All the Way by Joe Namath

Author:Joe Namath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Chapter Eight

Time to get up and stretch the legs, now featuring two artificial knees, a new hip, and an abnormal-looking left hamstring. That last injury was due to a 1973 water-skiing accident in the Bay of Five Pirates at Great Harbour Cay in the Bahamas. I severed two of my three hamstring muscles in my left leg. Just as I was getting pulled up on the water, the rope snapped, twisting my body to the right while my left leg fell behind and took all the pressure. The pain was sudden and near consuming, and when they hoisted me out of the water and into the boat, I was already in shock, shaking uncontrollably.

A buddy of mine had a private plane on the island. He heard about my injury and wanted to fly me out, but the landing strip didn’t have lights so the plane couldn’t leave after dark. He flew me to New York the next morning. Blood had been filling my leg up all night, and by then the back of it had turned purplish black. The two severed muscles had rolled down into a ball the size of a grapefruit.

I met the Jets’ Dr. Nicholas at Lenox Hill hospital and he examined my leg. I was mentally prepared for another operation.

“We’re not going to operate.”

I asked why, and he said that he had studied this injury, and the method required a body cast up to the chest to limit movement. “It’ll heal, and the only reason you need a hamstring muscle is to run.” He smiled. “And you’re a quarterback, Joe, you don’t need to run.”

Dr. Nicholas had been there since my first knee surgery, taking out a cyst, shaving the meniscus, and repairing three ligaments. Much later on, after numerous knee surgeries, he would mention that I had the knees of a seventy-year-old man. I’m seventy-five right now and, boy, my knees hurt a heck of a lot less than at Super Bowl III. I’ve had twenty-six years of generally pain-free knees.

But I can still remember how Dr. Nicholas walked into the recovery room as my head was clearing after my first knee surgery in 1965. All three of my brothers were there, but I was barely awake.

“Surgery went really well, Joe. You’re going to see a lot of improvement with your knee and the pain should decrease considerably.”

He talked me and my brothers through the procedure and explained that I would naturally lose a lot of leg strength and how important rehabilitation was going to be in getting back on the field.

I nodded, still groggy. Recovery. Whatever—I could barely keep my eyes open and my leg throbbed in pain.

“And—we are going to start now.”

He took my leg and lifted it up by the heel, the heavy ankle-to-groin plaster cast making it awkward, but the movement didn’t hurt. Until he said, “Good. I’m going to take my hand away and you need to hold your leg up. We’ve got to work that quadricep muscle and prevent any more atrophy.

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