“It was just stupid, what I did. It was day one and I just got excited, and thought, ‘I’ll just paddle out there’. I should’ve gone to the more intermediate section to the right of the beach, but I didn’t.”

The Giants skipper was on holiday in Uluwatu, Bali where he proposed to his partner of four years, Georgia Stirton. But what was a momentous occasion very nearly turned to tragedy.

“I came home, and they go, ‘Where’s your board?’ and I go: It’s gone, it’s in the rocks somewhere. I was just sort of coming back to life, like, ‘Gee, that was close’.”

Greene jokingly quipped that his surfing drama wasn’t his only close shave, with a dose of “Bali Belly”, the infamous traveller’s diarrhoea, having left him floored.