Scotty Stevenson: Missing season worse than pain of shattered leg

Willi Heinz broke his tibia and fibula last saturday. Photo / Getty Images

Willi Heinz, 28, allowed himself to shed a couple of tears as he was carried off the field at Timaru last Saturday. Moments earlier he had heard a loud bang. A few seconds after that, the pain had come. A sharp and unfamiliar burning had quickly escalated into something far more excruciating, and heart-breaking.

What Heinz hadn't immediately realised was that the loud bang was the sound of his tibia and fibula snapping for he had been focused on making a tackle on Highlanders wing Ryan Tongia who had wrong-footed him. Typical Heinz - committed as ever.

It was only when he looked down that things began to make sense; that the brain began to connect the dots. These are the sorts of unnatural calculations you are forced to make when your lower left leg is suddenly pointing in the wrong direction. There may have been some screams after that. One Highlander said the sight of Heinz's leg made him physically ill. But the tears Heinz shed as he left the ground on a stretcher were not tears of pain. They were tears of loss.

When your livelihood depends on your fitness, injuries are your worst nightmare. They're worse still when you are in the final year of your Super Rugby contract, in a very big year for New Zealand rugby, at a stage of your career when every minute of game time counts. That loud bang may have been the sound of bones snapping, but the tears were shed for what that awful sound signified: Heinz's Super Rugby season was over.

"I knew straight away the season was done and dusted," he told me yesterday from his hospital bed in Christchurch. He explained what goes through a player's head in a situation like his. "I was in pain, sure, but it was the heartbreak of it all that got me. All the training, all the preparation, a young family to support - it's amazing what you start thinking about at a time like that."

And he had plenty of time to think. He was taken to Timaru Hospital, before enduring a two-and-a-half hour ambulance ride back to Christchurch. There were roadworks halfway, he says, laughing, and they were forced to take the inland route. He told them a helicopter would have been a better option, but they laughed that off. There was a lot of laughing gas.

No laughing matter though. Willi Heinz now has a titanium rod screwed into the fibula. The tibia, said the surgeon, will take care of itself. There is no ligament or tendon damage, a small mercy. There is no self-pity either, for which his wife Sophie will be thankful. There's no point wallowing about, so he's been researching rehabilitation, asking of others who have suffered the same fate and ascertaining who came back quickest, and why.

And he wants to get back to the Crusaders as soon as possible, to find out how he can help. He wants to give everything he can to Mitchell Drummond and Billy Guyton, the two inexperienced halfbacks who now find themselves in the unexpected position of tournament starters. Broken leg, untouched team spirit.

He talks of the determination in the Crusaders squad, of how they could taste the title last year before that penalty, and that kick. He says they want a title for Todd Blackadder. He says his coach deserves it.

He also talks about how it will feel when the team goes on tour, when his mates board the plane for South Africa or Australia. "I'll be bloody jealous," he says. "I guess I'll just have to get my jollies elsewhere."

That elsewhere will be home, with Sophie and his two daughters, Finnley (8) and Charlie (4), and his wee son Moss (1); home where he can drive Sophie mad and she can do her best to heal his broken heart, and keep the kids - and him - off his broken leg.