‘I hated my life’: Bronson Xerri tells all as four-year drug ban comes to an end
By Michael Chammas
Out of the wilderness; Bronson Xerri’s four-year ban is over.Credit: Steven Siewert
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On a bench inside a bustling Centennial Park on Saturday morning, two days out from his ban being lifted, Bronson Xerri sits down to tell his story.
His mentor, renowned sprint coach Roger Fabri, wanders over to the bench next to him.
Xerri’s agent, Matt Desira, paces around the table like a father at a kindergarten orientation day, wondering – and hoping at the same time – if he is ready for what the world has in store for him.
After a few minutes of under-arm questions designed to do nothing but make him feel comfortable, the conversation takes a turn when Xerri is asked to recount the darkest of his 1219 days since he was banished to the rugby league wilderness for taking steroids.
An awkward silence follows. Fabri, Xerri’s closest confidant, interjects.
“Suicide,” he says without reservation, before Xerri jumps in.
“I don’t know if I want to put that in the story,” the 23-year-old responds.
The back and forth continues for a couple of minutes.
“Why? What are you ashamed of?” Fabri asks. “What’s the big deal? What … people are going to think you’re weak? It’s the truth.”
Fabri knows how close Xerri came to ending it all. He was often – five or six times a day – on the receiving end of panicked and disturbing phone calls.
“He would go through a whole series of different types of emotions, even just over the course of a day sometimes,” Fabri says.
“I would get calls telling me that he was ready to go crazy and rip in. Then two hours later he’d be looking for the tree to go hang himself. Many times, I thought I was going to lose him. Many times.”
Bronson Xerri is ready to return to rugby league.Credit: Steven Siewert
Xerri is uncomfortable, trying to find the words to explain how he felt.
The discomfort isn’t so much with the revelation of the severity of the mental health demons he has been battling for the best part of four years, but instead the notion that he had the right to evoke any emotion but shame from those who would soon come to read his words.
“I’m not ashamed about how close I came [to ending my life], but I am ashamed playing the victim,” he later explains after Fabri and Desira leave for a meeting. “At the end of the day, no one cares. I don’t want to play the violin. I harmed myself. I put myself in this position. No one else.
“For me to play the victim is stupid. It’s simple; I shouldn’t have done what I did. Everything that I’ve been through is because of what I did. I own that. I man up to that.”
How it all went down
Xerri’s phone rang. Then it rang again.
It was the morning of May 22, 2020– six days out from the NRL’s return after a two-month hiatus in the early days of the pandemic .
Xerri was home alone. He didn’t recognise the phone number and, like most NRL players, let it keep ringing through.
The phone rang again. What he didn’t realise at the time was that there were two men in a vehicle parked outside his Menai home waiting for him to pick up the phone. They’d been there since 7am.
When he eventually answered after the fourth call he was in a state of shock as he was asked to bring his phone and laptop to the front door to hand over to the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority.
“You have tested positive to Testosterone, Androsterone, Etiocholanolone and 5b-androstane-3a, 17b-diol,” the ASADA representative went on to say.
Xerri, in the frantic moments before he opened the door, called his mother and now ex-girlfriend.
“You need to come home now,” he said. “Something has gone wrong.”
The ASADA representatives soon left with his belongings. A shaken Xerri, waiting alone for his loved ones to return home, broke down.
“I closed the door and I just bawled my eyes out,” he recalled. “It was horrendous. It was a nightmare. I couldn’t stop crying.”
In the few hours he had between him finding out his fate and the media discovering his predicament, he jumped onto his partner’s phone and deleted all social media accounts.
“It was one mistake, one injection, at a dark moment in my life.”
He wasn’t ready to hear what the world thought of Bronson Xerri, the drug cheat.
By that afternoon, and all day for the next seven days, there were television crews and reporters camped outside his home.
“I’m looking out my window seeing all these cameras and journalists,” he said. “My mum and brother can’t even leave the house. I’d done that to them.
“It was one mistake, one injection, at a dark moment in my life.”
Xerri is open during the interview, but how he came into possession of the substance is a topic he won’t discuss.
He goes on to explain the reasons, not excuses, for that one injection. He’s at pains to stress that his explanation is merely to provide context for the state that he was in, not justification for the action of injecting himself in the days leading up to his test on November 25, 2019.
That year was life-changing. He had made his NRL debut at the age of 18 and was being touted as a future superstar of the game.
Bronson Xerri tested positive to a banned substance in November 2019.Credit: NRL Photos
By the end of the year his shoulder wasn’t able to withstand the rigours of such a brutal and demanding sport and was required to undergo two surgeries. A third beckoned.
He was feeling pressure from his club to get himself right for the start of the next season, such was his growing importance to the team, but the lingering issues with his shoulder weren’t going away.
Twelve days before he was tested by ASADA in the bellows of Shark Park, where he was struggling with his rehabilitation, his step-brother Troy Xerri was involved in a horror car accident.
He lost control of his speeding Toyota Hilux, crossing onto the wrong side of the road and collided into two cars in Eastwood in Sydney’s north-west, including a Mazda hatchback. The impact killed 63-year-old mother, Jo Duke.
Xerri’s brother was facing a lengthy stint behind bars, and would later go on to plead guilty to dangerous driving occasioning death and dangerous driving occasioning grievous bodily harm.
“I wasn’t thinking at all,” Xerri said.
“I didn’t think anything. I saw what I saw and without thinking I did it. I promise to God, I was not thinking. The state that I was in was horrendous. It’s not an excuse, but the reality of the position I found myself in.
“It was one mistake in a dark moment in my life. I had a lot going on. I was 19. I was vulnerable. I had just gone through two big operations on my shoulder. I wasn’t thinking at all. I wasn’t in a good mindset.”
Spiralling into depression
In the days and months that followed his public and private humiliation, Xerri pushed everyone away. He became a recluse, finding little joy in the life he once loved.
“I hated my life,” he said. “I didn’t want to get out of bed.”
His friendship with many of his friends deteriorated. People he once considered friends became invisible in his time of need. Much of that, he admits, is because of his own unwillingness to accept the repercussions of his actions.
Some of it, however, was a reflection of the true colours of those he once considered brothers.
“I filtered out all the bad people,” he said. “All the fake friends that I had.”
The one bond that grew was his friendship with Fabri.
“He’s my therapist, trainer and best mate, all in one,” Xerri says, talking about the man who only an hour earlier was putting him through his paces during a sprint training session at Centennial Park.
Bronson Xerri during his sprint training on Saturday morning.Credit: Steven Siewert
Fabri has risked it all for Xerri. He was told that working with Xerri would be in breach of his high-performance accreditation.
It didn’t stop him from handing in his accreditation, denying him the opportunity to watch one of his clients win gold at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, while also stripping him of the $20 million in insurance cover his accreditation once entitled him to.
“No one would give me insurance,” he said. “My business manager said to me: ‘this has got to be the most ridiculous decision you’ve ever made’. But I had to stay with him.”
”He doesn’t even know this because it’s none of his business, but I promised him from the start that I was there for him. ‘I didn’t give a f- – -’. I wanted to show him that I could be the best friend to him. The amount of people who say they have your back, don’t really have your back.
“People want to talk about stand-up guys … that’s all talk. You put yourself through real shit and see who are the real people that stand right there for you in the shadow when you really f—ing need them. There’s not many. He’s been through hell, this kid. He’s been through f—ing hell.”
Part of the reason Xerri pushed people away was because of the manner in which he was raised.
His father, Darren, is a physically intimidating presence. A tough and unbreakable exterior matched by an equally impenetrable emotional state.
This ordeal, though, changed the family.
“I was brought up to be the tough guy who doesn’t show emotion,” Xerri admits.
“Before all of this, we were all walking around like … I’m not saying we’re cocky but we like to be strong and show that. My dad raised me to be tough and stand on my own two feet.
Bronson Xerri scores a try for the Sharks against the Dragons in 2019.Credit: Getty
“When this all happened, he saw a vulnerable side to me and I saw a vulnerable side to him. It brought us closer. And my mum … I can’t tell you what that woman has seen me go through. She saw me at the worst of my worst. She’s been my rock.”
His father could see his son’s life spiralling out of control. It had been almost a year since he was cast aside from the sport. His reluctance to do much more than leave his bedroom to see what was in the fridge triggered a drastic response from a father who couldn’t watch on as his son began to throw his life away.
It’s why he would drive from his home in Coogee to his ex-partner’s Menai home to pick up his son and take him to a gym in Gregory Hills on the outskirts of Sydney to force him to train.
“He knew that not many people would know me out there,” Xerri says.
That was reflected in the man entrusted to help him find his way, personal trainer Tanaka Machisa, who 30 minutes into the interview sets up camp on the adjacent bench as a show of support for his now-close friend.
“My manager said to me, ‘I’ve got a lead for you and you’ve probably heard of him. His name is Bronson Xerri’,” Machisa recalls.
“I was like, ‘nah, sorry, never heard of him’. But I’ll never forget the conversation with his dad. He said to me: ‘out of everything I want you to work on with him, nothing is more important than you being there for him mentally’.”
Xerri with trainer Tanaka Machisa (left) and with his brother, Troy (right).
Xerri didn’t know it at the time, but the bond they would soon develop would mark the beginning of his road to redemption.
The NRL was the furthest thing from his mind, but his sessions with Machisa would trigger a chain of events that would culminate in a significant shift of his bleak and doomed outlook.
“From 12 o’clock to 1, when I was training with T, that was when I was at my happiest.
“In the morning before it, and all day after it, I hated life. I didn’t want to leave the gym. That one hour a day was all I looked forward to in life. Training became my medicine.”
Light at the end of the tunnel
Almost two years into his exile, Xerri stepped foot into the real world. For someone who walked straight out of high school into an NRL team, the grind of working for a living was a foreign concept.
He begrudgingly picked up a nail gun and joined his older brother and best friend, at their request, on a construction site as a carpenter. They had hoped it would help him through his journey, but it had the opposite effect.
“It made me feel even worse, to be honest,” Xerri said.
“I was standing out there on this stinking hot day shooting frames. It hit me. This is reality. I’ve gone from scoring tries living the life as a footy player, to this life that I never wanted.
“That was an eye-opener for me. I realised my calling was football and I didn’t want to waste what I had worked so hard for. Plus I hated carpentry. I can’t believe I lasted six or seven months.”
In those months, Xerri began to contemplate a comeback to professional sport. At first, it was via player agent Gavin Orr, who phoned the disgraced athlete to gauge his interest in a potential future in the NFL.
It’s one of the few sporting competitions that doesn’t fall under the World Anti-Doping Code, exempting him from the strict four-year ban that he had been handed.
Orr, and his brother Chris, had experience in that line of work. They represented Jordan Mailata when he went over to the United States, where he eventually went on to land a spot with the Philadelphia Eagles and play in last year’s Super Bowl loss to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.
Xerri will on Monday be free to return to professional training with the Bulldogs.Credit: Steven Siewert
They’d also orchestrated Valentine Holmes’ exit from the NRL in 2018, helping him earn a spot on the New York Jets’ practice squad the following year.
Xerri had been booked on a plane to Florida and granted at a spot at the IMG academy, where he would be exposed to talent scouts and afforded the opportunity to show off his talent at NFL combines.
Whispers of his NFL pursuit, though, began to circulate in the media.
“Then my lawyer called me,” Xerri says.
“He said that if I went over there, ASADA would restart my four-year ban from the day I returned.
“Bang. Just like that I was back into my hole. Back into my depression. In those weeks that I thought I was going, I finally had a purpose. I thought I had nothing to lose. Then they gave me something to lose. I could not risk it.”
Almost a year later he went in search of a new agent, forming a connection with Desira.
Desira, having just secured Xerri as a client, made it known to a staff member at the Bulldogs that the speedster was keen to explore a return to rugby league.
The message was passed on to the club’s general manager, Phil Gould, who wanted to set up a meeting with the banished footballer.
“The day I started to see the light again was the day Gus reached out,” he said.
“I still remember I was at home when my manager called and said ‘Gus wants to meet you’. I said ‘Gus? Like as in Gus Gould?
“You have no idea what hearing that did to me. It built this happiness inside of me that I hadn’t felt for a very long time. A feeling that I hadn’t felt in nearly three years. I rang my mum. I rang my dad. I rang everyone. I’m meeting Gus tomorrow!”
That night Xerri barely slept.
He kept thinking about how, during moments of sadness during his exile, he would sometimes picture himself in a Bulldogs jersey.
“I was a Bulldogs junior, so I just had this feeling that if I ever played again it would be for them. Then Gus reached out.”
Phil Gould walks down the stairs at the club’s Belmore headquarters.Credit: Getty Images
During a meeting at well-known Belmore establishment Jobel’s Cafe, where Gould conducts most of the meetings he does not want to keep secret, the Canterbury supremo lit a fire inside of Xerri.
“As soon as I saw Gus, I was sold,” he said.
“I was in. I walked out of there saying ‘that’s where I’m going’. My manager told me to relax because other clubs would be coming. I said to him ‘no, Dessie, don’t bother with them. I’m going to the Bulldogs’.”
The comeback
In the pre-season leading into his rookie year in the NRL back in 2019, Cronulla’s game-day staff asked the-then teenager if he had a preference about the song they play over the speaker at Shark Park if he was to score a try.
Run This Town, by Jay-Z, Kanye West and Rihanna was his jam.
”Feel it comin’ in the air. Hear the screams from everywhere. I’m addicted to the thrill. It’s a dangerous love affair. Can’t be scared when it goes down. Got a problem, tell me now. Only thing that’s on my mind … Is who’s gon’ run this town tonight.”
The lyrics were the fitting backdrop to an eye-opening try against the Penrith Panthers in round six that put the rugby league world on notice. It’s been his go-to track ever since.
“That’s a moment I’ll never forget,” he said. “The song was on, the crowd was going nuts. I was like ’wow, I’ve made it. From that night, it’s been my song. All my mates know. That’s me. In my darkest moments that song has been with me.”
The jury is still out. Does the blistering speed he showed to get around James Maloney and Dallin Watene-Zelezniak for his first NRL try all those years ago still exist?
Apparently, he still runs 100 metres in 10.8 seconds. Not bad for an athlete who now tips the scales at 100 kilograms, six kilograms heavier than the one who burst onto the scene four years ago.
A lot has changed in rugby league over that time. Not that he would know much about that.
“I didn’t watch a game for a long time,” he said. “I was so turned off the sport, I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
In mid-July this year, on the day the Bulldogs faithful farewelled the club’s favourite son Josh Reynolds at Belmore Sports Ground, Xerri was in the stands. It was the first game he had been to since his final one for the black, white and blue.
Desira had to physically drag him into the car, such was the anxiety about returning to watch the sport and being around people who knew exactly what he had done.
The reception he received from the Bulldogs faithful couldn’t have been further from the treatment he’d been copping online for years. The animosity towards him, though, acts as the fuel driving his redemption story.
“I read the hate comments and I want to come back and prove them wrong,” he said. “People saying I was only the player I was because I was on drugs. I took one injection. It was the biggest mistake of my life. For people to think that I turned into the Hulk from one injection is wrong.
Bronson Xerri has been given the all-clear to return to training on Monday.Credit: NRL Photos
“I’ve done enough talking. It’s time I go out there and let my actions speak for themselves. I can sit here and say whatever I want, but I’m going to go out there and prove to everyone that I’m the player that I am because of my hard work and sacrifice, not because I took one injection. All the sacrifices I made when I was young … All the hard work I put in to get to where I was. That was me. That wasn’t because of one injection.”
Some of the photos Xerri posted of his buff and heavily-inked body during his rugby league hiatus, at a weight of 107kg, only flamed the belief that he was still using steroids.
Over the past year he has undergone regular testing in preparation for his return, adamant that his ability to remain in peak physical condition wasn’t a result of any illicit substance.
“Steriods had just ruined my life. I had hate for it,” he said.
“I had hate for myself. I had hate for football. I had hate for the world. I had a ‘f— it’ mentality with life in general.
“But I’ve got nothing to hide. Besides that one positive test, I have passed every single test and I have been tested a lot. More than the usual. I’m going to be targeted, but come [at me].
“I post all these things on Instagram of me training hard and my body. People are saying ‘oh this guy is still on the gear’. Do they think that I’m going to post pictures like that if I’m taking stuff? Not a chance.”
Xerri has the belief in himself that, with a pre-season under his belt, he can be a better player than the one that left the game. Physically he will be in optimal condition. Mentally, he will be challenged.
Only the strong survive – the new tattoo he is thinking of inking on to his body when it makes it back into the bright lights of the NRL.
He can already picture the moment. Headphones on. Two-minute bell about to ring. Crowd going ballistic in the stands. Rihanna blaring through the speakers.
”Life’s a game but it’s not fair. I break the rules so I don’t care. So I keep doin’ my own thing. Walkin’ tall against the rain. Victory’s within the mile. Almost there, don’t give up now. Only thing that’s on my mind … Is who’s gon’ run this town tonight.“
“That’ll be the last thing I listen to before I walk out that tunnel,” he says. “Then it’s game on, bro. I’m back.”
If you or anyone you know needs support, call 139 276, Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.
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