Extended break: Popular Bulldogs defender Dale Morris has worked tirelessly to be fully fit after breaking his leg in 2011. Picture: Rob Leeson Source: Herald Sun
DALE Morris got a blunt reminder about his football mortality when moving house earlier this month. While unpacking a few boxes in his new study, the Western Bulldogs defender stumbled on a dog-eared cardboard folder.
"It had all of these X-rays of my leg, which I'd never really looked at before," he said. "I had a look at them and called my wife (Gemma) in for a look, thinking, 'Holy moly, have a look at this, how bad it was'."
The X-rays showed a clean break through the right lower leg, with both the tibia and fibula off-set. The injury occurred when Morris's leg was caught awkwardly beneath him during a marking contest in the final quarter against Essendon in Round 21, 2011.
"That night was the worst pain I've ever experienced in my life," Morris recalled.
"I had three or four of those pethidine pens and they felt like they did nothing. Then I got to the hospital and had more pain-killers and it finally settled down, but just a cough or a sneeze was enough to bring the pain flooding back. It was intense."
Morris remembered lying in a hospital room that night wondering if he would play football again.
"I'd had the X-rays and I was lying there with a million things going through my head and in walked Boydy (captain Matthew Boyd). He'd come straight from the game. I don't even think he'd had a shower, and he just sat with me.
"We had a little bit of a chat, but he didn't even have to say anything."
Another teammate, the injury-plagued Tom Williams, brought over a laptop loaded with dozens of movies - "he knew what was ahead of me" - and Daniel Cross's wife Sam dropped off some containers of home-made pasta sauce at the Morris home.
Although Morris faced months on the sidelines, that weekend confirmed what he had always known: that Whitten Oval was and would remain his second home.
"If anything it really felt like I was even more a part of a team," he said. "That's the beauty of the Bulldogs."
That weekend Morris had an epidural while doctors manipulated the bones back into place under X-ray.
"Fortunately there were no shards of bone or anything," Morris said.
Then the protracted rehabilitation began.
I was in a plaster cast up to my hip for a month; I went from running around and playing a game of footy to not being able to move at all. I was on the couch, foot up on the bean bag, and at the time Gemma was pregnant and feeling really sick.
"My two-year-old, Riley, clued on to it pretty quick that when he was out of arm's reach I was powerless and he could get away with plenty."
Almost more disturbing was the day the cast was cut off. "I looked at the leg and it had wasted away to nothing, it was just skin and bone. At that moment I thought to myself, 'Whoa, I've got a long way to go'."
The next major step in his recuperation came in late November, 2011, when Morris ran for the first time on the club's Alter G device - a treadmill that controls how much body weight goes through the runner's legs.
I was that scared, stressed, I didn't know what to think. Would my leg snap? I was telling my brain it was OK to put all my weight on the leg but it wasn't computing all that well. We started at 50 per cent body weight but day by day it improved: 70 then 80 per cent and before I knew it I was making the transition to running outside.
Morris returned in a VFL reserves game with Williamstown in late April. "Everything felt right about the situation. It was at Werribee, where I'd set out on my AFL career and it just felt like it was going to work out perfectly."
But during the first quarter he started to feel pain and tightness in the lower leg and more X-rays revealed a stress fracture three centimetres below the original break.
As the season wore on, it became clear that Morris would be better served setting himself for a full pre-season and returning in 2013.
Ever the team man, he concentrated on keeping a positive mindset, an approach not lost on coach Brendan McCartney who said recently: "He has had setback after setback after setback, but he keeps walking in with a smile on his face and goes to work."
A self-confessed "shocking spectator", Morris channelled much of his energy on game day into helping the batch of young pups at the club, often sitting in the grandstand with defenders on the verge of senior selection, pointing out where forwards and defenders were running and explaining why.
When he does return to the fray, some of those players are likely to line up beside him now that long-time teammates Brian Lake, Lindsay Gilbee and Ryan Hargrave have all departed in the time since he broke his leg.
"We worked really well together," he said. "You develop an understanding. We didn't need to tell each other where we would run or were kicking it. We just knew.
"Now it's me and Murph (Bob Murphy) at the top, and then there's a fair drop in experience to the next group. But I'm really excited about that next crop of defenders - Daniel Talia, Jordan Roughead, Easton Wood ... then there are others like (Jason) Johannisen and (Daniel) Pearce."
There are some who query whether Morris, 30 next season, can return with the versatility and pace that has been a hallmark of his 151 games. On the weekend, ex-Bulldog and Tiger Nathan Brown, who suffered a broken leg in 2005, suggested Morris would "definitely (find it) harder to play on the quicker guys" and his place might be jeopardised.
Morris is unfazed - and stimulated by the prospect of playing under McCartney.
"The thing about 'Macca' is he wants things done right rather than quick," Morris said. "If you do it right the success will come, whereas if you rush it you might get some success now but it might also fall away down the track."
He might just as easily have been talking about his recovery from that broken leg.
THE Bulldogs will hold an open training session at Whitten Oval from 9.30am today, with an autograph session at 11am.
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