The late Richmond player Shane Tuck endured “a war zone inside his head” during his last days, fighting a battle he had “no chance of winning” against neurodegenerative disease, an inquest has heard.
In harrowing testimony on Friday, Tuck’s sister Renee told the Victorian coroner’s court of her brother’s rapidly deteriorating mental health over the last year of his life, as his disease progressed.
“We will never be fully healed or set free from the experience of watching Shane being taken away from us and from himself slowly, and in such a cruel manner by this disease, unable to do anything to stop his pain and suffering,” she said.
Tuck, who played 173 AFL games for Richmond football club between 2004 and 2013 and later had a brief boxing career, killed himself at the age of 38 in July 2020.
After his death, he was found by the Australian Sports Brain Bank to have suffered from severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the debilitating neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head trauma and increasingly linked to long-term exposure to contact sports. It can only be definitively diagnosed by autopsy.
“CTE is real, and it is unrelenting. It brings a strong man absolutely to his knees and in Shane’s case, to his death,” Renee Tuck said.
The Tuck family’s collective fight against CTE began in earnest when Shane made the first attempt on his own life in 2019, Renee Tuck told the court.
“Shane hadn’t been himself for a long time, but we didn’t know what CTE was then. We also had just unknowingly entered a battle that we had no chance of winning.”
Shane reported that he’d started to hear voices, which alarmed the family, as it was “so far from his normal”. Despite the voluminous amount of medication he was taking, it “didn’t work”, and he only continued taking the medications to help him sleep.
“It just never stopped for him. The voices were relentless, and it was breaking him down slowly … No medications or treatment would touch the sides of his distress,” Renee said.
“Little did we know that his brain was rotting away. What started so slowly years before was ramping up to be a horrific finale, making Shane’s final days on Earth a war zone in his head.”
Renee Tuck said she wanted to speak out about what her brother and her family went through, to help other athletes be better educated about CTE to prevent further distress and trauma.
“Shane was disciplined and wanted to make his team and coach proud and now he’s dead. His kids have lost their father … They were ripped off by a disease Shane didn’t even know he had,” she said.
“Shane was a good, hard player who copped knees, elbows, feet to the head in the scrums of those games. Game after game, week after week. Shane wanted so much to do his best and he put himself through the wringer for it without complaints. His last coach never even reached out after Shane’s death, which speaks volumes of how his continuous grit and determination went unacknowledged,” she told the court.
Donating Shane’s brain to the Australian Sports Brain Bank and learning of their findings was the only thing that had helped the family rebuild their lives, Renee Tuck said.
“I have heard bystanders and supporters say, ‘They play footy. They know what they’re getting into’ or, ‘They get paid enough’. This isn’t true. No one who was made aware, as Shane was not, would ever wish this upon themselves. I hope that from what they hear through Shane’s story, it will give an understanding of how precious our brains and minds truly are.”
Her moving testimony came as the AFL’s chief medical officer, Michael Makdissi, defended the league’s policies and procedures around head trauma after criticism from US neurologist and CTE expert, Dr Robert Cantu.
Cantu said in expert testimony last week that while he applauded the league’s current focus on concussion prevention, there was a “missed opportunity” for the AFL to focus on prevention of CTE and long-term damage in players from the cumulative effects of concussion and sub-concussive trauma.
Makdissi said that while the AFL didn’t have a specific policy focused on CTE prevention, “we do think that our policies, procedures … all of the documents and resources we’ve got, do cover those really important aspects of repeated head trauma and longer term complications. We’ve tried to keep it a little bit broader than just one specific neuropathological diagnosis.
“Over the years we’ve had several rule changes to address the issue of not just concussion but repeated head trauma, both the number of impacts that players are getting and the magnitude of impact that players are getting,” Makdissi said.
Coroner John Cain said in his opening address last week that much of the focus of the inquest into Tuck’s death would be on head trauma in Australian rules football and in boxing, and the opportunities to reduce or minimise those risks.
The inquest continues.
• This article was amended on 28 July 2023 to remove an outdated reference to suicide.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org
