Former All Black Sonny Bill Williams says he has had successful open-heart surgery.<\/p>\n
In a long video documenting the health issue on his YouTube channel, the 41-year-old Williams said he discovered he had been born with a heart defect after going for a routine checkup following a neck operation.<\/p>\n
In footage taken after heart surgery, Williams said it was a success and that he was making it his \u201cmission\u201d to raise awareness of the need to take heart checks.<\/p>\n
Williams started out as a rugby league player, becoming a superstar in the 13-man code, before switching to 15-man rugby union and winning the World Cup twice with the All Blacks, in 2011 and 2015.<\/p>\n
He retired from both rugby codes in 2021 and has since taken up professional boxing, his most recent heavyweight fight coming last year.<\/p>\n
Williams said doctors told him that having a heart defect would have affected his sporting career.<\/p>\n
\u201cUpon reflecting, I feel like toward my late 20s, I definitely felt like I couldn’t get as fit as I used to,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe doctors both said,\u201d he added, \u201cit is a miracle that you found it (the defect) because it’s a case of a perfectly fit-looking person dropping dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking from inside the hospital, Williams said he has a \u201cbetter heart than when I walked in here\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former All Black Sonny Bill Williams says he has had successful open-heart surgery. In a long video documenting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[789,111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-639661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-all-blacks","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}