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'I literally couldn’t walk to the shop. I’d walk 50 yards and I’d be in bits'
Prop has travelled a long and lonely road back from pioneering hip surgery for his second coming
If you had thought Jack McGrath had fallen off the edge of the earth then don’t feel badly about it. That’s the description he uses himself.
In 2017 McGrath was a part of the Lions tour to New Zealand, featuring in all three Tests. When he came back he picked up where he had left off with Joe Schmidt’s Ireland set-up, unaware of the price he was soon to pay. He was a part of that stellar season in 2018 too, but the following Six Nations, against Italy, would be his last ‘big’ game. Thereafter there was a bit of space-filling in the warm-up for the World Cup, but that was it for Ireland. He was on a slow, painful slide off the main menu and into stale leftovers territory.
McGrath is in a small band of professional athletes whose careers have been blighted by hips that stopped working, but have now restarted. Tennis star Andy Murray, London Irish’s Seán O’Brien and rugby league player George Burgess — the younger brother of Sam Burgess — are fellow travellers.
Professor Damian Griffin, an orthopaedic surgeon who specialises in hip preservation, put the two Ireland internationals under his knife within a couple of days of each other. Two careers rescued.
For McGrath, the trouble started innocuously. One minute on that New Zealand tour he was on the ground, having just carried in one of the Test matches; the next moment someone fell on him, and when he got up something wasn’t right. He had a small procedure done when he came home but the decline was underway. Wear and tear was a factor, as well as that incident with the Lions. The shape of his hips in any case was also part of the story.
Some of us are born with Rolls Royce hip joints where the ball fits the socket and stays well-oiled into old age. Others have Ladas. McGrath might be closer to the second category, but he refused to be put off track for good.
“I suppose it’s just the way you are,” he says. “Like, my wife gives out to me for being stubborn, but I just tried to keep going with it. Because I had signed here [from Leinster], I really wanted to push to try and play and in the long run, it probably wasn’t the best thing to do, because it got as bad as it got, but I don’t think I’d change anything because I wanted to do my best for Ulster Rugby. They had put so much faith in me to come up and play for them. It’s just the cards you are dealt and the way your body is.”
And how bad was his body at its worst?
“I couldn’t do anything. I literally couldn’t walk to the shop. I’d walk 50 yards to the shop and I’d be in bits, I’d be limping and people would be asking me if I was alright. From putting on my socks to bending over and picking up dog brad pitt. Genuinely it was everything. It was very debilitating and it just got to the point where I couldn’t do any more. It was a knock-on effect where I’d get ready for training and the hip was as good as it could be, and then my back would go because you’re putting so much stress through another part of your body. There were a few times where I got back and was ready to play, then I’d do something and my back would spasm.”
This became a feature of his life. One night he was warming up to play in the Kingspan against Glasgow and in a warm-up scrum his back seized up. The following week he had the same experience. Towards the end of his days in Leinster, training had become a battle, which had a negative knock-on effect. Naturally enough that continued up north where they knew they were investing in a prop who needed fixing.
Given a choice between solving an issue through management and going under the knife everyone opts for the former — until they don’t. Professor Griffin has pioneered hip preservation surgery to the point where it’s an early choice rather than a last resort.
The surgery meant a player who seemed all washed up with Leinster, where he made his senior debut in 2010, could be reborn up the M1. Well, it could when the job was done and the rehab was successful. Getting a hold of the man with the knife wasn’t that simple, seeing as the British Army had side-tracked him to Afghanistan for six months where his experience in trauma was invaluable.
So from November last year to April McGrath was literally hobbling.
“That was tough because you’re trying to stay with the team, which is great, but you don’t want to completely lose your fitness — you don’t want to lose your conditioning. You’re trying to train but you’re almost training for nothing because when you have your surgery you’re going to be incapacitated for a while anyway, so I tried to stay motivated in different ways in training and getting home as much as possible.
“Like everyone you’d have good days and bad ones, good weeks and bad weeks. You just have to rattle through it, but the relief I got from like the day after the surgery. Like, I had 30 degrees flexion — I could barely lift my knee. Now I’m back up to 90 and that was a day after the surgery. From then on it was pretty clean. I was on crutches. Part of the surgery is they have cut a bone — basically they screw back the bone but you can’t walk on it because it’s a broken bone.
“You can’t weight-bear on it. I was on crutches for six weeks for that. That was the most monotonous time. I was home for four weeks and then I was back up here. I live in an apartment up here and I had to stay with a few lads and you’re depending on them for a lift and stuff. It was quite tough. I’d be independent and that was humbling, that sort of experience. But since getting off the crutches it flew in some ways because I didn’t have any setbacks in the rehab. We were taking it safe. The main part was being really diligent about no weight bearing for the first six weeks and let that bone heal.”
Evidently McGrath is not only stubborn, but patient. He kept the weight off, as ordered, and set about learning to walk like a healthy human being instead of a broken one.
“It had got so bad with my gait I’d be sort of walking naturally with a limp without thinking. Coming back I had to learn to walk without pain — it was nearly like I’d be expecting pain! So that was interesting.”
Given how long this has gone on — he agreed to move from Leinster in April two years ago — it’s going to take him a while to get up to a respectable speed. Arriving back into European competition rather than a handy URC run-out has put him under pressure. It’s hard to miss if you’re off the pace. So he went from Ospreys into the back-to-back Heineken Champions Cup games with Clermont and Northampton Saints. He’s learning new habits around stuff he once took for granted.
“The issue was if I’d fall on the ground I’d have to think of how I had to get up cos I couldn’t do it on the right side. So I’m like falling and going: ‘What way is the quickest to get back up?’ It just looks like you’re slow whereas now I don’t even have to think. I’m up. I can move laterally, I can go down and up, I can do everything like that.
“The main thing is just getting the lung capacity back, and the sharpness in how you’re playing. I’m still a good rugby player — I just haven’t played in 13 months. I can still read the game, it’s just the fitness part of it. It’s like the start of any season: it could take three or four games to get back into it. Hopefully I can bounce around on the 26th and get a run out against Connacht.”
McGrath turned 32 in October. Knock a playing year off that for time missed with his hip. He’s keen to repay the faith Ulster have shown him. Grateful to be visible again on the face of planet earth.