Paul Kent: Boyd Cordner faces tough conversation after several bad head knocks
The brain has no regard for reputation or prowess. Few at Mark Carroll’s age are in better shape but, that said, he believes the concussions stay in you. Boyd Cordner has an uncomfortable conversation with himself coming up soon.
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Boyd Cordner has an uncomfortable conversation with himself coming up soon.
It will be uncomfortable for everyone, really.
On Monday, the discussion was left to teammates.
“I saw Boydo today,” Mitch Aubusson said. “He seems like normal Boydo to me.”
Brett Morris said: “It was a great call from the team here and whatever decision is made we’ll get on with it.”
Jake Friend said: “Obviously we want him to play but Boyd’s welfare will come first.”
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Cordner suffered his fourth head knock in 10 weeks on Saturday night. And while the Roosters were quick to declare he passed his head-injury assessment in the dressing room and his absence from the rest of the game was only precautionary, Cordner is now playing the odds.
He is only 28 but the knocks appear to be getting lighter.
What nobody can be sure of, already, is their long-term effect.
To understand, just the other day Mark Carroll was in the boxing ring at his gym, Spudd’s on Crown St, doing only body punches until a punch did what it often does at Spudd’s and slipped up around the whiskers.
Carroll didn’t see the white flash but, somewhere inside, a small shudder ran down to his toes.
“The body has a memory,” he said.
Carroll is a survivor of the Great War, when he and Paul Harragon ticked off their match-up on the calendar and could barely sleep in the nights before the game as they planned what violence they would inflict upon each other.
It would not be unfair to say they both still carry a little of the injury of those days.
Few at Carroll’s age are in better shape but, that said, he believes the concussions stay in you.
Cordner, meanwhile, is a young man at the top of his game. Friend identified that on Monday, pointing to how the Roosters were a different team with Cordner on the field.
Cordner is not only the captain of the two-time NRL premiers, he is also Australian and NSW captain. Any thought on his future is no small decision.
But at the same time as Cordner underwent his HIA on Saturday night, Johnny Raper, one of the game’s original Immortals, sat in a nursing home in the dreamy state he has occupied for some years now.
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Raper, 81, was picked up some years back for his birthday party and the moment he sat down in the restaurant his brain convinced him he was really a younger version of Johnny Raper.
When some imagined slight was delivered by the waiter, the stink was on.
He could not be reasoned with and so, sadly, his family stood and took him back to the nursing home, their afternoon over in a small moment.
Norm Provan, another Immortal, is also frail and lessened by dementia.
Norm was unable to attend his naming as an Immortal in 2018, when he was about to turn 86, because he was not well enough to travel.
Some will point to their age to find the culprit for their current health, which is not an unreasonable argument.
Others will ask when it all began, and what contributed to it.
Nobody knows the answer for certain.
What is certain is the brain has no regard for reputation or prowess.
Over the weekend it was revealed Mark Broadhurst, one half of what remains rugby league’s most violent brawl, admitted he was diagnosed a fortnight ago with Alzheimer’s.
He forgets things, he says, but what can you do?
The same as young men make decisions that old men would not make, some old men would change their decisions as young men.
The adjustment is quicker for some than others.
James Graham famously said at the height of the concussion argument that it was his brain and he should be free to do what he liked with it. Graham then did what few care to do and researched brain injuries. He adjusted his stance afterwards.
That Cordner might have passed his HIA on Saturday night provides only a mild exemption.
“They are calling it a head knock, not a concussion,” Aubusson said.
Truth is, concussion is an inexact science. The HIA test is a best-practice exercise on a subject for which there is no precise information.
What’s to say the test is tremendously forgiving?
According to the latest medical advice it is not but there is also an acknowledgment the science is new.
Nobody wants to see Cordner leave the game but, after a particularly harrowing week, which included the death of his cousin from a head knock in a country game, everybody is a little sensitive.
All anybody wants is to wish him well, but it might start with a conversation.