Guy Walker had the world at his feet before a devastating injury left him disabled and feeling hopeless. During a trip abroad, he received a phone call that changed his life, writes DANIEL CHERNY.
Stuck in bed all day, unable to work, unable to exercise, unable to even sit up for 10 minutes, Guy Walker wondered whether it was all really worth it.
Here was a young man talented enough to have earned a state cricket contract and made it onto an AFL list, struck down in his mid 20s with no discernible sign of light at the end of the tunnel.
Then he got the phone call that changed his life. But more on that later.
Walker never thought he would end up like he has. This wasn’t in the script. Such was his aptitude in both cricket and football that as a teenager he turned down a likely AFL career to pursue the summer game.
He was one of Victoria’s next generation of fast bowlers, awarded a state deal and then one with the Melbourne Renegades. Walker could bowl in excess of 140km/h, playing in the 2014 under-19 World Cup alongside future Australian players Ben McDermott and Billy Stanlake.
Walker played a single game for the Renegades, in December 2015 at the Gabba. His three overs went for 47, but copping some tap from Chris Lynn and company wasn’t the worst thing to happen to him that night. He hurt his shoulder throwing, setting off a chain of shoulder surgeries that ultimately led to that match being the last professional sporting fixture he would ever play.
AFL scouts had kept in touch with Walker, a gun junior footballer as a rebounding defender with the Calder Cannons. He’d had approaches from the Brisbane Lions and Adelaide before eventually signing with Melbourne in 2018.
He was back to full fitness, but little did Walker know that the injuries which had plagued him in cricket would be nothing compared to the knock that would irrevocably alter the course of his life.
It was at a training session at Gosch’s Paddock, in December 2018, that a regulation tackle from Toby Bedford jolted Walker forever.
Walker had hoped that this fresh shoulder injury would clear following the Christmas break, but things did not improve. He’d had stress fractures, bulging discs and plenty of other ailments before but the pain was on another level.
“I woke up every night for two weeks feeling like someone was stabbing me in the shoulder,” Walker recalls.
He returned in the new year, where he was diagnosed with suprascapular neuropathy.
“I had a massive lump in the back of my shoulder because the nerve had severed. There were no messages getting sent, so I lost all the muscle there.”
Walker thought he’d be sidelined. He could cop that, having been there and done it. But his neurologist delivered far more devastating news. He’d never be able to follow either of his passions again, not even socially.
“It was her neurology practice in Hawthorn. I went into her office thinking she was going to say, ‘You’re out for a season again’,” Walker says.
“But she said to me, ‘This is what you’ve got, you need to retire immediately. You can never play again, and not only that, you won’t ever be able to pick up your future kids.’
“She said, ‘You’ve got 50 per cent of your shoulder for the rest of your life, and whatever recovery you have in the next 18 to 24 months is what you have for your life’.”
Under his career-ending injury policy, he was entitled to around three years of health coverage. However, the Covid-19 pandemic meant that access to specialists was patchy at best through 2020 and 2021. More worryingly, he wasn’t able to work and his coverage was about to run out. Walker’s therapy and specialist bills were around $1000 a week.
Sure, he’d made a bit of money through six or seven years of being an elite sportsperson, but these weren’t sums to tide him over for the rest of his life. How was he going to take care of himself?
“I got told in 2019 that I would have to lose a limb [to qualify for] total and permanent disability,” Walker says.
“So I just lost all hope for that.
“I wanted to be a cricket coach, but I couldn’t do that. I went through lists of jobs and I couldn’t do about 80 per cent of them.”
His quality of life was agonisingly poor. The future seemed grim.
“There’d be days and weeks where I’d be in bed all week, I’d be in that much pain, it’d feel like someone was stabbing me in the shoulder, in the neck. And then if I sat up, I felt like my neck couldn’t support my head,” Walker says.
“The time just goes so slow when you’re in pain like that. I’m just lucky that I had the support of my partner, Emily.”
With his prospects in Australia seeming no brighter, Walker and Emily decided to ship off to the UK in May 2022, to spend time around Walker’s elderly grandfather. Unfortunately, the trip was curtailed because of logistical challenges with Emily’s work, but it was during this brief stint overseas that Walker received the most important call of his life.
It came from former Dees teammate Kade Kolodjashnij, who had himself been forced into premature retirement because of concussion effects.
“Have you seen what’s happened to Patrick Bines?” Kolodjashnij asked.
Bines, the former West Coast rookie, had been in a similarly hopeless spot, seeking a payout for life-changing injuries he’d suffered during a brief AFL career. Insurance expert Adriana Oreskov had seen a report about Bines on FOX Footy, making it her mission to get the sum for which Bines had been told he was not eligible.
“This woman’s come out of the woodwork, Adriana,” Walker was told by Kolodjashnij.
“And that was when I got introduced to her,” Walker says.
Oreskov was optimistic that she’d be able to prove total and permanent disability for Walker.
“I looked at his policy,” Oreskov says. “I said, ‘You’ve got a valid claim’.
“With high-risk categories, it’s very difficult to get quality insurance. There is quality insurance out there but a lot of athletes don’t know about it.”
He returned to Melbourne in October, beginning a gruelling process of testing and documentation in a bid to get the money that he felt he needed to look after himself.
“They even sent me to an independent doctor. He sort of saw me for about 20 minutes, I took my top off for about two minutes, did a couple of tests and he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I can see how bad you are’,” Walker says.
“You can straight away see structural damage. You can see that there’s wastage, there’s no muscle. I’ve completely lost all the muscle around my suprascapula, my neck, my trapezius.
“I’ve lost 16 kilos. I was playing at about 84 in cricket and footy. I weighed myself two or three months ago and I was like 68. And I’ve lost all muscle.
“I can’t do any running, if I run further than a kilometre I’m in agony. I can’t swim. The only thing I can start to do is a bit of stationary bike.
“And that’s the other thing, is that because I haven’t been able to do exercise … I’ve got genetic heart issues as well, real high blood pressure, high cholesterol.”
Finally, earlier this year, Walker got the call to say that his claim had been approved.
“It was just more relief than anything,” he says.
He told Emily, who started crying, having seen the depths plumbed by her partner.
Walker can again afford to see his specialists. He is considering going to the US to seek further expertise on his problem.
Back, shoulder and neck surgeries are on the horizon. It is not going to be an easy road. But he now has hope, something that for months had been elusive.
“There’s many times when you’re sort of laying in bed where you’re laying in bed thinking, ‘Is this all worth it?’ And it’s pretty intense. You’re obviously in a pretty dark place.”
Oreskov is now on a mission. She has worked with Kade’s twin Jake Kolodashnij, the Geelong premiership player, to improve his insurance situation.
“We are different because we care and we are a team of experts specialising solely in insurance and claims and that’s all we do,” Oreskov says.
“A GP cannot understand the specialty of the brain the way a neurologist can. We understand insurance and claims, not just for athletes but everyday Australians.”
For Walker, reflecting on his sporting career is understandably a case of “what if?” He has seen mates play for Australia and others win premierships at the Dees. He remains friends with Demons Joel Smith, Clayton Oliver and James Harmes, as well as Victorian cricketers Travis Dean, Matt Short and Sam Harper. He does not begrudge them their respective success, but concedes a hint of envy.
“You watch your best mates playing for Australia, you watch your best mates playing footy, you watch Melbourne win a premiership,” Walker says.
“So absolutely stoked for them, but it is difficult because that’s where you want to be.”
Walker is sharing his story not because he is bitter. He just wants others to know that there are options and that it is important to be educated about insurance.
“Players need to be educated about what they’re signing up for. I just want athletes to see that I never thought this was going to happen to me. But I’m living proof that it can happen to you,” he adds.
“I know for a fact there’s other players out there going through this.
“Without the help of Adriana, I don’t know where my life would have gone. It’s just about giving us hope, because we just haven’t had that.”