Ryan Campbell's near-death experience has left no lasting scars – apart from a defibrillator fitted into his chest – but has it changed him as a person?
His near-death experience has left no lasting scars – apart from a defibrillator fitted into his chest – but has it changed him as a person?of his generation. He played 11 seasons for Western Australia but only twice won an Australian one-day international cap, as his career in the ’90s and early 2000s coincided with Aussie cricket’s golden generation.
The weekend before our lunch, Campbell announces that he is formally stepping down as the Netherlands coach, although he’s still going to travel with the team to the World Cup. Could this be part of the wash-up from the turbulent events of April? The Dutch don’t mind building cafes, nightclubs and beach cabins right on the beachfront, and Republiek sits in a cluster of these. Many are unprepossessing and downmarket, but this one is a stylish construction of wood and glass with a designer interior complete with sofas.
“The Dutch cricket board put us up in Amstelveen, but we went down to Haarlem, we saw the market square and the big church. Me, a boy from Perth, I thought, ‘This is European living’.” “I can’t wait. Even the little things: I just want to sit and read a newspaper. In the morning, have a coffee, read a newspaper at a cafe and just relax, instead of living my life through Google Translate,” he says.We’re pretty relaxed here in Bloemendaal right now – so much so that we almost forget to order. There is a fancy menu, but we’re both eyeing off the simpler fare that the Dutch do so well: burgers, chips and bar snacks.” enthuses Campbell.
“There was definitely no white light. I didn’t see any pearly gates or anything like that. There was definitely not someone coming to get me, which was a bit worrying for me,” he says. His chances of survival were less than 10 per cent. But now he is back to living a pretty normal life, his heart is fine, and nobody really knows why it happened. All Campbell can say is: “Somebody was looking out for me that day.”
His big lesson is to “stop saying no”. “So many times in our lives – and now I’m starting to sound like a bloody guru or something – we all say no way too often, instead of going, ‘I’m going have a think about that [and] maybe come up with a pretty good answer’.”He also says he now has zero time for idiots. “If you’re dragging us down, I’m sorry, I don’t have the time or the energy to waste.”
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