NRL hero Robbie O’Davis reveals probable CTE diagnosis and brain injury nightmare
NRL hero Robbie O’Davis, a dual Knights premiership hero who claimed the Clive Churchill Medal in 1997, says the noise in his head became too much.
In the twilight on a cliff top, Robbie O’Davis is drinking beers, throwing the bottles into the Pacific Ocean. He’s got two dozen with him, and with each one downed he’s hoping to build up the courage to end it.
This is the sixth time O’Davis has made the trek to the cliff face, and he’s wondering if this will be the last. He’s numb to the sound of bottles hitting the rocks and tumbling into the angry sea below because all he can think about is ending his life.
“I lean forward and wonder what it would be like to do that,” O’Davis tells The Weekend Australian. “I went to the cliff face heaps of times.”
O’Davis, a dual Knights premiership hero who claimed the Clive Churchill Medal in the 1997 win, and who played State of Origin and for the Kangaroos, says the noise in his head had become too much.
The only thing stopping him from throwing himself off that cliff, as he sat there boozing through his pain, is that someone will say he was “littering” before he died. That shame, he says, was enough to stop him.
Over the years O’Davis has struggled with suicidal thoughts, memory loss, and outbursts of anger and anxiety. He has felt lost for many years. “I was scared,” O’Davis, 50, said.
He called up the NRL for help but it had no solutions that helped.
Then in 2018, he got a call from someone from the NRL. The man on the end of the line asked: “Can we use your brain when you die, for research?”
An incredulous O’Davis yells down the line: “I want to get better while I am still alive, thank you very much.
“I just thought it was the worst kind of phone call I could have ever copped and I was that cranky. The way they put it to me, they didn’t want to help my brain while it was still alive, they wanted to research it when it was dead.”
A few weeks later, O’Davis had a call from Dr Andrew Gardner inviting him to be part of the NRL study into former footballers.
O’Davis was relieved. Finally, he thought, he might get some answers. The research drill would be brain scans, tests for depression, anxiety, memory and cognition. He would be asked about how he was coping in life.
But the four-hour neuropsychological tests with Dr Gardner were harrowing.
O’Davis felt humiliated.
The man who had brought Newcastle to its feet in a thrilling grand final victory against Manly in 1997, the man dubbed “Robbie O’Save us”, who danced on the luminous Sydney Football Stadium turf, now couldn’t remember the words and sequences he was being asked to store in his brain.
O’Davis says he threatened to belt the doctor; he thought he was being made fun of.
“That should have told them something was wrong with my brain,” he says.
In 2018, when the NRL researchers did an MRI brain scan, he thought he was going to find out what was wrong.
“I went in there to get told,” O’Davis said. “I just said ‘I’ll do this if you can tell me (that)’. And so I actually told them straight up. ‘I need to know what’s going on’.”
Little did O’Davis know, but that 2018 MRI identified a “focal gliosis in the left frontal lobe” – in simple terms, suggestive of brain damage.
O’Davis alleges he was never told about the 2018 damaged scan.
In late 2022 O’Davis had another scan, this time ordered by his psychiatrist.
That MRI now suggested loss of brain volume.
It was reading former Manly and Souths hero Mark “Spudd” Carroll’s story in The Weekend Australian earlier this year, which detailed Carroll’s probable CTE diagnosis, that triggered O’Davis to seek help again.
It was how he found Dr Rowena Mobbs. “My saviour came through Spudd Carroll,” O’Davis said.
Carroll connected him with Dr Mobbs, a leading Sydney neurologist who is running a research project into CTE, providing support for her patients and their families dealing with the long-term effects of brain trauma
Dr Mobbs now had her hands on O’Davis’s 2022 MRI.
And that’s when he found out the truth.
“And she (Dr Mobbs) said: ‘So these people haven’t called you in and talked about these scans?’
“I said, ‘No’. And she says: ‘You’ve got a laceration on your brain’ … and ‘they didn’t ring you and tell you about it?’. I said ‘no’,” O’Davis said.
O’Davis’s wife can’t understand why Robbie was not told back in 2018.
“It’s upsetting. It’s frightening. And yeah, it makes you wonder why? Where were they? Why did we not know?” Louise O’Davis told The Weekend Australian.
O’Davis has since been diagnosed by Dr Mobbs with probable CTE – an early-onset dementia caused by repetitive head knocks.
Dr Mobbs has ruled out drugs or alcohol as a cause of O’Davis’s “probable CTE”, which is an important fact given O’Davis copped a hefty ban in 1998 for taking anabolic steroids in breach of the NRL’s policies.
Dr Mobbs says her diagnosis adheres to the international criteria for the diagnosis of CTE “in life” from the world’s leading biomedical research institute the US National Institute of Health.
Critically, a person must have been exposed to “substantial” head injury over at least five years, and every other possible explanation excluded.
“We knew the risk of playing the sport was going to be substantial in the long run, but we didn‘t know it was our head,” O’Davis said.
“We knew it was our bodies but not our heads. We knew we were going to end up ugly men, but we didn’t know the inside of our head was going to be ugly.”
He is not alone. O’Davis claims many of his mates are struggling.
“A lot of my ex-player mates have got dementia and all that sort of stuff, and I was watching them fall in front of me, which is not too nice either,” he said.
Last year he lost his friend, former NRL footballer and Cowboys coach Paul Green, to suicide. Green had stage three CTE. He was 49 years old.
They had played in Queensland representative teams. O’Davis, like so many in the rugby league community, was shattered by the loss of Green.
He was due to attend Green’s funeral – but he forgot to go. Former Wallaby and NRL star Mat Rogers was expecting O’Davis to pick him up at his home in Brisbane. “Where are you?” said Rogers. O’Davis was speechless.
During his illustrious rugby league career, O’Davis watched the front rowers pummel the line. He says many of them are struggling and in a worse state than him.
“The thing that is getting into me now is that I’m a little rap dancer at the back, the Robbie O’Save Us at the back, the one that was not supposed to have all the big hits … one that scores tries and dances,” O’Davis said.
“I wouldn’t say I am a pretty boy … but I haven’t got the big, full brunt of all these guys in front of me.”
O’Davis says the big hits in football were addictive. He can’t remember how many concussions he had, but he does know he chased the feeling of “seeing stars”.
O’Davis was part of an amazing and stoic group of footballers who lifted Newcastle out of the doldrums after the 1989 earthquake and the shock closure of the BHP steelworks 10 years later, which cost thousands of workers their jobs.
The Knights brought home two premierships.
“We were the entertainers,” recalls O’Davis, a Knights Hall of Famer.
“We helped people when their lives weren’t so great.
“Now we’ve been thrown on the heap.
“I can’t remember the last time I smiled. I was the dancer, I was the happy larrikin. I’ve lost that personality.
“When you get off that podium, when the lights go down, people don’t help you.”
