Tom Curry: 'I remember the day so clearly... I was just in tears'

Tom Curry was never anyone’s choice as an ideal rugby interviewee… until now. Previously, he would usually give questions the same abrupt treatment an opposition player would encounter when clashing with him at a breakdown.

Opposition players can expect to be treated in that same dismissive way in the coming weeks and months, but the back row’s media image as a cautious, guarded operator was candidly dismantled last Thursday in the Sale first floor boardroom at Carrington.

Having avoided the Fourth Estate since seizing up last November on the training pitch visible in the distance over his right shoulder the other day, Curry had kept himself to himself these past 10 months. Even the public glare that accompanied his brief comeback last June with Sale and then across three tour cameos off the England bench in Japan and New Zealand was something he pointedly avoided embracing.

Now, though, with the countdown on to a new Sale season that begins with this Sunday’s visit of Harlequins to Salford, the 26-year-old climbed the stairs from his squad’s private ground floor area to let it all out across a 38-minute chat with a round table audience of eight journalists – including RugbyPass.

Wearing a white hoodie and seated with his back to a whiteboard filled with words written in green, red and black ink under a ‘High Performance Role Clarity’ heading, he was chilled like never before in a Q&A setting despite the musical distraction – bangers such as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit – wafting through an internal window from the downstairs gym.

Having placed at arm’s length the sealed food container he was carrying, there was initial chit-chat about his Elworth cricket affiliation which revealed his gear has been AWOL since his last appearance many moons ago. That cordial opening gambit over, what followed was 45 questions that mined more than 4,000 words in answers. Welcome to the Tom Curry therapy session!

He was originally sent to London for a November 14 investigation on the dicky hip that left him crippled at club training a couple of weeks after his Rugby World Cup with England ended with an October 27 bronze medal finish in Paris.

There had been an initial concern in France during the closing weeks of the tournament, but nothing sinister. “It was something that just wasn’t going away and I’d spend the gym sessions just stretching, thinking it was just a tight muscle or I might have just twinged it,” he explained.

“But there would be times when walking it would just jab me really painfully and I was, ‘That’s not good’. Then I’d wake up and it would feel a bit better. I went through that process of stretching out and activating it and once I’d get back it would just go.

“It [the pain] just never really went, it got worse. I’d finish training sessions and come down for breakfast the next day and I’d be walking at a 45-degree angle. For me, at the time, that felt normal but looking back it’s like, ‘Okay, that wasn’t good’.”

What muddied the water was he was still playing exceptionally well, bouncing back with vengeance in October following the two-game suspension that robbed him of his September availability after he was red-carded less than three minutes into England’s tournament opener versus Argentina in Marseille.

“That’s the thing. I’d get to 70 minutes and then it would hurt, then 60 and then in the bronze final it was 55. It was getting worse and worse. We had a week or two off, I came back to training, finished one session and thought, ‘This isn’t right’. Sale decided we were going to get it scanned.”

There was no inkling that the resulting Harley Street femoroacetabular impingement syndrome prognosis – a condition that means the ball in the hip joint isn't entirely round – would be so wretched that he was told by his surgeon to retire at just the age of 25. “It is like the five stages of grief,” he said, looking back on last November’s medical trauma.

“The hardest thing was the getting over it. I remember I spoke to Nav (Singh Sandhu, the Sale physio) when we were getting the scan results back and I remember the day so clearly. I was picking up Toby [Curry’s dachshund dog] and Nav rang me and just listed off all the things that were wrong and I was just in tears. I couldn’t get out and get my dog then so I had to wait 10 minutes.

“There was another one where I had a Zoom with the surgeon and he said you are probably going to retire. It was just quite a lot to take in. Every sports person will say they have difficult times like this but, for me, I wouldn’t be sat here if it wasn’t for my girlfriend Lilla. She has been brilliant.

“That’s the main thing. You come in here (to Sale’s training centre) and that’s probably the easy bit in terms of the rehab because you have got stuff that you can work on and stuff you can get better at. It is when you are away and you are walking around where you feel it. It is the day-to-day living, that’s the biggest thing. She was brilliant in terms of helping me around that side.”

Also of great assistance were calls to a select few players who previously had career-saving hip operations. “I spoke to Sean O’Brien, to Mike Haley, and then Ollie Devoto and Sam Simmonds a bit, but especially leaned on Sean and Mike a lot. They were brilliant.

“Sean gave me a lot of hope and said he played the most rugby he ever played for the last five, six years of his career in his last season and this is after he had the replacement. He says he plays now as an amateur and feels like a 20-year-old. That gave me a lot of confidence.

“Then you see Sam Simmonds playing a lot. Mike Haley says he jumps out of bed and he is absolutely fine. There’s not a lot of research (on hip injuries) and that is the tough bit. Let’s say you do your ACL, you could go to thousands of rugby players. You do this and there are three or four.

“You are flying blind, but I’m so lucky in terms of the people I am surrounded with that you are able to take everything out and focus on the rehab. There were three options: one was to get what I have done (arthroscopic keyhole repair surgery), the second was a replacement, third option was to leave it and retire but you are not going to do that!”

What was it like hearing the word 'retirement'? “Oh, it was horrible. I was lucky because I had Lilla there at the time but I literally just cried. I curled up into a ball. I just couldn’t really process it. It’s quite surreal, a surreal moment. But you just have to go through those raw emotions and then process it all.

“My biggest thing – the hardest bit – was getting to the surgery. I had three weeks until the surgery and 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 and I don’t really do that.

“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 that three weeks was really tough because you are limping around, you have retirement in your head and you’re being useless to everyone.

“It’s a lot to digest, especially at the time. You get ‘retirement’ and you’re balancing trying to get better and balancing long-term and short-term. Sometimes the best things happen when you just don’t know and you just crack on. That’s why (it was important) in terms of having my girlfriend Lilla, who was very much in the mindset of, ‘Let’s just do what we can’. It was pretty cool to go through I guess.”

It was December 4 in London when Curry was operated on by orthopaedic surgeon Damian Griffin, June 1 when he was back on the pitch in Bath three months ahead of schedule as a second-half Gallagher Premiership semi-final sub. He memorably melted Josh Bayliss in a tackle that afternoon at The Rec, but that dominant collision with Sale wasn’t the moment of relief after his career-threatening diagnosis. That exhalation came a few months earlier.

“The relief was when I could run again because we tried to get back running. We did partial weight-bearing, all the walking, all the rehab stuff, and then I tried to run and I couldn’t run. That was the toughest hurdle because I just couldn’t do it and it felt the same.

“That was a really tough period but then once I got to Loughborough (two visits per week), I enjoyed it because I worked with some really special guys. Their eye for detail is amazing and it genuinely taught me to run again – and that’s when the relief came.

“When I had done all the Speedworks stuff and I saw the surgeon again, he said, ‘My biggest worry was getting you back, this conversation is how we can make you better as a rugby player now’. That was my big relief.

“That was at my check-up. When would that be? It was at about four, five months. We did jump testing. He was having a look and he was surprised. Every conversation I had with him had been about retirement, so that was the first conversation which was like, ‘We’re back, so how are we going to get better?’ That was my relief point when I thought, ‘I can stop worrying now’.”

The banter at his Manchester club’s training ground also inspired. “We had quite a few injured lads last year at Sale so we had a good group of us. Nav was brilliant, we think the same. I’d make a joke every now and again about retirement and he’d tell me to ‘f**k off’ sort of thing.

“We were very much aligned. He got me to Loughborough, his eye for detail is brilliant and he has very high standards. My hip was everything to me so to have someone like Nav, it felt like it was everything to him. I know that sounds selfish, but it really helped me through. To be able to trust him was a massive thing at the time.”

Kudos too for Curry’s parents. “They were a huge factor in being able to get me to the position I am today. They took me in; I slept in their front room for two weeks while I was recovering from the surgery. The energy bill went up £200/£300 over that period as I kept the heating on all day and night.”

With his recovery successfully completed much quicker than expected, how is Curry going about this process of becoming a better player when spending less time beasting himself at training? “It has been a big growth and step up in terms of maturing,” he suggested.

“Before it was very much, ‘Well, I’ll get back, go home and be able to gym for an hour and then sauna for 20 minutes’. Now it is very much a case of what is going to make me the best player on Saturday? You have to drop a lot of ego. You can’t just go, ‘I’m going to do this’. You have to realise what is going to make you better and it makes you a lot smarter. It has matured me a lot.”

So reducing load and taking a breath is kernel to his longevity? “Exactly. And that’s probably what got me into this situation in terms of more isn’t more. That’s a big lesson to learn because ultimately you have to look deeper within yourself as a person, look at why you are like that, deconstruct it and then reconstruct it as a new thought process. It has been good, challenging. There are times when you get it wrong but it’s exciting… there is that epiphany moment for everyone (in their career) and I’m lucky that I have had mine slightly earlier!”

Curry does have a tentative idea of what he would like to do post-playing, but retirement never clouded his thoughts last winter. “I'd like to do coaching. I don't know in what format yet but that would be fun,” he said, going on to explain why didn’t use his latest lay-off to accelerate that ambition.

“That wouldn't be my thought process. Honestly, I don't understand when people say, 'I gained a hobby when I got injured, I learned something'. Honestly, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I'd be playing the piano and thinking, 'Why is that benefiting my hip?' Do you know what I mean?

“There wasn't any time where I thought, 'I'm going to learn this so I can do this'. I was just so obsessed with my hip. My Instagram page, it's meant to be quite a fun app – it was just hip exercises. I've got a file saved of hip exercises where I thought, 'I'm going to try that, see if that feels better'. I didn't learn a thing. I just wanted to be almost like your own physio, that was really important to me.”

Having played four times as a replacement at the back-end of last season, Curry got a half in Sale’s recent pre-season win over Newcastle. How has the body reacted to these on-pitch exertions? “I don’t think anyone jumps out of bed after a game, I can promise you that,” he said with a smile.

“Yeah, last week was good; it was good. The first one, the Bath one, I was with my family and we were walking around Bath and I was like, ‘This is a bit tough’. But then, New Zealand it was fine and at the weekend, yeah, Sunday was absolutely fine. So I was pleasantly surprised really.

“We have got rough estimates (in terms of the number of games this season)… but right now it’s just take every day as it comes, and just being really conscious. If it's feeling a bit stiff today, let’s relax, don’t let it get to you, chill and we will go again another day, and just keep going like that. So it’s just being sensible and clever.”

In time, will further surgery be required to keep Curry playing? “I don't know. This is the thing, you get to a point now in terms of the maturation, it's such a cliche answer, I hate these, you genuinely just take every day as it comes.

“All I can do today is make sure I do my prehab, running, make sure I manage myself, make sure I manage my own situation and then roll on when we're training again because you get so caught up in it… Yes, I will need surgery at some point, I have no idea when that is. I'm 26 now, until when I die there will be another surgery. I don't know when that is going to be, we'll just have to see.”

A parting word of warning, though, in the meantime: don’t ask him if he appreciates rugby more now after it was so very nearly taken away from him. “Honestly my biggest pet peeve is when players who come back from injury say they took it for granted and they appreciate it way more because, chances are, it will only happen for a month.

“I also think it means you weren't trying very hard before, so it's probably a bad way to put it. You obviously enjoy them; sometimes you're just very much in the moment. I wouldn't say you take it for granted. I don't like it when players come back and say, 'I just appreciate it way more’.”