Ben Smith had been a ghost now for more than a year. His fall had come late in the second quarter of a November 10, 1991, game in venerable, gusty Cleveland Stadium. He knew the instant his knee gave way that the injury was serious. Nobody had even touched him. The twenty-four-year-old cornerback’s leg just buckled, and down he went, alone at the bottom of the arena with eighty-thousand-plus local fans cheering wildly for Webster Slaughter’s seventeen-yard gain. Ben didn’t try to get up. He just lay clutching the knee.
He started to cry.
One day you’re at the top of the world, playing on TV, reading your name in the newspapers, driving your fancy foreign car, signing autographs, and then—poof—you’re gone. More than in any other pro sport, football players roll the dice with their entire career every time they step on the field. Years of single-minded devotion to the game, all the off-season workouts, summer training camps, high-school and college glory, the chance to become a great pro, to win financial security for yourself and your family for a lifetime … all of it is on the line every weekend, every play.
A limp is one of the distinctive features of an old football player. A quick injury tour of the Eagles’ locker room confirms that the game hasn’t grown gentler: Jim McMahon, football’s equivalent of a crash dummy, has already willed (in his ’86 book, McMahon) his battered remains to the Smithsonian Institution as the world’s foremost collection of scar tissue; Randall Cunningham is coming off knee reconstruction, the second of his career (and he’ll miss most of ’93 with a broken leg); Dave Archer, a veteran of multiple shoulder surgeries; Fred Barnett, knee surgery in college (and he’ll go back under the knife in ’93 with a blown knee); Calvin Williams, who missed four games in ’91 with a separated shoulder; Andre Waters, veteran of multiple minor knee surgeries; Wes Hopkins, totally reconstructed knee joint; Rich Miano, total knee reconstruction; Seth Joyner, multiple knee surgeries; Britt Hager, neck surgery and a hip condition called necrosis encouraged by taking so many painkilling injections as a high-school player; Reggie White, knee surgery; Mike Golic, knee and ankle surgery; Mike Pitts, knee surgery and nagging back problems; Keith Byars, multiple bone breaks in his feet, one so severe he required a bone graft from a piece of his hip; Ron Heller, broken hand, severe eye injury (after being poked in the left eye by Viking Al Baker, whom Ron sued), knee surgery, foot problems; Dave Alexander, knee surgery and foot problems; Eric “Pink” Floyd, ankle break in college (and knee reconstruction coming in ’93). These are just the starters, and one of the reasons they are starters is because they are particularly durable.
Usually it’s a knee. The joint is a marvel of anatomical engineering, a complex interface of muscle, cartilage, and bone, an elegant organic hinge with both strength needed to support the full frame of the body in motion and sufficient pliability to enable flexion, extension, and even a few degrees of rotation. Unflexed, the knee allows an accomplished athlete to seemingly defy gravity with sudden, fluid, powerful motion up or down, sideways, backward, and forward. Flexed, the joint performs a small screwing action that locks the upper and lower parts of the leg so tightly it assumes the stability of solid bone. Surrounding the ball and socket of the femur and tibia are wrapped layers of muscle, cartilage, tendon, and ligament, superbly capable of absorbing a lifetime’s worth of walking, running, climbing, leaping—but woefully incapable of absorbing the sudden and violent twists, whacks, and tortuous hyperextensions of football.
This is the remarkable but fragile vessel on which players hazard all.
With Ben, the trip to that painful moment on the grass at Cleveland Stadium began when he was just eight years old, throwing the football up in the air as high as he could and then racing down Flanders Drive in front of his father’s tiny house in Warner Robins, Georgia, trying to catch it before it hit the ground. He’d do it for hours, all by himself. He’d been a solitary boy ever since his mother, Doris Louise Bailey, had left five years earlier, moving off to the “fast life” of Macon, about a half hour’s drive north.
Doris couldn’t cope with the increasingly strict and stubborn ways of Ben’s father, Bennie Joe, an illiterate but proud, ambitious, and colorful man who frightened people with his intensity. Bennie Joe was the oldest of twenty-two children (his second cousin is Antone Davis’s father, Milton Trice, which makes the teammates fourth cousins, al though they hadn’t met until they were both playing for the Eagles), and he had assumed a patriarchal role in his enormous family at an early age, after his father, drunk, had managed to flip over a piece of heavy farming equipment on himself and die in a horrendous ball of flame. Bennie Joe helped raise his younger brothers and sisters and earned a license for operating heavy road-construction equipment.
He and Doris had five children, and Ben, the last, was only three when his mother accused Bennie Joe of seeing another woman, and went to live with her mother. The children stayed with their mother for a short time, but then Doris took up with a man from Macon and left all her children with their father. Looking back on it, she says she was just fed up with the rural life, with Bennie Joe, and with raising children. If he was so determined to hang on to his children, she thought, she’d let him have them. All five of them. She felt her husband was better suited to raising them anyway, with his strictly sober ways and steady wages. A frank woman with few pretensions, she would recall years later with a trace of a smile that at that point in her life she “went a little wild,” falling in with a bootlegging ring in Macon, spending her days and nights “out and around.”
Growing up a Smith meant being poor in worldly goods but rich in family. Bennie Joe built his house at the north end of Warner Robins, a splash of suburbia adjacent to Robins Air Force Base, a bustling modern oasis on a landscape of sprawling cotton, soy, and peanut land. A multitude of Smiths populate Houston, Bibb, and Peach Counties in Central Georgia, and as a motherless boy, Ben remembers being passed from aunt to aunt to aunt while his father was away, sleeping on blankets or on a mattress tossed on the floor alongside his brothers and sisters and cousins. The first time he remembers sleeping in a bed was when he was fourteen years old, when his older brother Lorenzo got fed up with his father and went north to live with Doris in Macon.
Ben remembers his father as a “wild man,” feared in the neighborhood and in the family for his strong opinions and fiery temper, but also admired for his stern competence and character. Angered after being robbed at gunpoint when he stopped for a hitchhiker on one of his long road trips, Bennie Joe brought himself a nickel-plated .38 Smith and Wesson, got a license for it, strapped it to his belt, and carried it with him everywhere except to church. It got so nearly everybody in town knew who he was, the intense, compactly built black man in work clothes and bandanna with the nickel-plated pistol on his hip. When one of his younger brothers was stabbed to death in a fight by a man named Earl, Bennie Joe swore revenge on the man, and it was common knowledge in the town’s black quarters that it was only a matter of time before Bennie Joe—who was known as a man who did not make idle threats—would follow through, plant Mr. Earl deep in the Georgia clay, and land himself behind bars. Bennie Joe thought so himself, although he worried about what would happen to his children. His conversion to a strict and evangelical Baptist Christianity showed him another way. Forced by his pastor to assist with door-to-door missionary work at the south end of town, in the very neighborhood of his intended victim, Bennie Joe arrived one afternoon at Mr. Earl’s door, with a Bible in his hand and the pistol on his hip. He heard a scornful voice, he says— Now look at you. How can you go and witness to somebody when you’re carrying around this grudge like a dead weight? And in that moment he saw the light. He had to chase down Mr. Earl, who fled out the back door at his approach, but Bennie Joe held out his hand and apologized once he caught up. Not long afterward, he stopped carrying the gun.
But Bennie Joe’s rebirth as a lay preacher came as an unbearable shock to his teenage brood, who one by one left him to live with their mother. Ben left when his dad forced him to quit the junior-high-school football team because it was interfering with events at the church.
Ben felt sorry for his dad. He explained that he intended to play high-school, then college, and then pro football.
His father scoffed. “I hate to disappoint you, son, but you’re too little to play football.”
But Ben had it all figured out. He had taken something from both his strong-willed parents. He looked just like his father, with his dark complexion, square jaw, and small features, but he had, at least outwardly, none of his father’s unbending and aggressive personality. People thought Ben’s personality, so outwardly easy and fun loving, resembled his mother’s. But beneath his ready smile and seemingly feckless ways, Ben at age fifteen was already as hard and focused as a diamond bit. He knew where he was going, and he was prepared to be stubborn about it if necessary. He was small. He stood only about five-five and weighed fewer than 130 pounds entering high school, but he was still growing, and he was agile, quick, and tough.
Ben had made a study of football, mostly from watching it on TV. There was room for a small, fast, hard-hitting player, even in the pros, in the defensive backfield. Central Georgia even had a reputation for producing some of the finest defensive backs in the country.
He also knew that his only chance of making it to the college game, at his size, was to become an excellent high-school cornerback. Macon was the best place to get noticed. It was a small city with old, well-publicized high-school rivalries that produced many of the ath letes who went on to play at Georgia State and the University of Georgia. His plan was to move in with his mother, not just to enjoy the looser atmosphere and the fun of city life (although that was appealing, too), but to play football—no, not just football, but corner-back—for prep-school powerhouse Northeast High.
He moved in with his mother to finish out junior high and went out for the football team at Northeast in his freshman year. He was placed on the scout team, which was where most first-year players expected to go … except Ben. He watched the older boys in practice and felt sure he could outplay them if Coach would let him try. But there was a protocol to these things. Freshmen just didn’t shoulder established players aside, unless they had grown up in Macon and caught Coach’s eye playing on a junior-high team, or unless their older brothers had blazed a reputation. Ben felt unknown and unappreciated, and after a season on the bench, he told his mom he wanted to move back in with his dad, play for Northside High School in Warner Robins.
He moved back to Flanders Drive and was MVP of the junior varsity team as a sophomore at Northside, where they used him at cornerback some, but mostly as quarterback and running back … which Ben didn’t like. He wanted to play cornerback. But Coach (as Coach will) had his own ideas. When he seemed insufficiently concerned about the fifteen-year-old’s playing preferences, Ben balked. Working out in preparation for the annual spring football game, an off-season exhibition designed to keep the team focused and in shape, Ben refused to participate in a rigorous one-on-one contact drill near the end of practice—he believed in saving his body for the game (or, from Coach’s-Eye View, he was too good to practice).
“I’m all tired out from being asked to play so many positions,” he told Coach.
So when the spring game was played, Ben was on the bench. Coach waited until the closing minutes before waving Ben out to the field.
Ben declined.
“You don’t have to worry about me playing for this team anymore,” he said.
See, Ben wanted to play cornerback. Period. He had the whole thing scoped out. He wasn’t interested in school, and the only career option at that age that was marginally attractive to Ben was going to work in the numbers racket—he had lots of older relatives who got along fine doing that. But that kind of life seemed to teenage Ben so ordinary. Football was a far more attractive avenue. It was exciting and glamorous and you could get rich without looking over your shoulder for the law! His father and friends and coaches all told him his chances were next to none, but that didn’t deter him one bit. Just like Doris and Bennie Joe, once young Ben had his mind set on something, step on out of the way.
If he couldn’t play where he wanted at Northside, maybe they would wise up at the south end of town, at Warner Robins High. The only problem was that to play on the south end he had to live on the south end. Bennie Joe and Doris agreed to drop their parental rights, and an uncle who lived on the south end adopted Ben.
And at Warner Robins, they let Ben play cornerback. Northside High’s coaches mounted a brief legal effort to block the move, and Ben had to sit out the first few games of his junior year while the schools wrestled in court, but the maneuver worked. Ben wasn’t the best athlete at Warner Robins; he wasn’t the fastest boy on the track team or the most gifted player on the football team. But nobody could match his intensity. After an amazing game in which he picked off three passes in an overtime victory over Lyons County High, Ben was named the Atlanta Constitution’s high-school defensive player of the year in ’85. He spent a long, lonesome year at a junior college in Oklahoma getting his grades up enough to satisfy the NCAA rules, and then accepted a full scholarship to play for the University of Georgia Bulldogs—all according to plan.
EVERYTHING ELSE had gone according to plan, too, including top collegiate football honors and a first-round draft selection by the Eagles. Georgia and then Buddy Ryan had tried to turn Ben into a free safety, but by mid-’91, halfway through his second season with the Eagles, Ben was what he had planned to be all along, a starting NFL cornerback.
He was patrolling the left side of the Eagles’ number-one-ranked defensive secondary, opposite Pro Bowl cornerback Eric Allen.
And, as Ben quickly learned, Eric was something else. A poised, articulate young man with a deep golden complexion and ambercolored eyes, Eric was as a San Diego high-school superstar whose trajectory through college and into the pros was as clean and untroubled as a play on a blackboard. Excellent Allen, or EA as his teammates knew him, was Buddy’s second pick in ’88, the player he took right after Keith Jackson. He started at right cornerback the first game of his rookie season, was named to the NFL’s all-rookie squad, earned his first trip to Honolulu after his second season, and had gone every year since. Eric was married to his sweetheart from Point Loma High School—you could look up their picture in the yearbook, Eric with an Afro the size of a bowling ball. He was the image of grace and ease, whether intercepting a pass on the field or pointing his Hollywood smile at a camera and offering commentary like a seasoned network veteran. Eric was golden. He made it look easy.
But what Ben discovered about Eric was, beneath that unruffled exterior, the man was a devoted craftsman … a grind! Eric was one of a handful of NFL cornerbacks who were so good at what they did that they were redefining the position in the pros. He and the Steelers’ Rod Woodson, the Redskins’ Darrell Green, the Falcons’ Deion Sanders, and a few others formed an elite corps within the community of NFL cornerbacks, players who weren’t just cornerbacks, but Cover Guys. It wasn’t just a matter of prestige either, although that was important. These players, Eric included, commanded salaries comparable to the league’s top receivers, more than $1 million a year. And they were worth every penny. Teams without an excellent Cover Guy had to resort to conservative zone coverages. Their corners needed deep help and assistance in the middle of the field, which would tie up both safeties in pass coverage and give opposing quarterbacks a set-piece defense to play around with, dropping short passes or running the ball when the zone set deep, and then lobbing over the top of it when defensive backs pulled in closer. But a team with a great Cover Guy had a lot more flexibility and punch. If you had a guy with the speed, quickness, and savvy to play one-on-one with a receiver like Jerry Rice all afternoon without getting fried, it freed up a safety to rove the secondary looking for trouble, or blitz the quarterback, or move up with the linebackers to stuff the run. A team like the Eagles, with two excellent Cover Guys, Eric and Ben … well, it helped explain why the Eagles in ’91 were far and away the best defense in the league.
A Cover Guy was a single-combat warrior, out there on the corner all by himself, dueling play after play, mano a mano with the league’s best receivers, with the stakes very public and very high—failure more often than not meant a touchdown. And we’re talking more here than having your mistake witnessed by a packed stadium of sixty thousand or seventy thousand, or even the millions more watching at home. When a cornerback got beat, it produced one of the most exciting plays in all of football, the long touchdown pass, which made the highlights reel for tens of millions of viewers the night and week after the game and then went on to have an NFL Films life of its own, replayed on videotapes and football anthology programs … it was a fair bet that your great-grandchildren would be watching it someday.
It took a special kind of person, someone with the assurance of an Eric Allen, to handle the job with aplomb. First, you had to have the physical skills not just to keep up with the league’s top receivers, but to stay with them running backward part of the time, keeping one eye on them and one eye on the quarterback, and then be able to leap with them and wrestle with them, if need be, to keep them from catching the ball. Second, if you had the physical skills, you had to know more about receivers, pass patterns, tendencies, and opposing quarterbacks than they knew about themselves. Eric and most of the others, Ben discovered, kept their own little books on receivers and quarterbacks, gleaned from experience on the field and hours and hours of film study. You had to know all the little moves receivers liked to make (they were all different), which foot they liked to jump off on, how they used their hands, and what opposing teams tended to do out of certain formations. Third, you had to fit all these skills and insights into a reliable set of techniques. Eric approached the line on a given play aware not only of the person he was covering and the quarterback who might throw him the ball, but of down and distance and offensive formation, which dictated how much room he could give a receiver coming off the line and what the man was likely to do with that space. Eric had eight different specific coverage techniques, roughly falling into the categories of playing off the man or playing bump-and-run. “Off” coverages relied on savvy, eye, and the quickness to close on the ball once it was in the air, getting to it before it reached the target. “Bump” coverages meant slamming the man coming off the line, trying to throw him off balance and interfere with the timing of his route, while maintaining your own balance and position.
Ben went to school on this stuff at the end of the ’90 season and then into his second year. He learned the delicate art of jamming a receiver and getting his arms up inside to gain leverage. If you did it right, the receiver couldn’t break off the jam, and you’d have taken him out of the play. If you did it wrong, you drew a holding flag and gave the other team free yards. He was learning all the subtle ways veteran receivers have of pushing off a cornerback; a gentle shove at precisely the right moment was all it took to get enough separation for the catch. Ben learned countermoves, how, when the push came, to latch onto the inside of the man’s jersey, away from the referee’s line of sight, so that the receiver couldn’t pull away. Most of the time, though, staying with a man was just timing and technique, getting in that bump, keeping your balance, reading the route, closing on the ball … it was like a dance, and Ben was getting good at it.
His salary was $352,000 in ’92, about a third of Eric’s. But Ben had made the NFL’s all-rookie team in his first year, just like Eric, and midway through his second year the Pro Bowl didn’t seem out of reach. The Pack still speculated from time to time that Ben would eventually play free safety. But Ben had seen the light. He wasn’t just interested in being a cornerback anymore, he was going to be a Cover Guy. He couldn’t wait for Sundays.
But now it was over. It was as though he had been struck by lightning. He was done, certainly for this season and part of the next, maybe for good. One second it’s you and Webster Slaughter, precisely the kind of receiver only a true Cover Guy can handle one-on-one, the next minute they’re rolling you off the field on a little cart.
TEAM DOCTOR Vincent DiStefano called it “the worst knee injury we’ve seen around here in many, many years.”
Which is saying something. Dr. Vince, as the players knew him, had been the Eagles’ team doctor for twenty-one seasons, and as such had seen as many orthopedic injuries as a battlefield surgeon sees trauma. A Philadelphia native, graduate of Temple University and Hahnemann College Medical School (both in Philadelphia), chairman of the orthopedic department at Philadelphia’s Graduate Hospital, and a well-known authority in the growing field of sports medicine, the short, precise, curly-mopped, sensationally tanned Dr. Vince, father of eight, was by any measure a fine surgeon. Dr. Vince told Ben his anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments were badly torn, that he had severely sprained the posterior cruciate ligament and torn both the lateral meniscus and medial meniscus cartilages—in other words, the equivalent of a small bomb had gone off in the joint.
Ben tried not to imagine the mess inside his throbbing, swollen, discolored knee. Twenty years or even a decade earlier, Ben’s career would have been over. Maybe Joe Namath could extend his career limping around inside a pocket of blockers with braces on both knees, but a cornerback’s livelihood depended on peak speed and agility. With the advances in surgical knee reconstruction over the years, there was at least a fair chance he’d fully regain use of the knee, said Dr. Vince, who was prepared and capable of opening the joint up and piecing the shreds back together. But, as Ben well knew, even a slight diminution of strength or flexibility would kill his Cover Guy plans. If he went under the knife immediately, with hard work and good luck, he could be back on the field in eleven months, midway through the ’92 season. But there were no guarantees.
The world of pro football had changed dramatically in the twenty-one years since Dr. Vince started haunting the Eagles’ sidelines, har vesting injuries. As players’ salaries mounted, and as agents became a bigger and bigger part of players’ lives, the concept of team doctor had gradually grown suspect. Whose doctor was he, Team’s or the player’s? Their interests weren’t always the same.
Injury is a central part of the culture of football. In the old days it was simple: you played with pain, through injuries, and proved your mettle as a man by sucking it up, doing what it takes. Sacrificing your body was expected, encouraged, and, with a growing arsenal of alluring painkillers, ably assisted. In the old days, a football club’s medical staff had one purpose: Keep the show going, patch ‘em up, pat their rumps, and get ‘em back out on the field. A player who insisted on healing properly was quickly branded a malcontent or, worse, a sissy. Boys learned this from the first day they donned a helmet and started crashing into people. You proved yourself worthy by hopping right up, tearless and fearless, after a bone-crunching tackle. The other boys would crowd around you when you were gasping or bleeding on the field, dozens of little-boy eyes peering intently down, pushing and shoving to get a better view, staring—not with concern, but to see if you cried. Every schoolboy athlete in America knew legends were made by popping dislocated fingers back in place and stepping right back into the huddle, or spitting out a tooth and calling the next play. In the beginning, in a sense, this was why men played football. Absent the heroic myth of the battlefield to test the strongest and ablest, America took a perfectly elegant and ageless sport and turned it into a brawl. In the good old days, pro football was just the meanest, biggest, grandest brawl of them all. Go back and check how bitterly the old pros resisted wearing helmets, then face masks and other protective gear; it was an affront to the awful dignity of the game!
The modern NFL has, of course, come a long way from the old standard, at least on the surface. For one thing, a club’s multimillion-dollar investment in a star athlete would be ill served by heedlessly exposing him to injury. A decent argument could be made (and often was) that it was in the enlightened best interests of both player and club to make sure a player was well cared for and fully healed before plugging him back into the lineup. But, medical opinions differed. Why go to the doctor who represents the Team when you can go to a doctor who represents you, and only you?
For Dr. Vince, being team doctor was a lot easier back when he started. It was a no-lose deal, especially for a football fan—which the good doctor was. Ministering to pro football players was not only interesting and lucrative work (Lord knows he had a guaranteed steady supply of patients who all could pay their bills), it gave Dr. Vince a high profile and considerable prestige—Hell, if the Eagles go to him, he’s the guy for me! Dr. Vince attended all the Eagles’ games, even those on the road, watched from the sidelines, and repaired the mounting damage as the season unfolded. What a deal! After more than two decades of this, he had written scores of papers and articles on sports-related injuries in medical journals and served as officer or consultant in several prominent sports-medicine centers.
But increasingly, the good doctor was encountering something new. A cynical virus had invaded paradise. Instead of the misty-eyed gaze of grateful respect he once got from repaired athletes, more and more he was getting looks that were outright skeptical and accusing. Increasingly, Dr. Vince was getting the cold shoulder—athletes publicly demanding second opinions before submitting to surgery or treatment, or flying out of town to be operated on by their own doctors. The truth was that Dr. Vince was as respected and admired as any doctor in his specialty, but gradually his official designation as team doctor began showing a dangerous new downside.
How do you think it looked when Randall, the most closely watched player on the team, chose to fly back out to California and put himself under the care of his own orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Clarence Shields, after being felled with a knee injury in the first game of the ’91 season? There was a growing list of players in the Eagles’ locker room who wouldn’t even consider placing themselves under Dr. Vince’s care, not because he was any less skillful with the knife, but because with so much riding on their career (and with cynical agents whispering in their ears), players no longer felt comfortable just placing their fate in the hands of Team.
Ben’s case was going to ably illustrate why.
HIS AGENT, Dick Bell, urged Ben to seek a second opinion. They lined up an appointment with a renowned specialist in Denver, and Bell even booked Ben a flight. But the knee was throbbing so badly on the day he was supposed to leave, Ben just skipped it. He was impatient to get the surgery done and get the healing process under way. Maybe he could beat the eleven months of rehab forecast by Dr. Vince and be ready to start the ’92 season. Seeing the second doctor in Denver would either confirm what he had already been told, or it would force him to make a decision—and, no doubt, mean further delays.
What was he going to do with himself if he couldn’t play football? Sure, he’d continue to get paid, but Ben had all the money he needed. He didn’t know what to do with all the money he had; in fact, it had created a whole set of problems in his life that he had never even imagined before. In that sense, Ben’s sudden success had been deeply disillusioning.
He’d started off enthusiastically, buying himself clothes, a car, the mandatory DHM in Macon, buying Doris a new car, buying Bennie Joe his own backhoe, giving away thousands of dollars to that huge extended family of his down in Houston County, paying off his college loans, purchasing insurance and paying his taxes … until he discovered, to his chagrin, that about half of his bonus was gone. Dick had helped him set the rest aside.
When it was all done, Ben came face-to-face with the fact that his life wasn’t all that much improved. Sure, he had things, a house, cars, clothes. He could take exotic vacations if he liked, but, when he really thought about it, he’d had more fun being penniless in college. The money he gave away didn’t make other people happy either. His mom didn’t like the DHM in Macon that much. It was a two-story structure with pillars in front like some kind of suburban echo of plantation life—didn’t suit her. His father was jealous of how lavish Ben had been with his mom. “She gets a house and a new car and I get a backhoe?” Bennie Joe complained, “I guess I’m used to being the underdog in this family.”
Like so many of his teammates, Ben found it difficult to go home. Many of his high-school friends were adrift and unemployed. Some of his classmates were already dead or in jail. Everybody wanted money. Ben, I got this great idea to start a business! Ben, I just need it for one car payment until my check comes through. Ben, we’re gonna lose the house if we don’t pay this bill. His uncle was in jail, arrested for armed robbery trying to keep up a crack habit. His disgruntled father was hard to be around—he still wouldn’t tolerate swearing or alcohol, so how could Ben invite a few of his old buddies over for a beer?
Ben himself had managed to emerge from one year of junior college and four years at Georgia with the literacy of a grade-schooler, although he was clearly intelligent and capable of learning almost anything—even a driven achiever when it came to football. But his ideas of what life held for him after retiring from the game consisted of a vague plan to build a big house on a lake and take kids fishing. It was easy to see why Ben quickly was possessed by one overriding impulse—fix the knee and get me back on the field.
He reported to Graduate Hospital on Friday, November 15, for six and a half hours of surgery by Dr. Vince, who replaced Ben’s anterior cruciate ligament with one from a cadaver and repaired all the other tears and breaks.
In the week he spent lying around the hospital, he was visited by only one of his teammates. Andre Waters stopped by to drink a beer with Ben and play Nintendo. Ben didn’t forget.
THE TROUBLE started about five months later, when the knee was feeling strong enough for Ben and the Eagles’ trainers to begin putting stress on the joint, trying to build it back up. It didn’t feel right. To Ben, apart from the pain, the joint felt wobbly.
“I don’t think this is supposed to be like this,” he complained to Otho, who assured him it wasn’t unusual at this point in rehab.
Otho had been around forever. A big, gruff man with a face that seemed one size too large, framed with dark hair, and accented by bushy dark eyebrows, Otho walked with a permanent lazy slouch and spoke with a low Texas drawl still intact after twenty-one years on the East Coast, first with the Baltimore Colts and then, since ’73, with the Eagles. Longevity like that was rare in football. Otho had seen whole generations of players, coaches, managers, and even owners come and go. He was a repository of down-home wisdom and NFL anecdotes and knew just about everybody who had ever worn pads and a helmet at this level. His lair, a suite of windowless rooms adjacent to the locker room and off-limits to all but those on the club payroll, was cluttered with massage tables, exercise equipment, relaxation devices (including a flotation chamber into which Otho once crawled and fell asleep, awakening late at night in an eerie, vacant stadium), workout charts, reference books, training schedules, tape, wraps, pads, orthopedic braces, shoe wedges, painkillers, needles, pills, and a positively legendary assortment of homespun ointments, balms, and potions that lent Otho an almost Merlinesque reputation for pasting football players back together and getting them back out on the field. A consummate yarn-spinner and practical joker, Otho was a gray eminence, not only with the Eagles, but throughout pro football, since many of the trainers working for other teams had served an apprenticeship with Otho or with someone else who had. In short, if Otho told Ben what he was feeling was normal, then, by God, who was going to argue with Merlin himself?
But at age fifty-eight, after more than a quarter century ministering to athletes, Otho was most definitely of the Old School when it came to sports injuries. Real men scoffed at pain. Although Otho and the other trainers on his staff knew enough not to encourage players to risk further damage to frayed limbs and swollen joints, they considered themselves frontline experts on what constituted a “playable” injury. Pain was part of the rehab process, too. An athlete in a hurry to repair a damaged joint couldn’t afford a painless rehab schedule (nor could the team, although insurers picked up the big paychecks of injured players). To a certain extent, the old ethic of playing with pain lived on most vigorously in the training room, where the idea was that real men regularly pushed their aching, surgically repaired body parts right up to the edge of human endurance in their determination to get back out on the field. By this standard, Ben was something less than a real man.
“It doesn’t feel right,” he kept complaining.
Part of Ben’s problem with the trainers predated the injury. He had always been something of a fussbudget with trainers. He’d come back to have his ankles or wrists retaped two and three times before a game, complaining that they didn’t feel just right. Little aches and pains would convince Ben he ought to skip practice, when Otho and the trainers knew damn well he could play— too good to practice. These were little more than annoying eccentricities so long as he was playing well.
But once Ben became Otho’s ward, his attitude became a major problem. As the trainers saw it, one purpose in pushing the damaged joint through painful exercises was to break down the formation of scar tissue from the surgery, which was essential for regaining full range of motion and his old speed and agility. But to Ben, pain signaled danger. He wasn’t buying Otho’s strategy. So the team kept sending Ben back to Dr. Vince. In March ’92, the surgeon performed a follow-up arthroscopic examination and surgery, cleaning out some of the scar tissue himself. In another session, Dr. Vince sedated Ben and then vigorously manipulated the knee himself—a procedure the doctor and Otho felt a more dedicated player ought to be doing for himself. Despite these efforts, as summer approached, and the ’92 season, Ben was still complaining that the knee didn’t feel right.
It didn’t help having Randall working away like a rehab god right alongside him. Randall’s injury, while severe, had not been as extensive as Ben’s, and he was much further along in his recovery. The surgery with Dr. Shields had obviously gone well. Randall was King Fucking Rehab himself, running, lifting, jumping, getting measurably stronger every day—putting on a dazzling show for Otho and the boys, and saying helpful things to Ben like “You’ve got to want it” or “Time to get down to business.”
Ben could sense a showdown brewing. Hanging around on the fringes of a team minicamp in June, Ben told one of the hounds that he didn’t think his knee would be ready to play on until the ’93 season. Given that Richie and Harry, Otho, and Dr. Vince were all still projecting Ben’s return for early in the ’92 season, this was news. Asked about it, the club’s brass wasn’t about to budge.
“Ben is a young player who has never been through this before,” explained Richie. “So it’s not surprising that he gets discouraged. It’s not easy to work back from an injury like that. But Otho and the doctor still think he’s making good progress. We expect to have him back this season.”
That was the public line, anyway. Privately, the club was getting fed up with Ben. Dr. Vince said he wouldn’t get better until he started working harder with the knee. But the damn thing felt so unstable; Ben was convinced the knee was going to pop apart every time he put weight on it. The word “malingerer” was being whispered around— Ben was being tagged a gutless slacker. During training camp at West Chester, Ben was up in the dorm with everybody else. He had therapy every morning at 7:00 a.m., and then Otho would tell him to get out, run, push himself up and down the steep hills around the practice fields, and Ben tried, halfheartedly. When the trainers found him just idling around the practice field, they scowled and reported him to management. When Ben skipped a weekend therapy session, taking a break from training camp while the rest of the team was out of town for an exhibition game, the club fined him $3,000. By midsummer, the team was considering taking Ben’s case to the league’s management council and trying to get released from his contract. If he refused to work himself back into playing shape, they could refuse to pay him his salary. Nobody confronted Ben directly, but he heard the whispers around the locker room and on the practice field—won’t work, poor work ethic, won’t take advice, coward … doesn’t want to play.
Doesn’t want to play?
Ben had gone into a long depression the previous winter after the knee surgery. He was a lost soul. He stayed home playing Nintendo all day and went out drinking at night. He would lie in bed until noon and then roll over and play video games until his eyes started to blur. His appetite went away, and he dropped nearly thirty pounds from his once-impressive frame. Gaunt, big-eyed, his head shaved, Ben showed up in the Eagles’ locker room late in the ’91 season looking so bad it frightened some of his teammates and friends. To the Pack, he had been transformed from a cocky, muscular millionaire athlete into a frail, insecure teenager. He was, of course, a ghost, no longer a member of the family of Team, cut off from his family and friends back home (his mother was afraid to fly, so she couldn’t come up to be with him, and his father was always working). Ben watched the Eagles games on TV, and when the announcers sang the praises of the team’s number-one-ranked defense, or mentioned the temporary absence of this or that key player, the name Ben Smith never came up. He had started ten games for that number-one-ranked defense in ’91, yet it was as though he didn’t exist! He felt as if he had not only lost his future, but his past.
Ben had weathered all that. He had bulked himself back up and regained the cocky twinkle in his eyes. It hadn’t been easy. And the club thought he didn’t want to play?
It came to a head at the end of summer, when Dr. Vince and Otho acknowledged that the knee was still loose, but that it was strong enough. They suggested that he tape the knee, brace it, and try running on it. How else were they going to find out what he could do? To Ben, the “suggestion” had the ring of ultimatum.
He said no.
“Somebody is going to tell me what’s wrong with my knee,” he said. “Y’all do what you’re gonna do; I’m gonna talk to my agent.”
When the Eagles’ pass defense started to slip so badly in Kansas City, Bud Carson kept trying to patch the weak spot on the left corner. After Izel Jenkins was repeatedly burned, he inserted Otis Smith and then John Booty, with similar results. Waiting anxiously on the sidelines was rookie Mark McMillian, but the kid was only five-seven and as green as the color on his uniform. Bud didn’t dare just throw Mark in. The locker-room chorus became “Where’s Ben?” Hadn’t Dr. Vince and Otho projected his return for October of ’92? Here it was almost November!
Ben was on the road with his agent, for three independent evaluations of his still-wobbly knee.
The first was with Dr. Michael Fagenbaum, a noted orthopedic surgeon in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fagenbaum took about ten minutes to examine and assess the progress of Ben’s knee and pronounced a stunning verdict.
“I can’t see you playing on this again.”
According to Fagenbaum, the donor anterior cruciate ligament had not taken properly (which happens in a certain percentage of these surgeries), and as a result the medial collateral ligament was unstable. As Ben and his agent understood it, if Ben played on it, the knee would almost certainly be seriously reinjured, and the question would no longer be one of playing pro cornerback, but of walking.
Fagenbaum said he could take it apart and put it back together, but the chances of Ben’s being able to regain anything like his former speed and agility were only fifty-fifty.
“Let’s not panic,” cautioned Bell to his stricken client. “We’ve already learned that different doctors can have different opinions. Let’s see what the other ones say before we panic.”
“But, Dick, why would he say that?” Ben was distraught.
Next they flew to Atlanta, to consult with Dr. Blaine Woodfin, another noted orthopedist.
Woodfin examined and tested Ben’s left knee, and, as Bell remembered it, pronounced Dr. Vince’s surgery a “failure.” He agreed with Fagenbaum’s assessment of the problem, but held out slightly more hope. Woodfin said he could reconstruct the knee himself, and Ben had a good chance of playing again, but there were no guarantees. He gave better odds. Woodfin said there was an 85 percent chance he could get Ben’s knee back in playing shape.
Next they flew out to see Dr. Shields, whom Ben had been eager to see after witnessing Randall’s miraculous resurrection. And the California surgeon, the first black doctor Ben had consulted, just swept the nervous young athlete off his feet.
“This is what we have to do,” said Shields, confidently, reassuringly. He explained how he would repair the damage. “You’ll be fine,” he told Ben. “Don’t worry about a thing. You’re gonna play football and you’re gonna play corner again.”
They scheduled the resurgery for December.
Ben and his agent were furious with Otho, Dr. Vince, and the Eagles. No one was seriously questioning Dr. Vince’s surgical skills (though Eagles players now began to eye him with unjustified apprehension). It was a given that knee repairs were tricky, and that they didn’t always work out. What surgeon could guarantee total success every time? But for months Ben had been complaining that things weren’t right, and all he’d gotten in response was whispered scorn, threats, a fine, and an ultimatum … to do what? All three independent doctors felt playing on the knee without further repairs would have been disastrous—Ben would almost certainly have blown it and his career. Of course, their opinions were no more valid than Dr. Vince’s. Chances are, all three were wrong. Dr. Shields and Otho had easily seen and worked with as many or more injured knees than the other doctors. But for Ben, judging by the way the knee felt, there was no question who was right. The way he saw it, Dr. Vince’s surgery had failed to restore the knee—Ben could feel that! And then, either out of incompetence or out of some misguided refusal to admit he was wrong, he had urged Ben to play on it. For months he had endured suspicions that he was shirking rehab, that he didn’t want to play anymore. Now he felt completely vindicated, and angry.
The only scientific measure of the joint’s stability, and this was hardly the last word among experts, was provided by a machine called a KT/1000 that ranks tension in the joint on a millimeter scale—the lower the number, the more stable the knee. Any knee loose enough to be ranked over 3.5 millimeters is considered a candidate for reconstruction. Woodfin’s measure of Ben’s knee was 6.5 millimeters! Why hadn’t Dr. Vince used the KT/1000? What was more important, pushing him back out on the field or making sure the knee was fully healed? So much for the team doctor!
Dr. Vince was surprised by the other surgeons’ findings, particularly by how poorly Ben’s knee had responded to the KT/1000 tests. He had inspected the joint back in March, when he scoped it, and it had looked fine. That was a far more reliable way to check on the success of his reconstruction than strapping Ben’s leg into a KT/1000, which is why Dr. Vince hadn’t used the machine. It wasn’t like he was unfamiliar with it. Hell, he had been one of the first sports-medicine experts in the country to use it! But given such poor readings from Ben’s knee, it was clear to him that something had happened since he had last looked at it. Since Ben hadn’t run on it, and had resisted any kind of strenuous rehab, he could only conclude that the knee had been reinjured in the manipulations he had been forced to perform— a more violent therapy than the daily rehab sessions with Otho would have been.
The way Dr. Vince saw it, Ben had only himself to blame for the poor progress he had made since surgery, and for the football season he would now miss. Of course, that’s not how Ben and his agent saw it. Three weeks after Ben told his story to the Philadelphia Inquirer, all but accusing the doctor and the team of what amounted to malicious incompetence, Dr. Vince resigned as the Eagles’ team doctor. It was a step he had been considering for some time, given the changing climate. He had even discussed leaving with Harry Gamble months earlier. Ben’s case, and this new round of bad publicity, just sealed it.
When Dr. Vince had signed on as team doctor all those years back, he hadn’t bargained on it so regularly taking a public bite out of his ass.
BEN FLEW OUT to Los Angeles in November and Dr. Shields redid the knee, a little more than a year after he crumpled to the grass in Cleveland Stadium.
Days after the surgery he had regained the flexibility it had taken him two or three months to regain after the first operation. Less than two months after the procedure, Ben’s knee measured a 3.0 on the KT/1000 at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic. He felt his career had been robbed of a year. The first year he chalked up to the injury, but the second year he blamed on Dr. Vince and Otho and the Eagles. Sure, they were paying him, but no one could ever give him back a full season’s joy in doing what he did best, and the ground he had lost proving himself Eric’s equal in the secondary. His contract would be up at the end of the ’93 season. How much more valuable would he have been with another full year of playing time, and maybe that trip to Honolulu? He and Bell were optimistic about his winning back his starting job in ’93, but what if he couldn’t? If Ben didn’t make it all the way back, they were going to come looking for Dr. Vince and ol’ Merlin Otho with lawyers. Ben had bad feelings about the Eagles. He wasn’t sure, frankly, he wanted to play for them anymore.
Ben had a lot of time to weigh these things as he recuperated out in L.A. He checked into a Hilton near the airport and got the hotel maintenance crew to hook up his Nintendo to the TV, and for a month and a half, while his team fought through a rocky period of uncertainty and conflict, Ben went to therapy sessions in the morning and hung around his hotel room for endless hours playing video games, trying to read Magic Johnson’s book (he got through part of it), staring out the window at the planes coming and going, chalking up huge telephone bills, ordering out for pizza, drinking beer, and counting the days until weekends, when he could watch football on TV.
During those long, lonely weeks, he got one call from the Eagles. Bud Carson phoned one afternoon to see how he was doing and wish him well. It meant a lot to him. Ben started thinking, Maybe playing for Bud again wouldn’t be so bad.