Source : ABC NEWS
Massimo De Lutiis spent his summer break before year 11 a little differently to most.
The Southport School product had just watched future Queensland Reds teammate Zane Nonggorr lift the trophy to cap a dominant GPS rugby campaign.
“I wasn’t anything special, didn’t have an athletic bone in my body,” the 21-year-old said ahead of the Reds’ preseason tour of the United Kingdom.
“Watching Zane … I was like, ‘I want to be that.’
“So I said to myself, ‘My time’s now.'”
The big-bodied student “spent all his money” on a home gym, moved his bed into his basement and for eight weeks did workouts twice a day, emerging only to run on the beach twice a week.
“I didn’t see a single friend, barely saw the sun,” he recalled of his origin story.
“But I just shot up and it was all worth it. When I came back to school all my friends were like, ‘What the hell, look at you. You’re massive.’
“And I made the first XV.”
A quad injury before last season denied him a Super Rugby Pacific debut, but De Lutiis has since impressed in Reds off-season games in Japan and Tonga, as well as for an Australia XV against England A in November.
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He was the only player in the 40-man Wallabies squad assembled this month that hadn’t played a Test under Joe Schmidt last year.
Strength is De Lutiis’s strength, and the evidence is overwhelming, his 202.5-kilogram bench press last April an unofficial Queensland all-sport record.
“He’s an awesome young kid, head screwed on and mutant strong,” Reds and Wallabies hooker Matt Faessler said.
“He may be an outlier, given the footy he’s playing at 21 considering tightheads don’t really peak until their late 20s.
“He’s going to be someone’s name that you probably hear quite a bit in the years to come.”
That will likely be in Wallabies gold, De Lutiis revealing Irish blood on his mother’s side to go with his father’s Italian roots in a three-way eligibility stoush that was avoided when the prop ran out for the Australian XV last year.
“I live here, so want to play for Australia and it’s always been my dream,” he said.
He’s not all brawn though, keen to master the art of the scrum with the help of Faessler and other old Reds like Nonggorr and Jeffery Toomaga-Allen.
“I’m not hear to set lifting records, I’m here to play rugby,” he said.
“You can be as strong as you want, but especially scrum wise, if you don’t have the technique you’ll get done over.
“So I try not to buy into that (hype), there is extraordinary players everywhere, so what makes me so special, really.
“Everyone’s going to have their best day, and their worst, and someone’s always gunning for you.”
AAP
