Dale Morris’ journey through the eyes of two of the people closest to him, his wife and club doctor
DALE Morris’ journey to 250 AFL games is one of pleasure and plenty of pain. Two of the people closest to the Bulldogs’ great - his wife and club doctor - shine a light on one of the game’s underrated heroes.
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DALE Morris told his wife Gem he had good news and bad news when he called her in February following an innocuous training mishap.
The good news … he wouldn’t need surgery. Her relief was instantaneous, given what the Western Bulldogs defender has endured across his often interrupted AFL career.
Then came the bad news … he had actually suffered an ACL.
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Her heart sunk, before she reverted to a familiar mindset, pinning her faith on her husband’s remarkable recuperative powers.
“It was complete shock,” Gem Morris said. “When he told me he had done his ACL, there was just silence from me.”
“He said, ‘I haven’t fully done it, but it is hanging by a thread’ … those three letters (ACL) are the most dreaded (in football).”
Six months on from that conversation - two years since playing a leading role in a premiership, despite having two fractures in his back - and seven years on from a sickening broken leg that would have broken lesser competitors, Morris will play his 250th AFL game.
At 35 years and 226 days, he will become the oldest footballer to reach that milestone, and is considered a certainty to play on next year.
“He would play until he is 40, if they let him,” Gem laughed.
“It would take Bevo to say to him, ‘we don’t need you anymore, you have done all that you can do’.
“Even then, I don’t think he’d want to leave.”
Morris’ journey has been a triumph against the odds, and Gem has been with her husband almost every step of the way.
She has seen him defeat deadlines and dire diagnoses each time to play again, realising long ago that whatever the game throws at him is met with equal force back the other way.
This year’s ACL was a case in point.
On the advice of Bulldogs doctors Gary Zimmerman and Jake Landsberger - who have been “like fathers to him” - Morris opted against a knee reconstruction.
“If we had reconstructed him,” Zimmerman explained, “it probably would have been the end of his career.
“He went into a knee splint, and missed about four months. He was well rehabed by the physios and rehab staff and made it back. He isn’t out of the woods yet, but he has proved everyone wrong so far.”
Zimmerman calls Morris “Numero Uno”, not only because he is considered the AFL’s No.1 bionic man: “I just think he is the nicest bloke you could meet. He is polite, well mannered, grateful … he is the sort of bloke you would want your daughter to marry.
“He’s not just the glass-half-full kind of guy; he is the glass-and-a-half full.”
Former teammate and Bulldogs assistant coach Daniel Giansiracusa says he has never seen anyone as resilient as Morris.
“He looks like he is cooked at times, but he just keeps getting up,” Giansiracusa said. “He just keeps finding a way.
“His persistence is as good as I have ever seen.”
Gem has been in a relationship with Morris since 2006, his second senior season with the Bulldogs after a long apprenticeship at Werribee.
She is so proud of him, and says it is great he is finally getting the kudos he deserves.
“He lives and breathes the game, and is meticulous with every aspect of his life,” she said.
“We live a holistic lifestyle. He lives paleo. It is a high-fat, low carb way of eating. It is controversial and really ahead of its time for an athlete.
“A lot of athletes still believe in the sugar process for fuel, (but) he works really hard to become what you call ‘fat adapted’, which means he burns fat for fuel. He eats super high but good fat, and has no processed foods whatsoever.
“We use a lot of bone broths. I cook litres of it, and it helps with his recovery.”
Morris told the Sunday Herald Sun that while football is his passion, the role he values most is as husband to Gem, and a father to sons Riley, 9, and Charlie, 6.
“My number one thing is to be a dad,” Morris said. “My family means everything to me.”
He remains eternally grateful for the guidance of Landsberger and Zimmerman, and the rest of the Bulldogs’ off-field team.
Two moments stand out for Dale and Gem as the most difficult of his many challenges.
The tibia-fibula double break against Essendon in Round 18, 2011 tested him on a personal level as much as professional.
Gem was pregnant with Charlie, watching the game on delay on TV, when several text messages alerted her to the incident.
“The surgeon said … ‘you can have a crack at a quick fix’, which was to pin it and plate it and he would be back playing in 12 weeks,” she said.
“But he said that would affect the integrity and strength of the bone, and your career won’t last.
“He said if we don’t plate it, it would be a tougher recovery, but I don’t think anyone of us realised how tough it would be.”
Morris took the second option.
He had an epidural; his leg was pinned into alignment. Gem described the pain as “disgusting” as he was placed in a cast up to his hip to keep his bone “completely together”, allowing it to heal naturally. He was wheelchair-confined for a month.
Gem insisted her husband had to come home, instead of a rehab centre, where she looked after him day and night.
“He had to relinquish all of his dignity,” she said.
The physical pain was excruciating: “I have never seen anything like it … he doesn’t show pain, but he was on the verge of tears.”
Two weeks later, Gem began to have contractions at 27 weeks.
Medication helped, but five weeks later, she went into premature labour, leading to hospitalisation.
By that stage, Morris was at least on crutches and could look after Riley ahead of Charlie’s full-term arrival.
The pain was almost as bad five years later when he pulled up with back soreness following the final round loss to Fremantle in 2016.
“He had fractures called transverse processes — the little wings that stick off the side of the vertebrae,” Zimmerman detailed.
“I immediately planted this positive seed about how Jimmy Jess had these fractures when I was at Richmond, and he played the following week.”
On the night that the Bulldogs were giving Travis Cloke a medical, Zimmerman decided a small procedure was needed to allow Morris to play finals.
“I had to think outside the box, because he was such an important part of the team,” Zimmerman said.
That allowed Morris to play all four finals in one of the most fabled months in football history.
Tellingly, he was responsible for one of the most inspirational acts of the 2016 Grand Final, laying a desperate tackle on Lance Franklin, resulting in a goal to Tom Boyd.
It remains the defining moment of the Bulldogs’ first premiership in 62 years.
“I could barely watch those four weeks,” Gem said, fearful he would miss out. “Every time he landed, I felt sick.
“In the first quarter of the Grand Final he landed heavily in the goal-square. He came down flat on his back. He stayed down and Dale never stays down.”
Then 21 minutes into the final term, with the game in the balance, Morris laid that telling tackle.
“I just knew it was him, even watching from the other side of the ground,” Gem said.
Morris presented a framed montage of that tackle to his surgeon David Young, and Zimmerman maintains none of the nine breaks he has suffered will impact on his post-football life.
In many ways, that one act of bravery encapsulated the career of a footballer who has never known the meaning of giving up, and probably never will.
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Originally published as Dale Morris’ journey through the eyes of two of the people closest to him, his wife and club doctor