The day Durante survived gun shot
Andrew Durante was reaching his arm through the sleeve of his jacket when he felt the bullet shoot through his chest.
Initially he thought someone had thrown a rock at him, after being substituted from the field during a trial match for Sydney Olympic’s reserves team. He even remembers laughing about it.
But when one of his Olympic team-mates noticed the blood stains on Durante’s white playing shirt, he knew something was seriously wrong.
‘‘My dad lifted up my shirt and I had this blood dripping down my chest and he was like ‘you’ve been shot’,’’ Durante said.
‘‘Then obviously there was a bit of a frenzy and everyone was screaming ‘he’s been shot, he’s been shot’. The game got scrapped and everyone ran to the changing rooms at the opposite end of the field.’’
The Wellington Phoenix captain was just 17 when he was shot by a .22 caliber rifle during a trial game at Mahoney Park in Sydney’s inner west. Although he luckily escaped without any serious injuries and would later become one of the best defenders the A-League has seen, he said it was still a very traumatic experience to go through, especially at such a young age.
‘‘I was thinking the worst. It came through my chest but on an angle and the bullet lodged under my armpit. I could actually feel it lodged under there so the doctor gave me a local, did an incision and pulled it out. I think it was a .22 calibre rifle. There was a big inquiry, the police got involved.
‘‘I asked if I could keep the bullet but they wouldn’t let me, but that was it. It wasn’t a real big setback in my career, I got stitched up and played a week or two later. For sure if it went straight in or on the opposite side maybe I could have died. Going on that angle it probably saved me a lot of other complications.’’
The little-known story of the day Durante was shot on the football field resurfaced on the weekend when Twitter user Mark Boric posted a photo of a news article that was originally published in the Australian and British Soccer Weekly when the incident occurred in 1999.
Astonishingly, Durante has largely kept the incredible tale to himself, revealing that barely any of his Phoenix team-mates were even aware that it happened until the weekend.
In fact, he said close friends Vince Lia, Manny Muscat and Glen Moss were probably the only players who did know.
‘‘I never found a time for it to be brought up, like ‘hey I got shot’. Not that I’ve tried to hide it, it’s just something that’s never really popped up and it’s not something I thought to bring up,’’ he said.
‘‘But I actually got in contact with the guy who posted it on Twitter to ask where the hell he got that article. I’ve got it somewhere at my parents’ place I’m sure, but for him to have found it is pretty amazing.
‘‘He said he was just going through some old articles in the Australian and British Soccer Weekly and he said he saw it and thought it was pretty cool that I was still playing.
‘‘At the time it was pretty big news but I guess it’s just something that has never come up again. I think it did make the news but it wasn’t like it would be nowadays when there would be a big article on it and everyone would pick it up. Back then there was no social media and very little online media.’’
Durante said police never found the perpetrator but that another shooting had been reported at a neighbouring golf course earlier that day.
‘‘There was probably just some idiot up there shooting from his house or up on the street taking random pop shots at people.
‘‘I remember the players saying when they were interviewed that they heard things whistling past their heads but they didn’t know what they were so it could have been so much worse than what it was but fortunately it wasn’t that bad.’’
Now in his 11th season with the Phoenix, the club’s longestserving player is set to host a testimonial dinner at the Alan Gibbs Centre at Wellington College on March 23. He has invited many of his former team-mates as special guests including Lia, Muscat, Paul Ifill and Ben Sigmund, and said the evening will be chance to reflect on his decade-long career in Wellington.