{"id":196537,"date":"2025-10-08T01:36:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T01:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/196537\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T01:36:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T01:36:12","slug":"comedian-dave-hughes-recalls-near-death-experience-at-afl-legends-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/196537\/","title":{"rendered":"Comedian Dave Hughes recalls ‘near-death’ experience at AFL Legends game"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave Hughes<\/a> has opened up about his injury at the AFL Legends<\/a> game that had him “near-death”<\/a>, sending him to the ICU.<\/p>\n

The comedian, known as ‘Hughesy<\/a>‘, was playing in the AFL Legends Match for Prostate Cancer at Marvel Stadium five weeks ago when he was ‘targeted’ by a number of former AFL players on the field, later going to hospital and finding out he had five broken ribs and a potentially deadly punctured lung.<\/p>\n

The 54-year-old spoke about the experience on The KIIS Network’s Will & Woody show<\/a> last night.<\/p>\n

Watch the video above.\ufeff<\/p>\n

Dave Hughes would up in intensive care after a charity AFL match went wrong. (Supplied\/@The Fox)<\/p>\n

“I nearly died but I’m going to say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. So, it was a real moment,” he declared.<\/p>\n

“On the night, I looked like I was at death’s door but some people thought I was bunging it on, and so I didn’t go to hospital on the night.”<\/p>\n

The next morning, his constant groaning led to his wife Lisa taking him to a Melbourne hospital at 5am, where they did an X-ray and figured out what his condition was. \ufeff<\/p>\n

“My first thought was not for my own safety. My first thought was, ‘Let’s get the media involved here and start doing interviews’,” he said jokingly.<\/p>\n

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The comedian and broadcaster played in a charity AFL match that almost killed him. (Getty)<\/p>\n

The radio star did in fact start doing interviews from his hospital bed.<\/p>\n

“I did about seven radio interviews and then Channel Seven were on their way in,” he said.<\/p>\n

“It was just going to be a great morning for me. I was chock-a-block full of morphine, having the best time of my life, and then the bosses of the hospital came down.”<\/p>\n

The comedian thought, ‘They’re going to give me flowers for putting their hospital in the spotlight’. It was an intervention; they said, “You’ve got to stop doing media interviews in ICU.”<\/p>\n

\"DaveHughes was taken to Cabrini Hospital in Melbourne. (Instagram\/@dhughesy)<\/p>\n

“I said, ‘You don’t know what heals me, do you? This heals me. You take that away and I might as well kill me now’,” he shouted.<\/p>\n

He ended on a cavalier note, “So breathing is an issue at the moment, but still, apart from that, life’s great.”<\/p>\n

During his interviews in hospital, the comedian even named the player he thought left him in his condition.<\/p>\n

For a daily dose of 9honey, subscribe to our newsletter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Meat<\/a><\/p>\n

Meat Loaf’s disastrous AFL set truth revealed years later<\/p>\n

A breathless and heavily medicated Hughesy was being interviewed on Triple M’s<\/a> Mick in the Morning and Fifi, Fev & Nick radio shows from hospital and admitted he thought he might die after copping a brutal hit from former West Coast Eagles player Andrew Embley early in the game.\ufeff<\/p>\n

He blamed this for breaking his ribs.<\/p>\n

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“The ribs were cracked in the first incident with Andrew Embley,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Embley came in from the side. It was the first collision, and from that moment I was struggling.”<\/p>\n

He also said former Gold Coast and Carlton player Daniel Gorringe “slammed me in the ruck” before Mitch ‘Robbo’ Robinson targeted him.<\/p>\n

“And Robbo, after I kicked the goal [hit me], I thought, ‘Am I going to die out here?’<\/p>\n

\"DaveHughes later appeared in a wheelchair on The Front Bar. (Instagram\/@thefrontbar7)<\/p>\n

“I kicked a goal, celebrated for just a second, and then Robbo smashed me.<\/p>\n

“The crowd wanted me to go back out there; I would have died.”<\/p>\n

FOLLOW US ON WHATSAPP HERE<\/a>: Stay across all the latest in celebrity, lifestyle and opinion via our WhatsApp channel. No comments, no algorithm and nobody can see your private details.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dave Hughes has opened up about his injury at the AFL Legends game that had him “near-death”, sending…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-196537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-afl","8":"tag-afl","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-australian-football-league","12":"tag-australianfootballleague","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}