Proper True Yarn

Fresh out of the Proper True Yarn fight camp, John Rayner sits down with Knuckles ahead of the seven man royale at Podcast Royale 3.0, and he's not there to make friends. No gym, no weight set, no boxing gloves. Johnny's training farm strong, throwing 44 gallon drums and tyres around and belting the bag in riggers, and reckons the city pricks on the card are in for a rude shock. There's respect for the legend Benny, but as Johnny says, no more sympathy votes. Whoever fights the best gets the win.
Then the yarns start. Growing up in Mudgee when it was still a small country town, the unspoken deal where the league boys did the fighting during union season and vice versa, and punching their way to a famous schoolboy rugby title against one of the biggest schools in the state. Later came the Woolpack in its days as the most violent pub in Australia, and the army application where he passed everything with flying colours until the psych test, where a contractor heard how many fights he'd been in, told him getting smacked as a kid was domestic abuse he should sue over, and marked him down as a psychopath.
From there it was industrial tiling in the mines and a proper welcome to manhood alongside wiry blokes with man strength, 18 hour shifts, poly welding out in the bush, then giving up two and a half grand a week for a $750 national parks traineeship he's never regretted. Twelve years on he's still a parks man, and part two digs into the national park yarns.
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The final chapter with Michael Crossland, and it opens with the scan that changed everything. Three years ago, busy again and skipping his checkups, Michael lay on a table while a trainee sonographer casually counted out loud: there's one there, another one, two more down there. He hadn't been told about any of them. Six more tumours in his throat, on top of the one from 2016, and a doctor once again telling him his tomorrows weren't guaranteed.
What he did next is the hardest part of this episode. He didn't tell his mum. He didn't tell his kids. His wife Mel played it cool while hurting more than anyone, and Michael kissed his babies goodbye at the airport having told them daddy was going away for some talks, knowing he might never hold them again. He told the surgeon he didn't care if he never spoke another word on stage, as long as he came home with nothing left in his throat. They took out all seven tumours plus a skin cancer they found on his shoulder mid surgery, and Michael walked out of that hospital completely cancer free.
The episode rounds out with news of the movie being made about his life, with producers attached and a Hollywood dream on the cards, Michael's answer on which actor should play him (his wife has a strong opinion involving a Hemsworth), and the most inspiring person he's ever shared a stage with. Not Branson, not the big names. His mum. If you've missed the earlier parts, go back to the start, because this series is something special.
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The full circle moments in this one are hard to believe. Ten days before the birth, Michael had reluctantly done a fundraiser for the Miracle Babies Foundation, a charity he’d never heard of. When he collapsed on the floor of level three, the woman who picked him up was the foundation’s CEO, and she told him everything was going to be okay. Then the man who spent four years of his childhood at Ronald McDonald House found himself living there again 30 years later with his own sick little boy. When sepsis hit and doctors said making it to the end of the week would be a miracle, Michael begged: take my house, my money, my career, everything I own, but please don’t take my little boy.

Five days later, his boy smiled. A Channel 9 interview and one cheeky question later, Michael raised $50,000 for recliners and medical fridges for the NICU before his cab made it back to the hospital. His son has since travelled the world with him, a healthy baby girl arrived in 2021, and Michael now has two little humans running around with his heart in their bodies. As Knuckles says, they could sit there all day.

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Part four with Michael Crossland starts with the promise kept. Years after losing his mum’s money in the GFC, he bought her a beautiful little home and put a pink ribbon on the door, told her he’d rented it for 12 months, then told her the truth: it was hers. No, he wasn’t rich. The bank lent him the money and he pays the mortgage every week.

Four weeks before he finally got his scans done, a surgeon speaking at the same health forum pulled him aside and said something didn’t look right about his throat. Four tumours. Your tomorrows aren’t guaranteed. And when his mum rang the second he walked out of that appointment, Michael got to use her exact words, 20 years later: the doctor told me everything’s going to be okay. He finally got the chance to carry the burden for her.

Then he postponed the surgery. If he was going to die, the book had to be finished so his wife and his mum were looked after. That book is now a bestseller in six countries with hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to charity. Surgeons removed three of the four tumours, but the fourth was wrapped around his vocal cord, the very thing that puts food on his family’s table. And just when you think that’s the story, he ends the episode with one line about finally walking in his mum’s shoes that sets up the biggest episode yet.
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Then came the part he calls one of the hardest of his story. When his parents separated, Michael invested his mum’s share of the settlement in a high risk portfolio to try and buy her a home. Six weeks later the global financial crisis hit and he lost everything she had, the money of the one person who’d sacrificed her whole life for his. What followed was rock bottom at a caravan park, bacterial meningitis, fluid on the brain and Bell’s palsy, learning to walk and talk again, and the darkest stretch of his life, with his wife refusing to leave his side.

Out of it came his why. Michael and his wife went to Haiti after the earthquake, rebuilt a school that now teaches 270 kids, and met an eight year old boy eating out of a bin who’d lost his whole family. Michael rebuilt his orphanage from the ground up, became a father figure to 44 kids, and that little boy has just graduated engineering with honours in the top 10 per cent of university students in the world. And as Knuckles says, we’re not even halfway through this story.
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