One painful reminder what athletes endure
IWISH I had a better story to tell … except, come to think of it, Alex Smith and Gordon Hayward do have better stories to tell and would probably give anything not to be able to tell them.
I didn’t break my leg in two places leaping to a basket, as Hayward did. I didn’t break it by making a brave, gladiatorial move, as Smith did. I broke my leg last Dec. 6 because I was trying to rush out of my house and tripped over my 14-pound West Highland Terrier, Fiona.
It isn’t until it happens to you that you realize just how much time — acres of it — you have on your hands when you’re out on your feet. Lying on the floor of my living room, Fiona and her Airedale brother, Desmond, trying to provide what comfort they could. Lying in an X-Ray room, trying to read the expressions of the poker-faced technicians, the half-deaf, septuagenarian doctor on call finally breaking the silence by exclaiming:
“HOLY [EXPLETIVE], THAT’S WORSE THAN I THOUGHT!”
It’s not at all fun, the things that creep into your mind and your imagination when you have nothing but time on your hands. Fifty weeks later, back on my feet, a permanent rod implanted in my lower right leg (“The biggest rod I’ve ever used!” my surgeon cheerily reported as the anesthesia wore off, which provided an odd sense of comfort), it’s easy to laugh at the things — morbid, morose, nonsensical, it runs a full gamut — that fill your brain in those moments.
But 50 weeks later, I am also thankful for having gone through the often tedious process of walker-to-crutches-to-cane, one-legged hopping to two-legged rehab, of wondering if I would ever really be able to put my full weight on the leg again. As a sports columnist, I am around injuries all the time. I am around athletes recovering from surgeries constantly. I have tried for years to understand the pain and the fear that overtakes them during their comebacks.
I just never really understood.
Not until I was lying on my floor, the lower portion of my leg pointing in a di- rection it was never supposed to point. Later, the surgeon would show the Xrays to my wife, point to the separate fractures and say, “This one is clean, but this one is circular — see how it looks like a candy cane?”
I am grateful my wife told the doctor to keep those pictures from me.
But I am also grateful, in a very strange way, for having endured that. It wouldn’t make me strong enough to watch the images, just in the past few weeks, of Caris LeVert dislocating his foot in Minneapolis, or of Smith mangling his leg in Washington — there are few stomachs strong enough to watch those, short of those that have spent time in med school.
I can appreciate, more than ever, what it takes for an athlete to endure the long, lonely road back to health in a way I never could before. It has been a solid decade or three since I could even remotely identify myself as an “athlete” without a self-deprecating chuckle, but that doesn’t really matter. If you’ve spent 20 minutes grinding on an AlterG antigravity treadmill, you know. You understand.
It’s why I root like hell every time I see Hayward on a floor, even though — actually, especially because — he isn’t quite where he used to be as a player yet. It’s why I marveled every time I watched Jacob deGrom pitch this year — not just for the opportunity to watch his real-time brilliance, but knowing there was a Tommy John surgery in his past, knowing there had to have been thousands of hours in his life when he feared — or, worse, knew — it was over for him, but kept rehabbing just the same.
It’s why I stayed with that amazing Red Sox-Dodgers World Series Game 3 even as it crept toward 3:30 a.m., watching Nathan Eovaldi ( two Tommy Johns in the books for him) chucking 98mph fastballs inning after inning.
It’s why I’ll make every effort to be there in a few months when LeVert returns from his foot injury, why I will be thinking every day of Alex Smith dragging himself onto a PT table for heat compresses and ice packs and all the torturous details in between that’ll get him back on his feet and — with luck — back on a football field someday.
As always, it is my great privilege to be grateful for so many things this Thanksgiving Day, and to wish you a wonderful and prosperous holiday. I just have a different prism this time around, where I see great athletes try to be great again, and even more the rest of us non-athletes trying to walk straight again.