Former NRL star Ben Barba has spoken about his darkest days as a football player, how his glittering career unraveled and how his daughters saved him from taking his own life.
The troubled one-time Canterbury Bulldogs hero – who was forced to find work as a scaffolder and truck driver after his footy career ended – was once the toast of the NRL as the top try scorer of 2012, with a Dally M Medal in his back pocket.
Barba left the Bulldogs at the end of the 2013 season to spend a year with the Brisbane Broncos before a two-campaign stint with the Cronulla Sharks, but tested positive for cocaine in 2016 and was released by the club.
‘It got to the point of suicide where I would sit there and think I can’t do this no more,’ Barba told Andy Raymond’s Unfiltered podcast.
It’s sad, because it’s not just me, it’s (a lot of) society these days.
‘My (life) was a little bit more in the media and there were times there that I just wanted to end it all.
‘It’s easy to say this when you look at guys that do it, to say, it’s so weak.
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