When you win a flag, you mainly hear about the happy stories. Many PREnders have or will share their Grand Final day story in a thread such as this. Lifetime memories. But this post is about a sad story involving a good friend of mine and the crazy events of last Saturday morning.
My friend (let’s call him Trevor) lives interstate and loves the Tigers. He flies up a few times per year to see games in Melbourne. He flew here last week to watch our Prelim win. And he flew in to Melbourne last Friday in the hope of snagging a GF ticket.
As it turned out, I was able to snag him a ticket through a prominent member of PRE (I’m not sure if that PRE member wants to be named, so I will not mention him at this stage, but he was very understanding of the whole situation. He was great and I think him profusely).
So anyway, after the parade on Friday, Trevor, myself and another Tiger mate (let’s call him Sam) agreed to spend the whole weekend at Sam’s house so we could celebrate together. We ended up watching a replay of the 2017 GF on Friday night before getting some rest for the big day.
At 2am on Grand Final day, Sam woke me up and said something had happened to Trevor. He found him lying on the steps that led down to the garage. Trevor was screaming in agony. It turned out that he went looking for the toilet, but being in an unfamiliar house he took a wrong turn and slipped down the stairs. We called the ambulance and was taken to hospital.
After tests and X-Rays, it turned out Trevor had broken his hip and required surgery. The surgery was performed on Saturday afternoon. So not only did he miss going to the game, but wasn’t even able to watch it.
Mind you, this is the same guy who broke his neck in another freak accident early last year (which he recovered well from). Trevor wasn’t able to get a ticket for the 2017 GF. He bought a corporate ticket for the 2018 GF only for us to lose in the Prelim. So he feels like the footy gods aren’t on his side.