TOUGH BREAK: Luth Howell was paralysed after a motorbike accident when he was 22 – it didn't derail his pool game though and now the 36-year-old from Campbells Creek will represent Australia in blackball pool. Picture: NONI HYETT
He shouldn’t be alive – yet a Campbells Creek man who cheated death twice is set to become the country’s first wheelchair representative in a cue sport later this year.
Luth Howell will join Cody Lawson and Dave Rynn in a three-man contingent from Castlemaine heading to Ireland in October with the Australian team to compete at the 2016 World Blackball Championships.
Mr Howell narrowly missed his first appointment with the grim reaper when his skull was crushed in a tractor accident on a farm in the Tasmanian highlands. He was four-years-old. Eighteen-years later his motorbike slammed into the side of a truck which pulled out onto the highway near Cranbourne.
“I was given between six- to 12-hours to live after that one,” he said.
“I broke my spine in six places, I broke my left wrist in nine places and my right wrist in three places.”
“I broke 10 ribs, had a collapsed lung, a bruised heart.”
That was 16-years ago.
After three weeks on a ventilator and seven months in hospital the former brickie’s labourer was told he would live the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
But Mr Howell was never one to sit idle and wasted no time getting back to work.
“I’ve always got to be doing something and getting back to work really helped … it made me feel more normal,” he said.
He spent the next nine years working the bar at Castlemaine’s Railway Hotel, where he now captains the pub’s pool team – ‘The Undertakers.’
“It’s fair to say I’m a pretty familiar face at the Railway now,” he said.
But Mr Howell has remained restless, he quit bar work several years ago to study a diploma in business administration and now works at the Maldon hospital.
Not that it has soured the relationship with the Railway, the pub has agreed to come on board as the major sponsor as the three pool sharks look to raise the funds needed to get them from Castlemaine to Killarney to take on the best in the world.
“We’ll be taking on professionals – guys who play six, seven days a week – so we are expecting stiff competition,” Mr Howell said.
“But I’m a pretty confident sort of person ... anybody can beat anybody on their day.
“And if I don’t win, well it will be a great learning experience.”
'It is a daunting prospect, but it will be a brilliant experience,' Dave Rynn says on representing Australia for the first time.