Melbourne Storm hooker and current Australian representative Harry Grant didn't have the greatest junior years in rugby league.
He's now considered one of the best dummy-halves in the game, but at age 12, Grant had faced a staph infection and multiple shoulder surgeries with the worst yet to come.
The troubles came following an ATV crash that left his leg so severely fractured it had to be pinned and screwed back together and held in place by clamps for weeks.
โWe crashed one of the surf-lifesaving ATVs on the beach,โ Grant told The Sydney Morning Herald.
โWe were on patrol and managed to flip it and land it right on my leg. It was a pretty ugly compound fracture and it was all pretty scary when it happened. She's come good now but at the time it was very ugly.
โI was out for about a year. I look back on it now and I think everything happens for a reason. It was an external fix and it was kind of hanging on by the tendon, so it was pretty gruesome.
โBut I was 14 then and after the infection in my shoulder, it meant I had been out for two years and when I came back โ that's when I moved into playing dummy-half.
โThe way I look at it, if that hadn't happened, without those two years out I might not have ended up as a dummy-half and ended up making a career of this.โ
As he says, this injury, which easily could have seen him never return to the game, ultimately put him on the path to representing Australia.
โOh I hated it for the first 12 months or so,โ he continued.
โEventually, I got my head around it and the way you have to be involved with every play or at least touch the ball every play.
โI had been playing in the halves and was pretty happy picking and choosing when I chimed in. But I got used to it and now I think I'm pretty lucky with how it all panned out.โ
The 24-year-old now finds himself in a battle with Ben Hunt to be Australia's starting number nine but can be just as impactful off the bench when required.
He is already a State of Origin winner and will be hoping to add the World Cup to his list of accolades when the finals begin next month.
