Proper True Yarn

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.

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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Part two with Michael Crossland picks up where the trial drug left off. The doctors said he'd never go to school, never play sport, and if he reached his teenage years it'd be a miracle. His mum told him everything was going to be okay and sent him to school anyway.

School turned out harder than hospital. No hair, no eyelashes, bandages over the burns, a nebuliser at every recess, and not a single day he didn't cop it from the other kids. Then, laid up after his first heart attack at just 12 years old, a get well card arrived from his class. Buried in the nice messages were four words he can still see clearly today: hope you die, Steve. What that card taught him about whose words get to weigh you down, and what's really in your cup when life bumps you, became the foundation of everything he now shares on stage.

From a 22 student primary school to a 1200 student high school, from being told he'd never play sport again to making the under 16 Australian baseball team two years later, Michael ends up on a full ride scholarship in Texas at 17, telling American girls his cancer scar came off a crocodile's tail. Six months in, he slid into second base, woke up in hospital, and at 18 it was all over. And as he says, that's only the start of it.

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This week Knuckles sits down with Michael Crossland, one of Australia’s most in demand inspirational speakers, who made the trip up from Coffs Harbour to share the parts of his story he never tells on stage. Fair warning, Knuckles was in tears two minutes in, and this is only part one.

Diagnosed at 11 months old with stage four neuroblastoma and sent home with a 96 per cent death rate, Michael’s life was shaped by his mum’s decision to see it as 4 per cent full instead of 96 per cent empty. Chemo started on his first birthday. Then came the 11 hour train rides between Sydney and Coffs Harbour, an 11 kilo tumour wrapped around his heart, and his mum carrying him into surgery because the doctors told her it might be the last time she held her little boy alive.

When the treatment stopped working, the family signed onto an experimental drug being trialled on 25 kids around the world. Within a day they were all in the burns unit, wrapped in bandages and laid in ice baths, burning from the outside in. Within 90 days, 24 of the 25 were gone. Michael was the only survivor, and he’ll tell you he’s one of the lucky ones, not because he lived, but because he wasn’t his mum.

Find Michael’s speaking work and his bestselling book Everything Will Be OK at michaelcrossland.com

The tables get turned this week as Knuckles puts Zak Palmas, the man behind the cam, in front of it for some proper true yarns from growing up on a cane farm outside Ingham, North Queensland.

First up, the story of two 16 year old mates who couldn’t find a car to get from a bush doof into town, so they took a lawnmower instead. Twenty minutes of road, a pair of L plates, and a phone call to the cops later, both of them were done for drink driving and ended up on the news.

Then the big one. Zak was slashing water furrows in the dry season when a worn slip clutch threw sparks into a trash-covered paddock, and by the time he noticed, the tractor wheels were already hot. What follows is a flat-out sprint, a one-man water tanker hookup that should’ve been impossible, and every farmer in the district turning up unasked to cut breaks and save the uncut cane. His dad’s favourite tractor didn’t make it, but as the boys say, you can get another tractor, you can’t get another life.

A 22 seater fixed wing, four hours, no toilet, and you can't stand up in it. That was the ride home every swing.

So the boys would hit the bottle-o before the hangar, sink tins waiting for the plane, keep going once they were on it, and bring an empty Gatorade bottle for the obvious reason. One bloke had about six beers after a ten hour shift, filled his bottle, and kept going. The plane sits on a slight angle. Everyone's in boots so nobody notices. The admin lady up the front had her shoes off.

That's the flight they got banned from drinking on. They drank anyway.

Then the other one. They flew directly into one of the biggest dust storms in New South Wales history, dropped what Zak reckons was a thousand feet in one hit, and the bloke next to him wasn't belted in. Zak watched him go into the roof and stay there. He watched the pilots come out of their seats. He rang his mum. Fifteen minutes of it, a crosswind landing at 45 degrees, a go around straight back into it, and a pilot of 35 years standing on the tarmac afterwards saying that was the worst turbulence he'd ever experienced and he thought they were dead.

Cheers, cunt. So did we.

Which is why the episode ends where it does. When they tell you to belt up, it isn't because they're wankers.

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Zak spent years underground before he got into coal, and the mine he won't name was the most eye opening job of his life.

There was a bloke dealing gear out of a lunchbox in the workshop. There was a group of them at it, and they never got caught, because between them they had fake dicks and bottles of clean piss ready to go. Right up until the day the site tested everyone in the morning, brought them all back up to the surface mid shift, and tested them again.

There's a fitter knocking on Zak's door at four in the morning holding an oil sample bottle. There's a bloke sitting in a jumbo in his jocks because it was too hot, doing racks, because he was bored waiting for a sparky. There's a fist fight that broke out beside Zak while he had his hands in a thousand volt cabinet. There's a store lady, a diesel fitter, and a set of cameras that nobody told them about.

And there's a leading hand who was asked to fill a condom, filled it right to the brim, and got it slapped straight back across him.

Underneath all of it: Zak started having nightmares about the roof coming in. That's why he moved to coal.

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Drake has cycled more money through a betting account in one month than most towns are worth, and he still can't pick a winner.

Zak's got Google out and we're going through the whole lot. A 37% strike rate. $770k on Canada. $1.5 million on Argentina to beat Spain, and Spain get up 1-0 in extra time. A million dollars on Argentina to beat France in 2022. Argentina win, and he still loses on a technicality. And then the one that started the whole curse conversation: a million on Conor McGregor against Max Holloway at UFC 329, and Conor's leg goes seconds into the comeback.

The UFC and boxing list is brutal. Tyson. Usyk. Tommy Fury. Adesanya. He does win occasionally, Izzy in the rematch and Jon Jones by submission, but the man once posted a screenshot showing $124.5 million wagered in thirty days.

Then we go looking for the biggest punts ever laid. Mattress Mack turning a $3 million bet into $75 million US when the Astros took the 2022 World Series, which is $117 million in real money. And a bloke in 1980 who walked into the Horseshoe with a suitcase holding $777,000, put the lot on one roll of the dice, and won.

Baked beans or rib fillet. The choice is yours.

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