By Cindy Yin
GWS Giants captain Toby Greene has opened up about a near-death experience while surfing on an end-of-season trip to Bali, admitting his close call came as a result of his own “arrogance”.
The 31-year-old told Triple M’s Rush Hour he had had to be rescued by a lifeguard on a jetski after getting into trouble in dangerous surf, revealing the incident had left him rocked.
“I paddled out, misread the break and how big they [waves] were, and that the reef was 30 centimetres deep… [I] had these eight-foot waves hitting me and blasted my board into the rocks, so that was gone; I couldn’t get it.”
Greene said he had been helped by a local lifeguard, who brought home to him just how close he had come to disaster.
“The [man on the] jetski was yelling [at me to] swim sideways because I can’t get to [you], he was trying to save me. I got under a few waves and told myself, ‘Don’t panic because you’ll die’.
“The jetski came and picked me up, and he said, ‘Mate, that’s as close as I’ve seen someone to perishing here’.”
Toby Greene on Triple M’s Rush Hour.Credit: Triple M
As for how he had got into the dangerous situation in the first place, Greene admitted: “I was just arrogant.”
“We were staying on this beach, and I’d noticed there were these little rocks that you could walk across. I noticed all the gun surfers were out surfing on the other side of this point, and I thought, ‘I wonder why no one had paddled out from my side, I’ll just do that, because it’ll save me time’.”
“It was just stupid, what I did. It was day one and I just got excited, and thought, ‘I’ll just paddle out there’. I should’ve gone to the more intermediate section to the right of the beach, but I didn’t.”
The Giants skipper was on holiday in Uluwatu, Bali where he proposed to his partner of four years, Georgia Stirton. But what was a momentous occasion very nearly turned to tragedy.
“I came home, and they go, ‘Where’s your board?’ and I go: It’s gone, it’s in the rocks somewhere. I was just sort of coming back to life, like, ‘Gee, that was close’.”
Greene jokingly quipped that his surfing drama wasn’t his only close shave, with a dose of “Bali Belly”, the infamous traveller’s diarrhoea, having left him floored.
“It started coming out of everywhere, it was crazy,” Greene said. “I thought I was going to die there for an hour. It was all good, we got through it, but it was a pretty intense couple of hours.”
Greene’s close call is the latest incident in a tumultuous off season for the Giants, who had 13 players punished over inappropriate costumes at a post-season function.
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