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2 months ago
22
It is a phone call Tom Curry will never forget. Sitting in a car park in Manchester, ready to pick up his Dachsund, Toby, when he discovered he may have to retire at the age of 25.
‘It’s like the five stages of grief,’ says the Sale Sharks and England flanker. ‘I remember the day so clearly. Nav, the physio at Sale, listed off all the things that were wrong and I was just in tears.
‘Then I had a zoom call with the surgeon and he said you are probably going to retire. I literally just cried. I curled up into a ball. I just couldn’t really process it. It was a surreal moment but you just have to go through those raw emotions and then process it all.’
The ball in Curry’s hip joint had ground so far beyond its natural shape that there were mornings he could barely walk. It would jam in its socket, making it difficult to get out of bed, let alone pursue a career as one of international rugby’s most physical operators. ‘I’d be down for breakfast and I’d be walking at a 45-degree angle,’ he recalls of last year’s World Cup.
The official diagnosis was femoroacetabular impingement syndrome. The surgeon offered Curry the option to undergo a hip replacement like Andy Murray, but instead he opted for six hours of keyhole surgery to reshape the femur and insert synthetic cartilage.
‘Andy Murray had the full replacement straightaway, which was an option. There were three options: one was to do what I have done, the second was replacement, the third option was leave it and retire, but you are not going to do that.
‘My biggest thing – the hardest bit – was getting to the surgery. I had three weeks until the surgery and I couldn’t really do anything. I was basically useless because you can’t do rehab and you can’t get any better, so it’s basically three weeks standing still.
‘Once I had my surgery, I just thought, “Now is the process”. Once I got to that point, I could start to process it all a bit more whereas those three weeks were really tough. You are limping around, you have retirement in your head and you’re being useless to everyone.’
Curry moved back in with his parents for a fortnight to help with his recovery. He did not play rugby for six months, missing almost the entirety of Sale’s Premiership campaign, spending long and repetitive days working on his rehabilitation.
‘Honestly, I don't understand when people say, “I gained a hobby when I was injured",’ he says. ‘Honestly, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I'd be playing the piano and thinking, “Why is that benefiting my hip?”
‘I was just so obsessed with my hip. My Instagram page, it's meant to be quite a fun app, but it was just hip exercises. I've got a file of saved of hip exercises where I thought, “I'm going to try that, see if that feels better”.
‘I'd be walking and I'd feel where my foot planted in my shoe and understand if that didn't feel good, what did I do, or that one felt good, what did I do. I don't really switch off.
‘I was limping for a few months and I was almost getting into a habit of limping. The biggest relief for me was when I got back running because there was a period where it didn’t feel good at all. That was the moment like right let’s go to Speedworks in Loughborough and they almost taught me how to run again. They just taught me better mechanics and kind of just built, we went twice a week and every week it just started feeling better and better and better.’
He ditched the crutches and learned to trust his hip again. Curry featured once off the bench at the end of the club season and marked his return with a crunching tackle on Josh Bayliss.
Steve Borthwick followed it up with a call-up to England’s summer tour and now Curry is making up for lost time. Sale kick off their campaign against Harlequins on Sunday and Curry will be on a personal quest to show that his best days are not behind him.
‘I am just excited to get back playing at Sale. I feel like I haven’t done it for a while.’
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