Day 36 – I Never Got Hurt in Football
I played 12 years of full-contact football back when there weren’t many rules to protect players, or the safety built into equipment like it is today. To me, it feels like every kid is bubble-wrapped now, but that’s just my opinion in comparison to “back in the day”.
With all that being said, I still never got really hurt. Sure, I had bumps, bruises, cuts and scrapes and the sprained ankle I told you about at my senior homecoming. But I don’t consider any of that being “hurt”. The old saying goes, “just rub some dirt on it and you’ll be fine”, that was the attitude of the day when I grew up.
The other factor is that we played outside all the time, so we were in shape and resilient. One major problem I saw when I was doing strength training and weightlifting in Williamsburg, was that kids would come in and they were very unstable especially in their core midsection. Everyone stayed home and played video games instead of riding bikes, running, and climbing trees, and as a result they were very weak and unstable. It would take me about a year to correct that condition.
Now, I will concede that I probably didn’t get hurt because players in high school and college weren’t as big back then. We didn’t have an offensive line in my day, that averaged 265 to 270 pounds like I have right now in high school and who stand 6’ 2” to a 6’ 7” like a lineman we had a few years ago. And when you are as mobile as these young men are right now, physics alone says you need more padding and better equipment to avoid injury.
Now the point to all this is to lead up to my story for today. It wasn’t until AFTER football that I received and injury that has been with me my whole life.
To give you some background, I was down at the beach and there is a thing we did that was fun and amazing. The sand dunes back then were very high, and we would climb to the top of the sand dunes, back up as far as we could, run to the edge and jump off into space and the great unknown…I know that sounds kind of dramatic, but that’s what it felt like.
Because of gravity, we would eventually hit sand about halfway down, and launch off again as far as we could go. On some sand dunes, you might bounce 3 times before hitting the bottom and then we would run back up.
After doing this, for who knows how long, I was going back for another run…just could not get my fill. Now, as you run up, the sand is very soft and sometimes you are buried up to your ankle or even halfway up your calf in the sand, so it isn’t easy.
I was tired and my legs were exhausted and on my way up I landed wrong on my knee and twisted it severely. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had torn my meniscus in a bad way. It was so bad that I couldn’t straighten it out. Some of the cartilage was lodged in the knee joint so my friends helped me hobble back to the car and we went home.
I had finished football and was about to finish school and it being a “non-football” injury there was no help offered. I walked on it very gingerly for many months and it actually was years before I could straighten my leg out. If I careful with my left leg, it would stay in place, and I built up the muscles around it to keep it strong
It got bad when I was working in Minnesota and a friend of mine at the Mayo Clinic, a very wonderful doctor there in Rochester, MN got me in to see a knee surgeon and we scheduled the operation. This is where it gets very interesting to me, and God’s grace really shines.
A week or ten days before the operation, I went for a pre-surgery visit and my doctor said he had just come from a Knee Conference in France (maybe you have to be from the Mayo Clinic to do such things) where they showed a new orthoscopic surgery that was less invasive than the current method. The end result was that my surgeon said I should wait.
Well, I had already planned to take two weeks off to recover and had set aside money for the operation but now it wasn’t happening, however what was happening in just few days was a guided trip to the Holy Lands with the group I was a part of. So, I called the organizer and he said someone had just dropped out that day and there was a slot if I wanted it.
So instead of being laid up in bed for two weeks, I was having the time of my life in Israel, Greece, Egypt and beyond. I probably never would have done that if all these things had not fallen in place. It was just another sign to me of the wonderful love and grace of God in my life to give me experiences above and beyond what I could imagine.
Years later I did get it repaired in Virginia with the new procedure which only left 3 very tiny scars on my leg and it has been good ever since.
Recent Comments