Jack Dempsey keeping a positive mindset on the road to recovery after major hamstring injury

WHEN you fall off the top of a mountain with an injury so severe you have to re-educate a leg how to run, it’d be easy to kick stones. But as far as Jack Dempsey is concerned, energy is wasted by focusing on the stones.

Dempsey was injured against the Barbarians in October

WHEN you fall off the top of a mountain with an injury so severe you have to re-educate a leg how to run, it’d be easy to kick stones.

With the good leg.

But as far as Jack Dempsey is concerned, energy is wasted by focusing on the stones, the rotten luck or the size of the fall.

The focus should be that you were on top of the mountain.

“I take positivity out of that,” Dempsey says.

“The biggest motivation I am using throughout this long-term rehab is I have set my benchmark now and I am going to get back there.”

Dempsey, the Waratahs and Wallabies flanker currently working his way back from a nasty hamstring injury, is one of the more confident athletes in Australian rugby.

And he’s needed every ounce of that self-belief since tearing his hamstring tendon off the bone playing for Australia against the Barbarians in Sydney last year.

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The injury required surgery and a rehab period expected to last six months. But adding another level of cruelty to Dempsey’s injury was the fact the 23-year-old had, in the preceding months, finally exploded into the big time for the Wallabies.

Playing at blindside flanker, Dempsey nailed down a starting spot with form that laid to rest those questions about whether the rising NSW was Super standard or genuine Test quality. A week before his injury in the 76th minute of the BaaBaas game, Dempsey was man of the match for the Wallabies in their victory over the All Blacks in Brisbane.

The world was Dempsey’s oyster and then suddenly, with an awkward collision in a late ruck, it wasn’t.

“It’s hard to explain but you can literally feel the muscle tear off, the tendons tear off the bone,” Dempsey said.

“In your head you try to be as positive as you can. I was on the ground waiting for the ruck to clear and I was thinking “it might just be grade two or grade three”. I’d never had that, so I didn’t know. But there was a lot of pain there.

“The moment I knew this is a big-time injury, I was lying flat on my face and I did a push-up with my upper body and I was going to kick my legs under to try and stand up. But when I did that I could only move my right leg.”

Dempsey was injured against the Barbarians in October

Needing surgery, Dempsey missed the Spring Tour and spent the next month on his back. The pain levels were up there but he only allowed himself a week of self-pity before he began thinking about getting back on the field.

Given the injury, though, that’s way easier said than done.

“You pretty much turn off that whole leg off for a month, and you turn off the hammy for three months. The you pretty much start from scratch,” Dempsey said.

“What I have just gone through in the last month is I am pretty much re-learning to run in that leg. My right leg has kept all its cognitive skills and muscle memory and so on, that hasn’t changed. But the left one, because of the sciatic nerve and the connections to your brain, after being switched off for so long, it is really tough to just jump back on it and assume you’ll be where you were when you left off.

“That’s definitely the toughest thing, in terms of the mental side of it.”

Dempsey has been working away for months at the Waratahs for eight hours a day, six days a week, and though the gains are steady, they’re slow, too. There’s ample room for frustration and despondency to creep in.

But Dempsey says he has held onto a different perspective. Where people see rotten luck to be injured a week after being the Wallabies star in a win over the All Blacks, Dempsey sees a silver lining.

“If I have had a bad day or there’s been a struggle in certain activity that I did that day in rehab, I always end up looking back to where I left off, in terms of being an international rugby player,” Dempsey says.

“I think if I didn’t have those positive results toward the end of the year, I could be in an even worse place. I wouldn’t feel like I have any security in terms of where I stand as a player. I know what I can achieve, and I have no doubt I can get back there.”

Dempsey has taken comfort from other players returning well from a similar surgery, including James Horwill, Lachie Turner and Nick Palmer.

There is no firm return date but Dempsey is eyeing off a probable return for the Tahs in May. He is not the type to say he can’t make the Wallabies’ June series against Ireland — and did something similar in 2017 — but Dempsey won’t rush it.

Climbing mountains can take time.

Originally published as Jack Dempsey keeping a positive mindset on the road to recovery after major hamstring injury