Rhyan Grant is currently in the United Arab Emerates trying to help the Australian soccer team defend their Asian Cup Title. With his distinctive blonde Mullet, Rhyan looks like a surfer who has been taking hairstyle cues from Mikey Wright. By his own admission Grant is a country boy who took up surfing late. That didn’t prevent him from chasing waves instead of soccer balls in his spare time when he moved to Sydney’s Northern Beaches. However, the pleasurable pastime almost proved fatal when Rhyan found himself on the wrong side of a stormwater drain. Below, the Socceroos defender details his frightening ordeal and a situation many of us have dreaded. And before you go labelling Rhyan a kook, walk outside and try and juggle a soccer ball twenty times. It’s a humbling experience.  

“I don’t want this to come across as a sob story. I am lucky to be representing the Socceroos at this Asian Cup.

I’m lucky to be alive at all.

Six months ago, I went for a surf and almost didn’t come back. I know a lot of people out there have probably had their own near-death experiences. It takes a lot to wrap your head around something like that.

I still feel rattled when I tell the story.

I’d just been cleared to come back from my second ACL injury when it happened. I was living in Collaroy on Sydney’s northern beaches and there’s a break just off the point there that had become my local surf spot.

One afternoon, a week before the start of pre-season, the surf was pumping. So I grabbed my board – an old-school longboard I picked up for a couple of hundred bucks at a garage sale – and went down for a look.

It’s hard to say exactly how big the swell was because it was pretty choppy. I reckon it would have been five-foot, minimum, with some bigger sets coming in. It was big enough that most people stayed on the beach. That’s what I should have done. Going out on that board in swells that size was a massive rookie error.

I grew up in Canowindra in the central west of NSW so obviously I’m not the most natural surfer. A country boy at the beach. What could go wrong?

I was over-confident after surfing some big waves a couple of weeks before but as I paddled out I realised just how sketchy it was. I was halfway when I realised the swell was way too big for me. I was in no-man’s land, right where the waves break, when I decided to turn and go back in.

I got caught on the inside of a few big sets and with the long board I thought I had to ditch it and dive under, rather than duck-dive. That’s how I got into real strife.

A bit further down the beach at Collaroy, there’s a huge sewage pipe that sits in the water and goes out a good 20 or 30 metres, from the shore to the ocean. On a good day you can see most of it but, on days like that, it’s pretty much completely submerged.

I was dragged towards the pipe. Then a wave picked me up and smashed me down on top of it. I hit my arm, leg and ribs hard. But before I could feel the pain, I was under the water. I came back up and got the chance to take one last breath before I was pushed straight underneath the pipe.

I felt my body get wedged in there, in the dark, and realised my leg rope was caught around one of the metal poles that hold the pipe up off the ocean floor.

I was pretty frantic, as you can imagine, fighting to get up for a breath, but I couldn’t reach my ankle to get free because the surf was pushing my leg in the opposite direction to the rest of my body.

I don’t know how long I was under that pipe but, after a while, the fight just went out of me. It seemed impossible.

I gave up. I stopped fighting.

I know that might sound exaggerated or heavy, but I did. I stopped trying to swim to the top. Everything went peaceful and quiet under the water. I got ready to just let it happen.

‘This is it.’

And then something happened that I can’t explain: my leg rope snapped. I got spat out on the other side of the pipe and washed down the beach.

I don’t know who it was, but someone was definitely looking out for me that day.”