, while chipping the other. As for my foot, well, it was a circus, busting all the ligaments plus the syndesmosis joint that keeps the whole show together down there.

As the doctor was explaining this, the penny truly dropped. I remember as a teenager when Nathan Brown broke his leg playing footy for Richmond – it was sickening at the time, but even worse later as it kept him away from the game for so long and led to his premature retirement. He was never the same player. I now had an overnight wait to think about this before an operation.

Funnily enough, faced with possible disaster, my brain went into overdrive in the other direction, trying to locate any positive I could find. Blame it on the painkillers that had finally been pumped into me. I switched to thinking about footballers who made it back inside a couple of months, and how that would be me after they popped in the pins and got me into rehab. In this dream sequence, I’d get back for the second half of the Big Bash League, demonstrate that I was good to go, get picked for the Indian Test tour, and never think about the leg again.

Loading

Of course, this was wildly wrong and ridiculous.

I didn’t sleep a wink that night. By the time I got into a hospital bed it was 1am, and it would be past lunchtime the next day before I was put under for surgery.

When morning came, it was time to make use of the waiting with a few phone calls. I’ve been around long enough to know how breaking a leg on a Saturday night can look, especially given I had a not unreasonable reputation as someone who has enjoyed a few evenings out across the journey. First call was to Australia’s chief selector, George Bailey. We’ve enjoyed a terrific relationship since playing for our country together, especially under his leadership. Bails trusts me and treats me like an adult. After the inevitable prognosis, I pretended to be blasé to lighten the mood: “So mate, you might need to find a replacement for me for these one-dayers.”

In the days following surgery, there’s meant to be a natural improvement with the leg in a cast. But the existing swelling meant that didn’t happen. I couldn’t get comfortable no matter what I tried. It turned out the swelling hadn’t stopped and was pushing against the confines of the cast, so the pain was out of control. They had to go back in and cut the cast to shove ice packs down both sides. My daydreams of getting back on my feet within a couple of weeks, wandering around the house to work on my putting and my short game, disappeared.

This was when Vini was told to start preparing for all eventualities. The doctors thankfully didn’t share this with me yet, as I would have freaked out. But the swelling was at risk of escalating into compartment syndrome. This means that intense pressure on the muscles can lead to infection and necrosis. If they couldn’t get it under control in the very short term, the risks for the limb were existential. I might never walk properly again. I might never play cricket again. I might, if everything went wrong, lose the foot entirely.

This is an edited extract from The Showman, by Glenn Maxwell, with Adam Collins. Published by Simon and Schuster from October 30.