Thomas Beattie spent years trying to get a recurring thought out of his head and it was a shattered skull that convinced him to leave it be.
He remembers everything so clearly — the ball, the bounce, the back of the other guy’s head, the crunch and the hundreds of tiny shards of bone floating behind his eyes. He remembers the pain and the seven surgeries and, most of all, he remembers a deeply personal epiphany that, five years on, has suddenly become a discussion point for strangers around the world.
First, to the accident. He was 29, an Englishman abroad.