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On top of having his NRL career snatched away, Johnny Manning has witnessed the death of two brothers, his sister and his wife – all in heartbreaking circumstance and all before his 40th birthday.
It’s often said in sports journalism that you should never meet your heroes, lest you be disappointed.
What can be thoroughly recommended, however, is making an effort to meet athletes who have no pretension of heroism. Because more often than not, they will become the people you admire and learn from most.
Johnny Manning is a bloke that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry in his name to credit the 15 first grade games he played for the North Queensland Cowboys between 1999 and 2001.
But he has a story that deserves a book.
If Manning’s biography were to be printed in full, it would sit somewhere alongside Viktor Frankl’s haunting, raw, and ultimately inspirational Man’s Search for Meaning.
It delves to the heart of the question: Just how much can the human spirit endure?
Entrusted as captain of the Cowboys reserve grade squad, Manning was always one of the most decent, well-rounded, engaging and intelligent people you’d find in the ranks of professional sport.
This was a guy who at high school proved equally comfortable writing theatre reviews as he was carting a football forward into opposition packs.
Indeed, when a luckless run of three knee reconstructions, a shoulder reconstruction and a bad ankle break signalled the end of his NRL career at just 23, he turned to becoming a movie critic for the Townsville Bulletin.
Manning could converse on all sorts of topics, but when you talked film, he could go for minutes reciting character dialogue back-and-forth without missing a beat.
It was no great surprise when, just a few years after his NRL dream ended, he announced he’d be moving to Sydney so he could attend the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, commonly known as NIDA.
Alexandra Barlow-Manning, Gabrielle Manning, Johnny Manning. Image: Johnny Manning.
In the years since, he has appeared in 30-odd television commercials, an episode of Home and Away, several crime re-enactment shows, and two feature films.
It seemed like his new path. The repurposing of a gifted soul who had already taken more than his fair share of body blows.
Tragically, he had only just overcome the first of several increasingly tumultuous events, the likes of which almost defy belief.
“You know, from the moment I retired from football through to the suicide of my brother (Patrick in 2010), I don’t think I ever really cried,” Manning says.
“But that was bloody horrible. I think I went for weeks where I was continually sobbing.”
Older brother Patrick was a well-known sports reporter in North Queensland, predominantly for Mackay’s Daily Mercury.
One weekend Patrick attended a boxing event in which a fighter lost his life.
Shortly after, Patrick was found by his siblings dead in a canefield from self-inflicted means.
“He’d probably shown signs of ill mental health and he was on some medication,” says Johnny.
“When we were younger we lost our older brother Michael to brain cancer when he was 16. I was only three at the time, but Patrick and Michael were closer in age and, to be honest, I think it impacted him a lot more.
“Finding out about Patrick’s death was really weird circumstance. I was up home to watch the NRL grand final and another brother Laurence received a phone call saying that Pat’s car had been reported stolen and abandoned.
“We found it on a track between cane fields at Walkerston and the door was flung wide open. We were trying to make sense of what had happened and had no idea he was dead at that stage.
“Then we spotted some blood. And a short distance away we found Patrick’s body in the cane.”
Somehow Johnny can get through retelling the story these days without shedding a tear, but his cheekbones tighten and his eyes glaze over as the imagery reappears before his mind.
What compounds the tragedy is the revelation sister Gabrielle had only a few months earlier been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Gabrielle was John’s closest sibling, a mother to two children, who was also living in Sydney at the same time.
“She was due to go to New York on a holiday and she rang me to say she had found a lump in her breast and she was going to get it checked when she returned,” Johnny reveals.
“I pleaded with her to get it checked before she went to New York, so she did, and yeah, it turned out pretty nasty.
Greg Inglis spoke publicly about his battle with depression. (AAP Image/David Moir)
“Gab lasted until May 2012 but the cancer was relentless. It kept coming back and she had no respite.
“There was a film of fluid covering her lungs and which got into her brain. In the end she died from respiratory restriction. She was that sick on her final night alive, I prayed she would die peacefully.
“The last thing she said to me was ‘Make sure my boys grow up good men’.”
The heartbreak of the Manning family over the succession of family losses was there for all to see.
The mind boggles at the resilience needed for Johnny, his remaining brothers Laurence and Anthony, and their parents to regroup and keep plugging along with daily life.
A welcome pillar of strength in this time was Alexandra Barlow, John’s new partner whom he had met in the period he was helping Gabrielle through her sickness.
They became engaged in August 2013.
Less than six months later, she too was told she had cancer.
“Unfortunately Alex was misdiagnosed a whole bunch of times prior,” says Johnny.
“She’d be bed-stricken some days and have back pain, but it was thought she might just have a food allergy or infection.
“Then she started talking to me in detail about the questions they asked when she went for a scan and I thought: ‘I know this. I’ve heard this before’. I think I knew then she had cancer.
“When the scans came back, she collapsed on the end of phone.
“They told me she had six months to live, but I didn’t ever mention timeframes with her.”
What started in the pancreas eventually spread throughout Alexandra’s organs and lymphatic system.
She underwent a procedure where her gall bladder, bile duct, duodenum, part of her stomach, half her pancreas and half her liver were removed, along with 21 lymph nodes.
The operation left young Alex with a scar right across her body and with reduced immunity to further threats.
“They got 95 per cent of the cancer…but you know it’s such a f**ker,” says John.
As it eventuated, Alexandra lasted three-and-a-half years from diagnosis to her passing, longer than expected, but far, far shorter than the timespan the couple had originally envisaged together.
After the pair made good on their promise to marry, Alex passed away in the final week of June this year.
Johnny reveals he unashamedly tries to keep the link to his wife alive through the two dogs they raised from pups together.
“My dogs help me big time. Otherwise I’d be kicking around by myself in a pretty empty house,” John admits.
“I pass up a lot of social opportunities these days that I used to jump at, mainly so I can be at home with the dogs.
Alexandra Barlow-Manning and Johnny Manning. Image: Johnny Manning.
“In years gone by I was a regular at Cowboys Old Boys reunions, but I’ve missed a couple now.
I don’t always feel like I want to talk about everything that’s gone on.
“The dogs are the strongest link between Alex and me, and spending time with them always lifts my spirits. I absolutely recommend puppy therapy to anybody feeling down.”
Which brings us to the crux of this tale – after life has taken so much away, what can be drawn upon to keep you waking up to face a new day?
Manning shares several poignant quotes from his mother, spoken when he felt like he was encroaching on a panic attack at Alexandra’s funeral.
The one that resonates most is: ‘If you’re walking through hell, you might as well keep on walking’.
Despite being a big, tough bloke over 100kg, Manning doesn’t even pretend to have all the answers to what he has faced…and is still facing day-to-day.
In fact, he readily admits there are days that are a struggle.
But he gets through them.
“Have I had any suicidal thoughts? Yes,” he says matter-of-factly.
“But have I ever seriously intended to follow through on them? No.
“I don’t want that to be my legacy, because I’ve felt that and I don’t want to ever put people in a position where they question what they could have done differently.
“Rather than commit suicide, I’m the kind of guy that would bugger off to Africa or somewhere and create a new life.
“You never have to look far to find someone who is worse off than yourself, and there are too many people I want to repay for their support.
“Caring for my wife gave me purpose, in a similar, but much bigger way, to when I was playing football.
“I have to find that purpose again, but I don’t want to make this all about me when it was my wife who was so brave and bloody amazing.
“Really, I just want to be normal again.”
If you or anyone you know needs help, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36.
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