Jack Willis is exhausted. It is three weeks since he suffered a savage knee injury while playing for England against Italy and only now, having had a four-hour operation to repair the torn and ruptured ligaments, is he being weaned off the heavy-duty pain medication. The withdrawal symptoms are kicking in so sleep is difficult, he can feel nauseous and break out into cold sweats. This is the unseen side of life as a professional athlete, when the toughest challenges are often faced away from the spotlight.
For days after the incident, Willis, 24, was haunted by the crunching sound of his left knee buckling. The flashbacks may have stopped but the memories of that day remain vivid: from the joy of coming on to win his third England cap and scoring his second Test try, to the despair of what followed; the injury, the agony, the tears and the difficult phone calls home.
“I remember hearing Steven Gerrard say that sport will give you the highest moments of your life but it will also give you the lowest,” Willis says, his left leg resting out in front of him on a pile of cushions. “Unfortunately, I lived that in the space of five minutes.
“I was raring to go and ready to take my opportunity. I managed to crash over for a try with a pick-and-go and it was just incredible. Ellis [Genge] was nudging me over from behind and he ended up jumping on top of me, head-butting me in the face and screaming at me. We were screaming at each other. It was good fun.”
Fun as it was, Willis was picked for turnovers not tries. He sniffed an opportunity to steal the ball as Italy attacked on England’s 22 but Sebastian Negri, the 6ft 4in, 17st flanker, came steaming in and twisted him out of the ruck with a crocodile roll. The scream this time was of pain and fear. Chillingly, it could be heard up in the middle tier of Twickenham; the replay too gruesome to show on television.
“I just felt my knee starting to get put under a bit of pressure,” Willis recalls. “I thought, ‘I need to let go of the jackal here to get myself out of the way,’ but it was too late. I felt my body being pulled one way, my knee going the other way and all of a sudden I heard a crunch and a pop. I was screaming because of the pain and the weird sensations.
“I was shouting in anger, frustration and pain because I knew that what had happened was pretty serious. The doc came on and the physios were talking and asking me questions. I was like, ‘I can’t hear you, what are you even saying?’ Then I just heard ‘Pain relief . . . do you need pain relief?’ I remember shouting, ‘Yes, yes.’ ”
Willis was treated for seven minutes and then driven from the field. The pain relief took hold in the medical centre at Twickenham. As he waited for the results of an x-ray, Willis called his girlfriend, Megan, and his parents, Jo and Steve.
“I just broke down on the phone crying and said, ‘I’m so sorry that it’s happened again,’ ” Willis says, referring to the ligament damage he suffered to his right knee before England’s 2018 tour of South Africa. “All of that was going through my head quite quickly.”
Willis was out of the game for 18 months on that occasion but returned to take the Gallagher Premiership by storm once again, winning player-of-the-year awards last season and making his England debut against Georgia in the autumn. A place on the British & Irish Lions tour was an ambitious but not unrealistic target.
Sitting on the medical gurney at Twickenham, Willis knew that had gone. Richard Hill, England’s team manager, and team-mates Charlie Ewels and Will Stuart spent time with him. When Eddie Jones, the head coach, came to the medical room after the game, Willis broke down again.
“Eddie said, ‘Mate, I’m so sorry, we’re thinking of you, hope you’re OK,’ ” Willis says. “I remember saying, ‘I’ve just loved the last couple of weeks with England so much.’ Then I just burst into tears. I couldn’t say anything else, I just sat there with my head in my hands on the physio bed. He put his hand on my leg and said, ‘Look, mate, we’re thinking of you. We’ve got you.’ ”
Beno Obano, the Bath prop, helped Willis get dressed, pulling on his socks. “He’s a good young lad and he’s going to be a good player, and this is an unfortunate setback for him,” Jones said after the game.
After a night dosed up on painkillers in the England hotel, Willis went for scans which revealed he had ruptured his medial collateral ligament, torn his posterior cruciate ligament and suffered cartilage damage.
That period before the operation is the worst for an athlete; “dead time” Willis calls it because nothing is healing, there is no progression, it is just a constant battle to try to reduce the swelling.
“I was sort of having flashbacks for the next couple of days,” he says. “I could hear my knee crunching and the sound it made again and again and again and couldn’t really get it out my head.” A week or so after the injury, Willis saw Mike Brown, the Harlequins full back, being rolled out of a ruck and he winced. “I think it was the scrum half who croc rolled him and fell on his knee. I just couldn’t watch it. I looked away.”
Should the technique be removed from the game? “I would like to think so but I am sitting here moaning because I have had an operation,” Willis says. “The breakdown has been an area of the game that has been confused for quite a while. There’s a lot that needs to be reviewed. [A crocodile roll] is not the right way you are taught as a kid to clear a ruck.”
Andy Williams, the world-renowned knee surgeon, conducted the operation last Wednesday at the Cromwell Hospital, Kensington: day one of a rehabilitation process that Willis plans to document by writing for The Times and with monthly video episodes on his Instagram account.
Willis had the company of Alex Rieder and Marcus Garrett, two Wasps team-mates, on his previous road to recovery; they would help each other through the daily grind and the mental challenges. Even with that fraternal support, Rieder revealed to The Times after his retirement that he developed a hidden reliance on painkillers and the psychological effect of trying to save his career led to anger, anguish and depression.
This time Willis expects he will be on a solo journey, which is a daunting prospect indeed. He wants to document his progress as a form of personal motivation but also as a vehicle to help other people cope with the mental health challenges of long-term rehabilitation.
Willis knows they are coming for him. He has been down this road before and emerged stronger for it. By chronicling his experiences, he hopes to share that message with others in a similar position. It could become a virtual support network.
“No one really saw my last journey back,” he says. “They saw me getting injured, and everyone feels gutted for you, then you disappear for 18 months. You come back and the bandwagon starts again when you are playing. There is nothing wrong with that. Everyone wants to watch rugby but sometimes you want people to see what you go through.
“I am a little bit apprehensive not having that [group of guys with me] but documenting this will give me a new motivation. Equally, I can give some insight into the ups and downs for people going through similar things who don’t necessarily have the level of support I’ve got at the club.
“Having gone through it before helps in a lot of ways. You know that the operation is the first stepping stone to recovery and a big part of that rebuild process. But you also know there’s a lot of pain and hard days to come after that operation, like how rubbish I am feeling now with low-level withdrawal symptoms as I’m trying to get off the drugs.
“It’s a weird old process, the rehab journey. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It does get pretty dark and miserable at times. You can be feeling really good for a few months and then have a rubbish day of rehab, feel like you’re not going anywhere and you start to feel pretty miserable quite quickly.
“I can show those struggles and show the battles that you face so that anyone else doing this will know they are not alone.”
Willis may be feeling exhausted but his determination to make it back to the England team is ferocious. “I will give everything I can to come back a better and stronger player,” he says. The Rebuild 2.0 is underway.
Topic: Jack Willis - The Rebuild 2.0 (Read 2544 times)
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