DANIEL Menzel has spoken of “the worst phone call I’ve received in my life” after a training mishap in late 2012 resulted in his third knee reconstruction.

Menzel and the Cats had been confident he had escaped major damage after his left knee was twisted in a tackling drill. But a surgical opinion confirmed he needed another round of reconstructive surgery, leaving Dr Chris Bradshaw the task of delivering the crushing news.

“I’ll never forget it, it’s the worst phone call I’ve ever received in my life,” Menzel says in his two-part documentary Dan Menzel: A Long Way Home, which airs on Fox Footy on Tuesday night.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it the whole way home, I bawled my eyes out the whole way home. “I thought, ‘how is this happening again?’, we thought we were in the clear a little bit but as it turned out we weren’t.

“I didn’t want to call Mum, I didn’t want to tell anyone, it’s just one of those ones where you don’t want to tell anyone. It’s not a good phone call to make.”

Menzel and the Cats opted for the LARS option hoping for a shorter rehabilitation after the drain of two traditional rehabs in as many years. Despite a smooth rehab, the graft snapped two games into his VFL comeback in 2013, resulting in his fourth reconstruction.

Menzel recalls his teammates’ faces when they arrived at the club from an interstate trip to learn he had suffered another setback, this time potentially career-threatening.

media_camera Daniel Menzel faced a tough road.

“They all walk in and you look at their faces straight away and it looks like someone has died, the expression on their faces,” he said. “Straight away I feel like, ‘what have I done again?’.

“You actually feel like you’ve let people down, in a way, the amount of people who have supported you and the amount of people who have done so much for you, it’s happened again and you go through so many emotions.”

Part one of Dan Menzel: A Long Way Home airs tomorrow night at 8.30pm on FoxFooty. Part two is on Wednesday night at 8.30pm. It documents the long and emotional journey surrounding Menzel’s return to senior footy from four knee reconstructions.

MENZEL SHINES ON BLEAKEST OF NIGHTS

Geelong coach Chris Scott, teammates Andrew Mackie and Nathan Vardy, former AFL player Wayne Schwass, brother Troy Menzel and club physio Mark Young detail some of the dark times in Menzel’s four-year battle.