All-In [28802]
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Interesting piece on ACL tears and increasing prevalence
Aug 4, 2015, 12:15 PM
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http://grantland.com/features/derrick-rose-rob-gronkowski-rise-acl-tears/
This part seems the most relevant for what Watson did last year (and the description of the way most ACL tears happen sounds exactly like what he did when he tried to cut up the field against GT)...
The Strange Case of DeJuan Blair
But Adrian Peterson, remarkable as he is, at least had ACLs. DeJuan Blair was already a schoolboy phenom in Pittsburgh when, the summer before ninth grade, he went up for a block and landed awkwardly on a concrete court, hearing the infamous “pop.” He had to crawl his way to the sideline, writhing. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with a bone bruise, but when he couldn’t walk, he got a second opinion: ACL tear. The Pittsburgh Steelers’ team physician performed his surgery. It was just about a year later, during the high school playoffs, that Blair batted the opening tipoff to an opposing player, raced down the court to block his shot, levitated, landed, and felt the pop again, this time in his left knee. He knew immediately. “That one was gone,” he remembers. There was another surgery. He was on painkillers for three months and would wake up in the middle of the night crying because he wasn’t sure he could make it back again.
“I wanted to give up on basketball,” he says, “but my mother and my father and my grandmother kept me going — and the love of the game.” He resolved that he would come back stronger. During his junior year, he wore two knee braces to help stabilize the knees, but even though he could play, there was that mental gremlin warning him that they could tear again.
Which is exactly what happened. He re-tore his right ACL in 11th grade dunking in his coach’s backyard. But this time he dared not go to the hospital because he feared what his parents would say about his trying to dunk on his fragile knees. So he went to a therapist and tried to work through the pain. He did. And then, just before his senior year, he was playing with his brothers on a concrete court in the Hill District, went up for a dunk, landed, and … pop! He limped home, holding in the agony, returned to the therapist, and somehow, the pain subsided. As Blair puts it now, “I was blessed.”
How blessed not even he knew. He became an All-American at Pittsburgh and runner-up to Blake Griffin as College Player of the Year, then left after his sophomore season to pursue his dream of playing in the NBA. It was at the draft camp in Chicago that his knees were X-rayed and the radiologist delivered the news: Blair had been playing without ACLs. Even Blair said he was “amazed.” He knew he had reinjured the knees, but said he had no idea he had actually torn the ACLs again. Charger quarterback Philip Rivers had played in the 2008 AFC championship game without a right ACL, Pittsburgh wide receiver Hines Ward had played without a left ACL. But no one had ever had a professional career without any ACLs.
Of course, once teams heard, his draft stock plummeted. Expected to go in the first round, he fell to 37 and the San Antonio Spurs, where he played his way into the rotation. There are several theories of what enabled Blair to play when his knees should have been slipping and sliding. The most convincing is that Blair spent so much time building his quads, hamstrings, and calf muscles that they grew oversize enough to stabilize the knee. Blair himself says he had always worked diligently on his legs — at 6-foot-7 and 270 pounds, he is built like a Transformer — and that he never felt any pain after those first torments or played the game any differently from when he had ACLs. As for the mental part, since he didn’t know he didn’t have functional ACLs, there was nothing to overcome. Now he is on the Mavericks, playing solid minutes and putting up good numbers.
He says, not unreasonably, that his life would make a good movie.
Message was edited by: camcgee®
Message was edited by: camcgee®
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