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By Root 693 0

thinking, “Oh, this ain’t so bad physically.” But after my second year, when I started playing more than 30 minutes a game, it changed. When you start playing killer minutes you notice. You feel the toll that all those minutes, all that jumping and running and banging, are taking on your body. I remember my sense of it changing to “Man, this is damaging my body.” You hit the wall as a rookie, but that’s fatigue from never having had to play so many minutes and so many games in college. But pain is different. It’s much worse. You dislocate a finger two or three times a season, and after a while your fingers aren’t pointing in the same direction. Six times I’ve been operated on. Both knees have been ’scoped multiple times. I had to have my torn triceps repaired, then my quad at the end of my career. You feel an obligation to play anyway, especially the stars in any sport, because you know how much your teammates are depending on you, you know how much the fans are hoping to see you play; that’s why they pay all that money for those tickets. You want to be out there because you want your team to win and you know how difficult that is if you’re the best player, or one of the two best players, and you’re unable to play. But the overlooked thing is how management rushes athletes back to play. They’re notorious for it.

Anytime an athlete gets injured, you hear or read the next day that he’ll be out two to three weeks or four to six weeks, or some specific period of time. That’s based on what the team physician and trainers tell him. So they tell you that you’ll be out four to six weeks—everybody knows because it’s in the newspaper and on TV—but after you miss one week they start asking you, “How long are you going to be out?” And you’re thinking, “You just told every reporter in the world I’m going to be out four to six weeks, so why are you asking me after one week how long I’m going to be out?”

The last time I got ’scoped—I was playing in Houston—I played in a regular season game exactly two weeks later. I had sprained a knee, got ’scoped on a Sunday, and played on a Sunday fourteen days later. There’s no question I came back too fast. There’s pressure coming from everywhere to play as quickly as you can, even though nobody really knows the extent of some of these injuries and nobody knows or cares about the long-term damage you’re doing to yourself. That’s the culture of the sport, and it’s something we accept. When a guy is hurt and he keeps playing, you’re thinking, “Aw, man, look at that guy still out there playing—I’ve got to keep playing if he’s playing.” So you stay in the lineup anyway. Or you might miss one game and come back sooner than you should. Several times I’ve asked physicians outside team sports how long I would be inactive if I wasn’t a professional athlete. In other words, how long would a normal person take to come back from this injury I’m expected to recover from in four to six weeks? And they’ve told me, well, probably six weeks instead of four, or eight to ten instead of six. You hear stories from your first day in any professional sports league. We all know stories about guys in the NFL playing with fractured legs and broken bones and fingers nearly severed.

I hope people were really listening to the details that were reported about the day Korey Stringer of the Minnesota Vikings died from heat exhaustion in training camp. He came out of practice twice, and he was vomiting. And the guy sitting at home listening to this is figuring, “Well, if he was vomiting and came out twice, he must have known there was something seriously wrong.” People who haven’t been there have no idea how many times guys vomit during an NFL training camp or have to come out for a few plays, then go right back in because of the pressure to keep playing. Now, that’s the most extreme case because it’s a tragic example, that a young man with a family died because he felt he just had to play through some kind of suffering. But the pressure to keep playing is tremendous. People have no idea.

And there really is a difference between