Shane Tuck: Hawthorn’s AFL legend Michael Tuck talks about late son’s concussion battle
Hawthorn champion Michael Tuck has spoken about the heartbreaking last night he spent with his son who was found to be suffering from a concussion-related brain injury.
AFL
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Hawthorn legend Michael Tuck has revealed how his son Shane hugged him and expressed his love for his parents in the hours before he took his own life last July.
In an emotional interview on the You Cannot Be Serious podcast, Tuck said he and his wife Fay would never truly get over Shane’s death – at 38 – saying there was evidence the post-mortem findings of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), a crippling neurological disorder, came from his football career.
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“We knew something was wrong with him near the end because he was getting worse and worse,” Tuck told former teammate Don Scott and Sam Newman.
“We know he had a go at boxing (after his football career) … I am not going to say too much, but we have a few documents to say he wasn’t travelling well in 2012 or whatever it was. That was well before his boxing.”
“We didn’t know what was going on … that’s why we sent his brain to the brain bank to find out what the problem was.
“We found he had probably the worst case (of CTE) so far.”
“We were trying to help him (when he was alive), but he knew he was worse than we knew. You don’t know (about CTE) until you pass away to be tested.”
The post-mortem detailed Shane Tuck – a tough, hardworking Richmond midfielder who played 173 games from 2004-2013, had the worst case of CTE ever detected in a VFL-AFL footballer.
Football greats Polly Farmer and Danny Frawley were also found to have suffered from CTE in post-mortems.
Tuck pleaded with his son not to “do anything stupid” on the night before his death in July last year, with both he and his wife checking on his welfare throughout the night.
“I’ll be honest with you, the night before he did ‘the business’, or the morning, or whatever it was, he came up and hugged me and Fay, and said ‘I love you Mum’ and ‘I love you Dad’,” Michael Tuck said.
“I just said to him ’Don’t you do anything stupid’. I meant that in a loving kind of way.
“We checked on him through the night at 3 o’clock in the morning … and found him about 8 in the morning gone.
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“When someone in your family passes, you don’t ever really get over it,” he said. ”Life seems a little bit different, to be honest. ”
When Tuck spoke to the Herald Sun in July he said Shane, a father of two, had kept private his suffering.
“He kept it all in because he was a tough, strong man,” Tuck said.
“But you’ve got to show … it’s not a weakness, it’s just to express yourself with honesty and don’t try to cover up things.
“He didn’t mean anything by it, he just couldn’t admit he had a real bad problem.”
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