If it all ended tomorrow – and even the perkiest tea leaves would take one look at him and admit there’s every chance – Tom Williams says he’d hobble away without bitterness.
From day one he’s loved his football club and how it has enriched his life, and that’s satisfaction enough.
As for loving the game? That would be asking too much.
“No, no I don’t love the game,” Williams says, reckoning he’s not alone in just happening to be good at something that for a decade has lanced him like a voodoo doll.
“It’s kinda like an ex-girlfriend – you hate her initially, then eventually get back to being friends with her again,” he says.
He senses the ice thawing, but 12 major operations in 10 years haunt him like a dozen exes who’ve bound his football heart in scar tissue. Last year, as his right shoulder again gave out in Darwin in the most innocuous fashion, this tortured Western Bulldog decided he’d had enough.
“It’s the first time it really broke me,” he says, admitting he gets fidgety and emotional talking about it.
When he’d had the second of three shoulder rebuilds in the 2012 pre-season, he made a silent vow to retire at the next major mishap. And now here it was, a trapdoor to freedom.
“I approached the club about retiring. I didn’t want to stick around if I was starting to become a burden. That just leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. There was a little bit of relief in that [talking about retiring]. But, in saying that, I couldn’t do it.”
Williams already was asking himself, “Do I really want to go through with this?” when chief executive Simon Garlick told him the club wouldn’t let him go. “It’s hard to walk away from people like that, who believe in you,” he says. “They’ve been through it with me as well.”
Williams corrects the contention that injury defines his career. “It is my career.” Faced with it ending thus, he pondered his legacy. “There was a bit of, if there is a tiny chance that I can turn my career around and help the club, I’ve got a year left on my contract. If they still want me, I’m happy to give it another crack.”
At 27, Williams is a wincing example of the toll Australian football can take on a healthy young body. He gets around in rubber slip-on sandals over socks to relieve feet twice snapped at the navicular bone, feet that ache when he wakes each morning. Bench-pressing with patched-up shoulders is a throbbing nightmare. “Games are the only relief I get,” he says.
He hopes a pill will have been invented before he’s an old man that will make it all go away, but reckons it’s only once a week, trying to relax on his day off, that he really notices. “You build up a tolerance,” he says. “You can deal with anything really if you deal with it long enough.”
It hasn’t always been this way. When Williams arrived at Whitten Oval in late 2004 the question mark over him wasn’t medical, rather whether a rugby convert from Queensland could harness his sublime athletic gifts and a single season of football experience to become the player that pick six in the draft demands. Apart from a broken collarbone at the start of secondary school, he’d never been hurt.
Not that he hadn’t shed a tear. His father, Steve, helped set up the Brisbane Broncos. “A hard man, a great man,” Williams says. Every time his son was tackled and hit his head on the ground as a five or six-year-old playing rugby, he’d cry.
He remembers a teammate’s father taunting him, “Oh, he’s crying again, he’s a sook.” Walking home one day he asked his dad, “Why don’t you tell him off?” Steve Williams replied, “Why don’t you stop crying?” So he stopped crying.
To trawl through Williams’ medical chart feels almost macabre, but every setback remains vivid. It started early in his first season with a sore foot that in the next VFL game became a snapped navicular, compounded when a doctor diagnosed a rolled ankle and gave his crutches to someone else. Williams was out for two years.
This introduced him to the delights of surgery, a process he has become the Bulldogs’ resident expert in, telling young players it’s a breeze – “You lie in bed, they give you relaxing drugs, knock you out and it’s all over”. At 18, going under the knife for the first time, he was scared stiff.
Rehab, he soon realised, was the painful part. Day after day of working towards something impossibly distant, not just the loneliness but the feeling that you’re removed from life, unable to be even halfway normal. “It’s a first-world problem, I don’t want to compare it to anything,” Williams says, blessed with perspective. “But when you’re in that situation it can get a bit overwhelming.”
There was a rare quad strain after changing his running gait to help his feet, the shoulder hurt in a tackle in 2008, hurt again grabbing Ryan Griffen at training, then the thigh that gave way after over-training. Missing the 2008 finals left him “pretty flat”.
He managed plantar fasciitis throughout 2009, discovered he could play through pain, then broke another foot bone and missed the finals again. He entered 2010 with a simple aim – build a baseline to which he could add a foundation towards hopefully being a good footballer. He played 23 games, another 17 in 2011, and what he brings to the Bulldogs was clear.
Then came another foot, another shoulder, yet another foot, yet another shoulder.
He realises now how the cycle changed him, that he’d bottle up the angst caused by each knockdown, tick the same boxes all over again, not want teammates to see the inner bruising. After that 2012 pre-season shoulder injury he’d had surgery and was back running within a week. “I got really efficient at, ‘Digest it, get over it, move on.’”
In Darwin last year, after a gruelling 25 minutes getting another dislodged shoulder put back in place, an ambulance officer looked at his tear-streaked face and asked if he needed more pain relief. No, he told her, that won’t help.
Now, Williams is on the comeback trail again, although he laughs that he doesn’t see the calf strained against Melbourne three weeks ago as a fair dinkum injury. “I consider it like a cold.” He finished that game hobbling around the forward line, patched up rather than subbed out because Tory Dickson already was gone. He kicked three goals and the cameras captured a career first: Tom Williams, injured again, and smiling.
He was beaming for girlfriend Jayne, who often trips over the various straps and bands fixed to the walls and floors in their virtual rehab centre home, and who has been there through the worst of recent times. “To her it’s always been, ‘surgery, rehab, grumpy me’. She’d never seen me kick a goal live, hasn’t really seen me play at all the last two years. That was a reason to smile.”
At the start of the season Williams experienced a strange detachment in games, knowing where he should be running but finding himself standing still. He’s felt the hesitation receding, the footballer’s reflex coming back to him, and is heartened by coach Brendan McCartney treating him like a 23-year-old. He feels confidence rebuilding, with it affection for what he does, if not love.
He can’t afford to think, what’s next? “Hopefully there’s a happy ending.”
