Shane Christie: On his enforced retirement, his love of rugby and changes he says are needed for it to survive

Shane Christie is a Mako legend who ended his rugby career early after suffering from repeated concussions. He tells Charles Anderson his story and how we need to be doing more to avoid the tragedy that can come from ignoring the sport’s ticking time bomb.

Here is a boy. Six years old, on the rugby pitch at Canvastown. It’s morning and frosty. The feel of ice crunching under small boots. The feel of picking up the ball from the back of a scrum, running down the left side, crossing the try line and putting it down. Shane Christie remembers it vividly - his first game. His first try.

He’d play any chance he could, every lunch break. He’d watch his brothers play. He’d watch the All Blacks on the weekends on the TV at home. His was a childhood typical of so many players. He grew up with it, the feeling of strapping on boots on those cold weekend mornings. The rush of crossing a tryline. The exhilaration of watching the All Blacks. Typical. Until it wasn’t.

Shane also remembers his first concussion. He was now in Nelson, playing for the Nelson Rugby Club. They had just finished a game in Golden Bay and were heading back over the Takaka Hill. His teammates cracked open the beers. So did he. He had one and then had to tell the bus driver to pull over so he could vomit. He remembers his coach saying: “Oh you’ve had a knock.”

He told that story on a recent podcast episode but, after, he thought more. It wasn’t his first concussion at all. Back then ‘knocks’ were part of the game. You weren’t playing right, if you weren’t putting your body on the line, if you didn’t come away with a couple of those over your playing time. He thinks now that maybe his first concussion was when he was rollerblading on a halfpipe. He slipped out and hit his head. Then another when he was playing bullrush at high school, got his tackle wrong and collected the knee of the school’s best rugby league player.

“I just got up and saw stars and felt pressure on my head and had headaches straightaway,” he says. “Basically, I just sort of looked around and ignored it. As a kid, even now, you do not think what damage you're doing to your head.”

It wasn’t until later in his career that he started having an idea about it. From those Canvastown days he moved up the ranks after starting to take rugby more seriously when he turned 21, after the death of his stepfather.

That ambition turned to training hard. Shane made the Mako squad, eventually captaining them and then onto the Highlanders, which he also captained, and then onto the Māori All Blacks.

Early on, he received another concussion while at a trial for Nelson Bays. Again, he went in hard for a tackle and hit the hip bone of his target. When he stood up, Shane walked off in the wrong direction. He went to the on-site ambulance and couldn't remember his name or address. He remembers his friend driving back to where he was living in Richmond. They picked up chocolate milk from a store on the way home. Shane took a sip. Looked at the bottle and couldn’t fathom what he was drinking. He had forgotten what it tasted like.

“I knew it wasn't right. I knew who my friend was. He was talking to me, and I could understand what he was saying. But I just couldn't remember what the drink was and why it tastes so good and familiar.”

Memory is a strange thing. Over the course of Shane’s career he thinks he likely had dozens of concussions. These are types of traumatic brain injury caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head or by a hit to the body that causes the head and brain to move rapidly back and forth. This sudden movement can cause the brain to bounce around or twist in the skull, creating chemical changes in the brain and sometimes stretching and damaging brain cells.

But Shane remembers those incidents with astounding clarity. Dates, people, times. He remembers the player at the Nelson Bays’ trial whose hip crashed into his head.

“It’s the emotions,” he says. “The same thing why I remember scoring that first try. Something is changed by emotions that make it stick out. Emotions make you remember.”

It wasn’t until 2016 when he started to have serious concussion problems. Sometimes he would play games and feel like he was on autopilot. He would look back and not really remember anything about what happened.

In that year, Shane says he received a few concussions while playing for the Mako. Then, when he went to play Super Rugby for the Highlanders, he had three or four over a three or four game period, over about six weeks.

“I’d lost the tolerance to handle them,” he says. “I’d lost the tolerance so much that I couldn’t exercise.”

What does that feel like?

“It feels like a bruise in your head, and when you're walking it hurts. So when you're thinking it hurts, when you’re trying to exercise the pressure hurts, and you're not as fast and can't think as quick.”

During the summer break, Shane would try to run but found any sort of high intensity was impossible. When he came back to the Highlanders he managed a couple of short runs. He thought he would be fine to start training. Then, during a lineout practice, he lifted one of his teammates and when they came down their elbow clipped him in the head. It was a small knock, comparatively. But when your brain is in the condition Shane’s was, any kind of trauma sets you all the way back.

One of the dynamics at play in this scenario is how players may or may not talk about the extent of their problems with management. These are high performance athletes whose income relies on their ability to play at a certain level. Anything that compromises that compromises their ability to earn - and the future of their contract.

For Shane, he didn’t realise how severe his head was at the time.

“I was hoping it was my neck issues but without stricter protocols I was able to play.”

His loyalty was to his teammates. So over the course of three months, he tried to come back. He would train apart from his team, slowly working himself up. He couldn’t abide loud noises or being in a social setting for long periods. So this time was also isolating for Shane. He was trying to build tolerance in his brain to be able to handle the sorts of work it would need to stand up on the playing field. But as soon as he started to run he would get stabbing pains.

“When you think about that and what you need to be able to play contact rugby. You know your brain can’t tolerate the same collisions.”

It came slowly, the inevitable decision. But he knew it was time. His time playing the game was over.

“I was gutted,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t play, so I went through this phase of thinking ‘what am I going to do’?”

Because the tolerance in his brain was so low for any sort of stimulus, the stress of losing a career was magnified.

“How you handle stress is limited because your mind can’t compute things the same way … I’d get angry. I was frustrated by a lot of things. The general stress from the symptoms and then the stress from losing the game, your career, identity, the doubts about the future, short term, long term.”

But the conversations happening around Shane were not about the rest of his life. They were about his ability to play right now. What needed to be proved so he would be eligible for a small payout on retiring from the game.

“It’s short-term thinking … we are not looking at what life looks like 10 to 20 years after. If we don’t start looking at that timeframe, how can we prepare players and give them the best health advice for their life. Professional sport becomes just like a rotisserie.”

Shane became the latest victim of that rotisserie in 2016, when he stopped playing. He didn’t play in 2017, hoping to make his comeback. In 2018 he finally retired, aged 32.

But it was earlier, in 2015, when Shane first saw the movie ‘Concussion’. Set during the 2000s, the film stars Will Smith as Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist who fights against the National Football League trying to suppress his research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) brain degeneration suffered by professional American football players.

CTE is a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated trauma to the head. The encephalopathy symptoms can include behavioral problems, mood problems, and problems with thinking. The disease often gets worse over time and can result in dementia.

“I knew exactly what it was. I don't remember where and why I watched it. People would say, ‘bro you don’t want to watch that’. I was like, ‘this is what we are doing’.”

Shane recognised similarities in what CTE presented and what he was experiencing. Moments of psychosis. Where he couldn’t distinguish what he was doing. Short term memory loss. Irritability.

Former All Blacks Carl Hayman and Regan King are also among more than 200 named claimants currently suing World Rugby over exactly these types of neurological injuries.

Closer to home, you can’t talk about this topic without talking about Bill. Billy Guyton. Mako legend, teammate of Shane’s for four years. One of his best friends.

Shane still remembers the phone call in May of last year. The person on the other end of the line told him, matter of factly, that Billy had taken his life. He was 33. It didn’t hit Shane until a few days later.

Guyton's family decided to donate his brain to the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank at the University of Auckland. Following post-mortem analyses conducted in New Zealand and Australia, Billy was diagnosed with stage 2 CTE in March of this year, becoming the first New Zealand-based player to be officially diagnosed with the disease.

In response, New Zealand Rugby said it acknowledged the Guyton family for their loss and continued grief surrounding the passing of Billy.

"We share the family's concern at his diagnosis. NZR is concerned about the possibility that repeated head impacts during participation in rugby may contribute to neurodegenerative diseases in later life."

Shane and Billy were having concussion problems around the same time. They both were launching their coaching careers too, after retiring from the game. That’s when they didn’t spend as much time together. It’s something that Shane regrets.

“Bill was way more outspoken than I am. Now I’m just trying to have the courage to speak my mind about what I see. He has motivated me to do that.”

What he is talking about is a frustration with entities like NZR who will not publicly acknowledge the link between the types of head knocks Billy and Shane received over their careers and their brain damage. Especially in light of the amount of money that is spent on the game.

“You think about Eden Park. You know that's one of the biggest stadiums in the country. The Cake Tin, Dunedin and Christchurch. We spend millions and millions of dollars on the organisation to entertain, but we're not putting the right resources into health from the outcome of the sports.”

Shane does worry about the future. His symptoms escalated after Billy died. When he was really bad, his middle finger was twitching severely on both hands, along with his elbow.

“That's like nerve damage. So I'm worried, but I'm not going to think negatively about it. I'm going to use my time. What it does give me is a bit more confidence because I'm pretty lucky in a lot of ways to sit here and speak … but there needs to be truth. We can't be ignorant and say, ‘oh, yeah, they did everything they could;’ like they say. That's not true.”

“Everything they could” looks like a greater acknowledgement of the impact that repeated head injuries have on players - not just professionals. Shane believes kids shouldn’t start playing until they are much older. He thinks there needs to be a wider catalog of what players have head knocks over the years from all their teams. Just switching teams or schools, or locations should not matter.

“A doctor needs the full picture. Not just from the time they are with a particular team. If they can look at that history and see what has taken place then they can better inform those players about how they should play the game, or whether they should play at all.”

It also looks like better insurance for players, better collaboration between NZR, ACC and teams to make sure that if they have long term injuries, they are looked after, even after retiring.

But if he could speak to that six-year-old kid on the Canvastown rugby pitch, what would he say?

“I have no regrets, nothing. I loved my career. I'm so stoked to have had the opportunities that it gave me. I love the sport, and I hope it lasts a long time, but it's not going to. It's not going to if we don't make changes.”