‘I’d go to bed crying’: How an Eel confronted end of a career that had barely begun
When Steve Dresler came to Sydney he moved in with Reed Mahoney and Dylan Brown. But while the Eels young guns have kicked off their NRL careers, his was over before it began.
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Part 2: The injury that ended Tony Caine
Part 3: Yow Yeh still dreams of coaching
Part 10: “My footy boot was on the wrong way”
They were the lucky ones — blessed with talent, passionate and on a path that led to riches and fame. Then it all came crashing down and they had to rebuild lives that would never be the same. Fatima Kdouh continues our series profiling rugby league players whose careers ended all too soon.
Every Monday Nathan Cayless would get in his car and drive over the Gasworks Bridge to Eels headquarters in Parramatta.
It’s all very normal and routine. Until one Monday morning last October when it wasn’t.
Cayless noticed a distraught young man in a car travelling in the opposite direction.
As the cars crossed paths, Cayless realised not only did he know the man, he coached him in NSW Cup.
Like Cayless, this particular Monday morning wasn’t like the others for Steve Dresler.
He was driving away from a doctor’s appointment with tears streaming down his face when his phone started ringing.
“Mate, how are you?” Cayless asked.
“I just drove past you over the bridge, are you all right? What’s wrong? I could see you crying through your window.”
An hour before passing Cayless on that bridge, a doctor had told the young Eels forward that his second knee reconstruction had failed, he’d been playing without an ACL for at least a year and with that, his NRL dream was over at the age of 20.
“The last eight weeks of Cup I was in so much pain I couldn’t train, I was doing captains run only and playing,” Dresler says.
“I was living off Endones, painkillers and injecting it. No one could figure out why it was stuffed.’’
After the season Dresler got the type of call no one wants – his doctor needed him to come in for a talk.
“You’ve done your ACL again but this time your ACL is absent and you’ve got no ACL in there,” the doctor told Dresler, adding that he should get a second opinion.
“I saw three other surgeons,’’ Dresler says.
“They all said the same thing, ‘we’re not going to operate if you’re going to go back and play.’
“They all pretty much said I was an idiot to even think about playing again.”
***
While this story starts at the end of Dresler’s NRL dream, you have to go all the way back to the beginning to appreciate why his journey isn’t your regular tough luck rugby league yarn.
Underneath the pieces of a shattered dream is an inspiring story about courage – and a dream that won’t die, not before making a difference in the lives of the kids with autism at Giant Steps.
Dresler was born in the northern NSW coastal town of Yamba and raised on a macadamia farm with his three siblings.
Even before he was a teenager NRL clubs starting circling the forward – not that his father Mark could believe it.
“A guy from the Titans called my old man and said, ‘‘hey mate, we’d like you to come have a look at our junior development and get Steve in our system.’ And Dad thought it was one of his mates and thought ‘f--- off’ and hung up on him. Then he rang back and convinced my dad he wasn’t pulling his leg.”
So at 12 years old, Dresler signed a two-year contract to train with the Titans.
While the agreement was essentially designed to stop the Brisbane Broncos from getting their hands on Dresler, it would spawn his unwavering ambition to play rugby league professionally.
But Dresler’s growing body sabotaged his aspirations at every turn, and he would go on to suffer at least nine serious injuries before the age of 20.
In 2014 he suffered his first ACL injury while playing schoolboy footy for Palm Beach Currumbin as a 16-year-old.
In 2015, Dresler broke his wrist taking the first hit-up of the match against archrivals Keebra Park High School. Not only did he play on, it emerged that only 24 hours before taking the field he was sick in hospital.
Geoff Bagnall, his coach at the time, compared his performance to Maroons legend Trevor Gillmeister, who famously discharged himself from hospital to lead Queensland to Origin victory.
By this stage, Dresler had suffered four serious injuries and undergone numerous surgeries, but his toughness and resilience was too hard to resist for NRL clubs.
And some of Sydney’s powerhouse clubs were eager to lure him south of the border.
“After the Keebra game Parramatta called me and asked if I wanted to come down to have a look their set-up and others too like the Rabbitohs and Bulldogs, they wanted me to come down and see them,” Dresler says.
A week after surgery, and with his left wrist wrapped in plaster, the 17-year-old packed his belongings into his car and set off on a nine-hour journey from the Gold Coast to his new home in Parramatta.
“I literally finished school on Friday and then drove down from the Goldy at 5am on Saturday morning to Sydney by myself.”
Waiting for him at the end of the 833km road trip was Eels SG Ball coach Dean Feeney and new Parra House roommates and Reed Mahoney and Dylan Brown.
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Brown and Mahoney have both been there during the lowest points of Dresler’s young life.
“I would go to bed crying and Reedy and that would come in,’’ Dresler says.
“The amount of times I’ve had cries to him… why has it happened to me? Why can’t it just be better.”
It was confronting for Mahoney, still a teenager himself. He wasn’t equipped with the tools to help guide a teammate through such dark days.
“I was with him when he was going through the worst times,’’ Mahoney says.
“Steve’s a very stubborn person and he doesn’t like people telling him what’s next and what to do.
“When you see a grown man come home crying from training, it’s not very nice. I had never been in that situation so I didn’t know how to help out. I just had to be there for him and make sure he’s OK.”
Today, Mahoney is on course to have a breakout year, while Brown makes headlines about million-dollar deals after playing a single NRL match.
Dresler feels a sense of pride in watching his former housemates fulfil their NRL dreams but the tears return as he tries to describe the end of his own journey.
“Seeing the boys succeed now and me being so close myself and so close to them, I’m so happy for them, but you know… how close was I to achieving my dream to play in the NRL...
“I try to be funny and hilarious and joke but I am embarrassed about it because I haven’t achieved my dream and let so many people down.
“Especially with my family, that’s why I don’t want to move home because life has always been about football and me trying to make it.”
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For all the setbacks, there has been one constant in Dresler’s life since he move to Parramatta four years ago.
When he’s not at the Eels in his role as a welfare officer, the 21-year-old works as a teacher’s aid at Giant Steps - a school for children with autism.
“I want to use my presence to try and help the kids. They’re all so different and have their own little story,” Dresler says.
Dresler is so dedicated to his role at Giant Steps, the children he helps look after were the first thing he thought of when his knee gave up on him for the second time.
As he lay on the ground that Saturday two years ago, Dresler looked up at trainer Feeney and asked him a simple question.
“What am I going to do about work, what about the kids?”
Originally published as ‘I’d go to bed crying’: How an Eel confronted end of a career that had barely begun
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