Mum suspected tough son injured

Sam McKendry's mum, Ray Sowter, is used to seeing her son put his body on the line in rugby league games.

She watches every one of his games on television and could tell the former Dargaville lad and Kiwi and Penrith Panthers front rower had been hurt during the Panthers' NRL win over the Parramatta Eels in Sydney on Monday.

But at that stage no one, not even the hardy prop himself, knew he was playing with a broken neck. He had a stable C6 vertebrae fracture and played on in two stints during the game.

"Obviously during the game I knew he was hurt, so I texted him straight away after the game," Ms Sowter said.

He replied, "Oh no, Mum, I've done something to my shoulder."

McKendry, 23, played through two stints against the Eels with the fracture - having sustained the injury early in the first half when he tried a tackle on Parramatta centre Jacob Loko. He went off but returned to the field in the second half and played on again for 14 minutes, until he noticed numbness in his arm.

After the game he was "still pumped up with adrenalin and wasn't really feeling much pain".

"I just thought I had a bit of a stinger in the shoulder," he is reported saying. "That's about it ... It wasn't until I watched the video, and saw that I went in with my head, that I thought I might need to get some scans."

He was to see a specialist about the injury yesterday, Ms Sowter said.

She said she worried more about her son getting injured since his jaw-breaking effort in the last minutes of a test between the Kiwis and the Welsh at Wembley, London, 18 months ago.

McKendry also showed his hard-man side then, playing on after a shoulder charge left him with a clean break on the point of the jaw, fractures on one side and his bottom teeth about a centimetre out of alignment. He underwent three hours of surgery later that night and was off the field for 10 weeks.

It is not known yet how long the neck fracture will keep him out of play.