Springboks Coach Reveals Near-Death Rugby Injury
By Priscilla Jepchumba
After suffering an accident that threatened his life, the former All Blacks fly-half-transformed attack maestro spent six weeks in a Japanese hospital.
At first, the doctors gave him a "50% chance" of living. The playmaker sustained the injury while representing the Japanese team Wild Knights versus Kintetsu Liners. Despite feeling uneasy, he persevered and kept playing.
But after the game, he continued to feel bad and got a fever. The physicians sent him to the hospital, where they discovered that he had burst his pancreas.
“I was blindsided and didn’t see it coming,” said Brown back then, “the doctors said it was quite severe and they needed to operate to save my life.”
During an interview with the Behind the Ruck podcast, Brown talked about his near-death experience and the difficulties he had going back on the field.
“It was life-threatening, they gave me a 50% chance to live when I got to the hospital and I spent two weeks in ICU with my insides severed,” said the coach.
“I had six tubes coming out of my stomach trying to drain the bile that your pancreas produces to digest your food. The danger of a ruptured pancreas is that the bile goes through your organs and digests your organs so then that becomes life-threatening.”
He was only 33 years old at the time, and he would bounce back and play for another three years until hanging up his boots in 2011.
For someone his age who is normally highly active, the path to recovery was definitely not an easy one.
“So I spent six weeks in hospital and I walked out at 72kgs so I had lost 12kgs, so it was a tough time to get through that six weeks because I’m not a good guy to enjoy just being stuck in hospital lying down doing nothing,” added Brown.
“I wanted to get out, I wanted to compete and I wanted to play rugby again, so it was a tough time but as soon as I got out, I came up with a plan to try and be back playing.
“My goal was to get back for the final of the Japanese competition, so I had 3 months to try and get fit again and put my weight back on and get confident enough that when I go onto the collision again, I’m going to be okay.”
After his playing career ended, Brown began his teaching career, which eventually brought him to the Springboks coaching staff under Rassie Erasmus in 2024.
However, he accepted a player-coach position at the Wild Knights when he was in Japan, and that is when his coaching career really got started.
The number of international players that Japanese teams could sign was restricted, as it still today. The former playmaker shared that his passion for teaching flourished when his teammates asked for his help.
“Luckily enough for me back in the early 2000s in Japan there were only one or two foreigners per team, so the Japanese players always come to you for advice and they come to you to do some training together to try and help them improve their game,” he added.
Brown said he enjoyed helping the Japanese players improve and later in while still on contract, he was asked to be a player-coach.
He added that being a player-coach allowed him to learn a lot about coaching and different approaches to coaching, and it probably made him a better player because he was trying to coach the players. At the same time, he had to deliver himself around the pitch and be accountable.
Brown was probably about thirty years old when he signed on as a player-coach, and his body sort of hung in there for a bit longer than they thought.
JUDY ROTICH