It was a Saturday night in October 2002, and Jason McCartney was in Bali. He and his North Melbourne teammate were heading towards the Sari Club when they crossed the road. The noise was too loud. They wanted to actually hear each other. Twenty minutes later, a suicide bomber detonated inside the club they had just walked away from. Then the car bomb went off out front.
“I thought I’d been shot,” Jason told me. “Playing footy at the elite level for twelve, thirteen years to that stage. I’d never been hit that hard.”
Burns to fifty per cent of his body. Perforated eardrums. Shrapnel injuries. Blinded temporarily by the flash. He pulled himself off the ground, found a girl from Melbourne he half-knew in the chaos, and they guided each other out through the smoke, tripping, he realised later, not on rubble but on people.
He was thirty-two years old and had been given a second life.
What happened in the months that followed is one of the most remarkable recovery stories Australian sport has produced. But when I sat down with Jason recently, what struck me most was not the physical comeback. It was the architecture of his mind. How it was built, over decades, and why it held when everything else collapsed.
Hardiness Is Built, Not Borrowed
There is a word Jason uses that I have been thinking about ever since. Hardiness. He is deliberate about it. Resilience, he reckons, has become flat. Bouncing back is only half the story. Hardiness is a stable personality trait built around commitment, control, and challenge – a proactive mindset that converts stressors into growth opportunities rather than threats. It points forward, not just back.
And hardiness is not something you are issued at birth. It is constructed through exposure, through managed difficulty, through setbacks absorbed and processed over time.
Jason’s was built in Nhill, a country Victorian town of 2,500 people halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide. He rode his bike everywhere, worked alongside his father, played every sport available. By sixteen he was already playing senior football. When Collingwood drafted him, an Essendon supporter getting called up by the Magpies, he arrived already tempered.
Then AFL stripped him back down anyway. Seven years across Collingwood and Adelaide, around 75 games, barely enough to show what he had. By the end of his time at Adelaide, he thought he was done.
Then Dennis Pike walked into his house in West Lakes with a sheet of paper listing everything Jason did well. Not everything he needed to fix. Everything he did well.
“I’d lost a lot of belief,” Jason said. “That resonated with me.”
Pause on that for a moment. The science on feedback and self-efficacy is unambiguous: negative-heavy feedback loops do not motivate high performers, they erode them. What Pike did in that lounge room was simple. He reflected back capability rather than deficit. A career that was effectively over started again.
Six years at North Melbourne followed. Jason describes them as the period where he finally got the best out of himself.
What the Whiteboard in Intensive Care Teaches Leaders About Structure
After Bali, Jason was flown back to Melbourne in a coma. Burns across half his body. Doctors told him five to ten weeks in hospital, minimum.
He asked for a whiteboard.
“I’ve got to be out of intensive care in two weeks,” he told his physio, Henrietta. “I need to mark it down.”
This was not denial. It was the athlete’s instinct for structured goal-setting applied to the most confronting situation imaginable. A long-term anchor, the wedding in December, with milestones mapped backwards from there. Short-term markers to create momentum and a sense of agency in a situation that could otherwise feel completely out of control.
He got out of intensive care in two weeks. Out of hospital in four. He walked. Then he ran; less than fifty metres the first time, in Fawkner Park outside the Alfred, legs nearly giving out. The wedding went ahead as planned.
Self-efficacy, Albert Bandura’s construct, is the belief in your ability to manage or influence a situation. Jason would not have framed it that way from his hospital bed. But that is precisely what he was building. Every small milestone ticked off fed the belief that the next milestone was possible.
When he first ran again, he turned to Henrietta and asked what was next. She sat him down and told him that was it for the day. He was furious, until she reframed it. Burns like his were the physiological equivalent of a triple bypass. He needed a different model for progress.
That, he said, was the light bulb moment. Not pushing harder. Understanding the actual nature of the challenge.
Culture Is Infrastructure, Not a Values Exercise
Jason has spent nine years at Greater Western Sydney. When I asked about leadership, he redirected immediately away from the coach-as-tactician model.
“The work’s done during the week,” he said. “There’s not that much a coach can consciously do on game day.”
What he describes is a player-led leadership model: building a critical mass of leaders throughout the group who are genuine extensions of the coaching philosophy. Leaders who hold the standard in moments the coaching staff never see. Leaders who create accountability laterally rather than waiting for it to come from the top.
GWS draws almost all its players from outside Sydney. Three locals in the current men’s program. Every recruit relocates. That makes culture and environment not a nice thing to have but an operational necessity. If the environment does not feel right, talent leaves. Given the salary cap means every club’s playing group is roughly equivalent in talent, culture becomes the differentiator.
The same is true in any competitive talent market. Culture is not a feel-good concept. It is the structural condition that determines whether your people perform, stay, or leave.
Jason keeps coming back to one idea: water what you want to grow. Reinforce the behaviours you want to see more of. Save the hard conversations for one-on-one. Publicly reinforce what you want to reproduce. He admits he still catches himself reverting to old habits with his own kids. Awareness, he says, is the start.
The Processing Never Ends. It Just Gets Better Managed.
Jason worked with a psychologist after Bali. He resisted it initially. He is equally clear it was one of the best decisions he made.
“Address the situation as soon as you can,” he said, “because then you have the opportunity to get some control back before it becomes uncontrollable.”
He went back to Bali while still recovering, before playing his first practice match. Exposure therapy: confronting the sights, sounds, and smells in a controlled way rather than letting avoidance calcify around the experience.
His teammate Mick McMahon was with him that night and was not physically injured in the same way. But the mental scars went far deeper. Mick was exposed to more, processed less, got help later. The physical injury, counterintuitively, gave Jason structure. A body to rehabilitate. A timeline. Milestones. Mick had no such scaffold.
I think about that in the context of the leaders I work with. Setback without structure becomes rumination. Difficulty without meaning becomes trauma. The job, for yourself and for the people you lead, is to build the scaffold while the building is still on fire.
Jason turned fifty-two recently. He walked past the Alfred Hospital and let himself sit with the thought: without the people inside that building, there would be no fifty-second birthday. No family. No nine years at GWS. No grand final tilt to chase.
That kind of perspective does not make you soft. In my experience, it makes you harder than almost anything else.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew May is a performance scientist, author, and keynote speaker. As founder of Performance Intelligence, he works with senior leaders and organisations across Australia to build the systems, culture, and mindset that make high performance sustainable. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast. To enquire about Andrew’s keynotes or explore Performance Intelligence’s corporate programs, visit performanceintelligence.com.
REFERENCES
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W.H. Freeman and Company.
Kobasa, S.C. (1979). Stressful life events, personality, and health: An inquiry into hardiness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 1–11.
Maddi, S.R. (2013). Hardiness: Turning stressful circumstances into resilient growth. Springer.
