By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The 2019 Rugby World Cup winner and Bulls winger Sbu Nkosi says he is ready to relaunch his career after a period of darkness that almost stole his life and his rugby.
Nkosi spoke out for the first time about his return to rugby and exactly what led him to disappear for a few weeks and sparked a widespread search for him back in November and December of 2022.
He was later found at his father’s house in Emalahleni, Witbank in Mpumalanga.
“I’m feeling myself again, my spirit is revived,” Nkosi said in a Bulls interview.
“I almost felt like a shadow of the man that I was supposed to be. And I needed to take a step back to fix that before it became a problem.
“There’s no specific moment I can point to where it all began but I do think there are significant triggers along the journey. This absolutely vile energy building up. It all started back when I was at the Sharks, in the last few months of my stint there.
“And then I came here to this beautiful environment you know and it got me up, it got me up … amazing players, good coaches and the people upstairs also here for us. It lifted me. And at some point everything just started becoming heavy again.”
According to Nkosi it felt like bad luck just compounded the situation and that he was fighting negative energy that was all around him constantly, but he could not see it.
He struggled to see things clearly and from there, he says, things started to spiral.
Nkosi referenced his broken rib that kept him from the Springboks Year-end tour to Europe in 2022 as one of the instances of bad luck and thereafter it just “kept raining”.