The night Nathan thought he died
By ROSANNE MICHIE
Herald-Sun
26feb06
AS Nathan Brown lay in hospital with his shattered right leg, his head filled with swirling thoughts of broken bones, funerals and bad karma.
Foremost was the sickening clash that ended his football season and threatened his playing career. TV footage of it caused some to faint and others to turn away, heeding the networks' warnings about its graphic nature.
The Richmond star had collapsed, his leg grotesquely twisted and his face contorted with pain, when Melbourne's Matthew Whelan tangled with the Tiger's shin on May 27 last year at Telstra Dome.
Brown's mind played images of what he thought would be his funeral. He wondered if his injury was a kind of payback for the bad things he had done as a young larrikin.
Yet, as low as he was, he found positives in his misery.
The pain, disappointment and heartache gave him new perspective. So did the outpouring of goodwill from friends and strangers.
"It puts a lump in your throat," Brown says. "As a male, you don't try to ever show emotion, but privately when you read these letters, some of them are amazing. They do put a lump in your throat.
"No joke, I was sent 17 copies of Lance Armstrong's book (It's Not About the Bike). The poor bloke had cancer and nearly died . . . I broke my leg. There aren't a heap of parallels, but I appreciated it. And, yes, I had already read it."
He was surprised more than 3500 people leant him their support and shared their own stories of suffering.
His hospital room was filled with family, friends, teammates and opposition footballers. Now he cannot go anywhere without people coming up and asking him how his injury is.
Brown has reappraised his values.
"I am getting in contact with my inner-emotional forces, which will make my girlfriend very happy," he says.
It's typical Brown -- serious and reflective one moment, cheeky and flippant the next -- and one of the endearing things about a man many describe as a lovable rascal.
Brown's self-assessment is more blunt: he reckons he's shallow; talks candidly about dreaming of amassing enormous amounts of money; hates the thought of anything spoiling his looks and says he loves the fashion industry; figures he's far too self-absorbed to have children at the moment.
He believes Melbourne ruckman Jeff White's severe facial fractures, suffered at the end of last season, were much worse than his injury.
"I'd rather get my leg messed up than my face messed up!" he says.
"Some people find that I am very shallow at times, and a lot of my mates do, but I am very big on looks and I am very big on appearance and I like my money. Sad but true."
His cheekiness evaporates when he talks about his injury and it's clear the long nights lying awake contemplating his future have changed him, perhaps given him some depth he didn't know he had.
"You think you're bullet proof, a strong young man, and all of a sudden you're being told you can't walk for three or four months," he says.
"It really opened my eyes. Yes, it did give me empathy. It certainly gave me perspective. I was lying in a hospital bed with my leg all swollen, just thinking 'What if I don't ever play again? What am I going to do?'."
Brown hadn't thought too much about his spiritual side before the accident.
"You always wonder, when you die, how many people are going to turn up to your funeral. I know I didn't die, but I was lying in hospital with a broken leg and I was surrounded by all these people and I thought, 'These are the people I'd want at my funeral'. It was quite interesting."
The injury occurred when the once wayward rogue was playing the best football of his life -- the stand-out player up to round 10.
"Maybe it was karma," Brown says. " I don't know if the world works like that, but it could. I did a few bad things when I was younger, which I am not overly proud of."
Then the cheekiness returns and he laughs.
"So to all those people I have treated poorly or not respected as much as I should . . . five years later I'd like to say, 'I am sorry. I have broken my leg and I hope that'll make you feel better'."
Again, typical Brown.
The two things people in his inner circle agree on is his loyalty and his silly sense of humour. Girlfriend Sally Proud says Brown's refusal to take himself seriously is part of his appeal -- though it's exasperating.
"I think Nathan is far more intelligent and perceptive than he realises," she says. "Sometimes I hear him say those really shallow things and I think, 'Oh my goodness'. But I can't censor him."
But Proud did use her considerable skills as a PR executive to smooth some of her man's rough edges.
'SALLY is always telling me I should think more and read more and she always brings up things that I just don't think about, but probably should," Brown says.
"She's very worldly and rounded and loves women's rights and all that sort of stuff. I wouldn't wish it on any girl to be the girlfriend of a footballer. It's all about us (the footballers)."
Tigers coach Terry Wallace is another with a close, but unusual, relationship with Brown. He and then Bulldogs recruiter Mark Kleiman spotted him as a skinny 16-year-old with long blond hair (Brown recalls: "I was going through my Kurt Cobain phase.").
It was Wallace's job to knock the cheeky, raw talent into shape.
"He needed a fair bit of bevelling around the edges," Wallace says ruefully. "He was laden with talent, but a little bit wayward, to say the least.
"I called him into my office (at the Bulldogs) for a private chat so many times, you wouldn't believe. Look, he was a handful. In the early days it was interesting to see which way he would go."
Brown left the Bulldogs at the end of 2003 in search of a new challenge and went to Richmond. Wallace joined him there in 2004 and wants Brown to mentor some of the young larrikin Tigers -- Brown laughs that the task may be a bit hypocritical.
Brown is not a typical footballer. He owns and designs for his own clothing label, called Lenny, with former teammate Craig Ellis. And not many players would be comfortable playing Shane Crawford's gay love interest in a spoof for The Footy Show?
The man who once dreamed of being a TV weatherman has big hopes for Lenny and a media career after football. He says he now knows money can't buy happiness and how valuable football is to his psyche.
"I want to become a more consistent elite performer," he muses.
"When I am having an 'on' day, no one -- and I don't mean to be big-headed, no one -- in the competition can stop me.
"But I am doing that once or twice a year. Chris Judd, James Hird, Jason Akermanis are doing that six or seven times a year."
Before Brown can reach that level, he has to ignore the physical and mental scars of his injury. The early signs are good.
He played for Richmond reserves on Thursday night, picking up half a dozen kicks and scoring a goal against the Kangaroos in a half.
But what about the psychological side? For a month, he couldn't bear to watch the video of the incident that caused his injury.
"I have watched it a couple of times. The first time wasn't great. I was a bit shaky," he says.
"It was strange to see something like that involving yourself. When you see the leg, you think, 'How are you going to get better again?'.
"But the body does amazing things and it just recovers."
At the time of the sickening crunch, some experts said Brown would never play again.
As he prepares to return from eight months away from the game, Brown still battles residual pain in the right leg that graphically snapped in two places.
But there he was on Thursday night, ahead of schedule -- his ambitious target to be ready for Round 1 that he set himself in hospital last May.
"I'll be right for Round 1," he promises. "But I'll be very nervous going back. I have never sat out of the game so long -- and I am against my old team, always fun.
"Some people say that I won't make it. Only time will tell.
"I don't know if I'm going to be the player I was. But I am going to give it everything in my power to give myself every chance.
"Who knows? I may even be even better."
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,18270177%255E11088,00.html
