The full interview will be published in the official Collingwood Match Day Program each week.????
This week, collingwoodfc.com.au spoke to former midfielder Chris Curran, who was considered to be one of the Magpies’ brightest prospects in the mid-1990s until a decade-long foot injury prematurely ended his career at the age of 23. After retiring in 1998, Curran has worked as a primary school teacher.
On discovering that he had been drafted to Collingwood via an article in a newspaper…
Yeah, I didn’t know, because it was the first year they had the supplementary list and I didn’t even know anything about it. I just looked in the paper after someone had said ‘you’ve been picked up by Collingwood’ and I didn’t know anything about it until I read it in the paper. I was just down at Box Hill and had two training sessions there and I had my mind set on playing there for the year.
On his experiences under coaches Leigh Matthews and Tony Shaw…
With Leigh Matthews, he’d obviously been there for a long time and I didn’t have a lot to do with him. Most of my jobs that I was given, especially when I started tagging, it was through Shawry’s role in that first year even though Leigh was coach. He dealt with me and told me what my role was so I had more to do with him than I probably did with Leigh Matthews when I was in that first year. Shawry was great, and I think we let him down a bit with most of the years that we played when in the first half of the season we were doing really well and flying but then in those four or five years, in that June-July period, I don’t think we won a game and we fell away a bit. But I really enjoyed my time under him.
On the debilitating foot injury that forced his retirement midway through 1998…
The foot was there since I was 15. They just misdiagnosed it at the time. Throughout my career I had a couple of operations on it and it just never healed. So even though I had all those other knee and jaw injuries, the foot was always the worst. In the last two years I was playing, I was doing mostly rehab. I didn’t train much and was always in the gym or on the bike or in the pool and just before a game I’d get a jab to take the pain away. I played for about two years with injections and couldn’t feel the foot. At the start of the year I had a hamstring injury again. I came back against the Dogs, and obviously was pretty unfit but managed to get back in the team for a couple of games and in the end the last game was against Brisbane. I just went and saw Shawry, Stan Magro and Danny Frawley and because I couldn’t train, I had no fitness and couldn’t kick. Even with the painkillers in my foot I just couldn’t turn and run properly and I just said to them I can’t keep playing like this. I went and got the foot checked out and the screws that were in there had snapped in half and caused a bit of damage. I just hung up the boots halfway through the year.
On the origins of his foot injury…
It was a stress fracture and I did it at Richmond. I remember the day I did it and was in a lot of pain; it was quite swollen. They diagnosed it as ligament damage and that’s how they treated it. What happened was it was a stress fracture and a little bit of bone or sheaf grew over the top of the fracture, so in three months time when I came back it was sore but it held together for about 2-3 years. Then it just exploded again. Because the fracture never healed for three years, there was too much damage done to it so basically just never healed.
A tribute to Curran as published in the August 1998 edition of In Black and White after he announced his retirement.
On the decision to retire….
Basically during the week after a game when the painkillers had worn off, I was in agony and could hardly walk. That’s why I didn’t train very much, and I was 23 at the time and I could hardly walk then so I thought, my football’s going nowhere, I can’t run, I can’t kick, and I can’t play on painkillers for the next 10 years. It was affecting the way I was playing so I thought it’s not normal to play with painkillers in that way. I just thought it would be best to stop and not be in so much pain in the future.
On ending his career at the age of 23…
It was pretty hard. I was there for the next year (working in rehab at Collingwood) but after that, because it was so frustrating, I had to get away from it for a few years. I just cut all my ties from footy for a while. After that I started my own personal training business and then I got married and had our first child n then I got into teaching. I was the Head of PE and Sport at Christchurch Grammar in South Yarra and then I came down here after that. I’ve been teaching for about 12 years now.
