On March 24, 1984, I was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where tests and an exploratory surgery soon confirmed what doctors immediately suspected. I had a full ACL tear, torn cartilage, and a broken bone in my right knee.
It couldn’t have been any worse.
I remember calling Bill Pollak from my bed to ask that he locate the nation’s top orthopedic surgeons and see whether they could fly to New York to examine my knee. Meanwhile, I spoke to members of the hospital staff and requested medical journals relating to my injury. I had frankly never heard of an ACL tear before. But I wanted to learn everything about it and use the same analytical approach I’d taken overcoming every other obstacle in my life.
I didn’t know any other way.
One at a time, the doctors arrived from around the country. I recall seeing three prominent surgeons within a matter of days. I was also examined by Dr. Norman Scott, the Knicks’ team surgeon. I asked each of them the same question: “Do you believe your technique will allow me to become an All-Star again?”
The three doctors Bill had contacted all said no. I would never play again. Surgery would be required for me to even walk normally again.
Only Dr. Scott answered, “Yes,” emphatically.
His open knee procedure, he explained, was radically different from the others. Called modified iliotibial band surgery, it was also fairly untested. But Dr. Scott had confidence it could give me the outcome I desired if I was willing to follow his instructions to the letter and undertake rigorous physical therapy. The iliotibial band was a muscle and could be strengthened over time.
It wouldn’t be easy, he warned.
I told Scott that was okay. I’d made my decision. I was going with him.
My surgery was scheduled for April 1, 1984, April Fool’s Day.
The date probably should have made me a bit nervous. It didn’t.
I was eager to get things underway.
DANIA SWEITZER WAS A FORMER ALL-AMERICAN swimmer and one of the best physical therapists in the country. At the time, she was working at a private physical therapy center in New York. They received a lot of patients from Lenox Hill Hospital doctors, including Norman Scott.
During the 1984 basketball season, I had gone to the center to rehab a sprained ankle and worked with Dania for several weeks. I’d thought she was skillful and committed, and truly cared about her patients.
A few days before my operation, I asked Dr. Scott to contact her. When she came to see me at the hospital, I asked if she would be my therapist moving forward. She agreed. But I needed to make sure of something and asked her a version of the question I’d presented to Dr. Scott.
“Dania, do you know what you’re getting yourself into?” I said. “I don’t want to just play basketball. I want to be the best. So I’ll ask again. Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”
She looked me in the eye.
“Yes,” she said.
It was same answer I’d gotten from Norman Scott. My team was assembled.
I never questioned Dania again.
MY LAST WORDS TO DR. SCOTT after being wheeled into the OR were, “God Bless.”
His eyes met mine, and he nodded, and the anesthesia mask went over my face.
My surgery went without complication, but the pain after I woke up was awful. I was shocked to find forty-one metal staples holding my knee together. On the first night post-op, the nurses gave me morphine and I hallucinated that Bengal tigers were coming out of the wall. I was just about to climb out of bed to escape them, when someone grabbed me and pushed me back down on the sheets. It was a good thing. If I’d stood up, I would have destroyed my reconstructed knee, probably beyond repair.
After that close call, I asked to never again be given morphine. I was not going home with a drug problem. I’d coped with pain before and knew I could manage it.
WITHIN DAYS OF THE OPERATION, Dania began visiting me at Lenox Hill. She wasn’t allowed to officially start as my therapist, because the hospital had its own PT staff. But she was able to oversee what they were doing there.
They started moving my scar tissue a little, moving the knee. It was excruciating. They also strapped on a huge device called a continuous passive motion, or CPM, machine to flex my tendons. Again, it was very painful—I remember breaking out in sweats—so they discontinued it for a while.
Another machine my body didn’t tolerate was the TENS unit. The TENS would send electrical pulses into my leg and strengthen the muscles by making them expand and contract. It also broke up scar tissue.
The TENS gave me a full body spasm. Every muscle in my body felt like it was clenching. I screamed in pain. My mother, who was at the hospital every day, was down the hall and heard me.
As we went along, Dania told me that some of her female patients compared the pain of breaking down scar tissue to giving birth, and some thought it was even more painful. But Dr. Scott had explained that I would not gain mobility without breaking the adhesions. So the TENS was incorporated into the routine.
I would never recover full mobility in my leg. Scott was very concerned about hyperextension of the knee, so he buttressed it with sutures. But as a result, I’d be unable to completely bend it.
I returned home at the end of April. The Knicks had provided a customized hospital bed that would fit me, but I was unable to leave it. I couldn’t even lift my leg off the bed.
As I lay on the bed each night, I thought about the uncertainty ahead. No NBA player with my injury had ever successfully returned to the game. The few who did were only shadows of their former selves. The odds were against me.
But I refused to be denied.
MY FIRST HOME SESSION WITH DANIA was on May 1, exactly a month after my operation.
She did a complete evaluation, with Mike Saunders, my Knicks trainer, standing by as she examined me.
“Let’s see.” Dania gently touched my wounds wearing sterile gloves. “We have moderate to severe effusion of your right knee… the suture line’s healing well, with two open areas at mid-patella. One’s half an inch, the other an eighth of an inch, seeping sanguineously…”
“Dania?”
“Yes?”
“English, please.”
“Some of your wounds are still open, and you have a little bit of blood and fluid draining from them,” she said. “But everything looks clean.”
I nodded. “What’s next?”
“We’re going to set goals for every day,” she said. “To improve your range of motion, increase your strength, improve your gait pattern—”
“Specifically meaning…?”
“I’d like to get you to stand up over time, and then bend down enough to sit on the toilet.”
I looked at her. “That would be nice,” I said.
THAT FIRST DAY, we had a CPM machine delivered to my house.
With the CPM, you strap your leg in from the ankle to the knee, and then set the device to bend your knee at five degrees more motion than you can do on your own. The machine very slowly bends and straightens, bends and straightens, for between four and six hours a day. I would need to stay in bed the entire time the CPM was attached.
Initially I couldn’t lift my leg up off the mattress without Dania’s assistance. But after a few days, I was able to lift it, and we went from five- to sixty-degrees range of motion on the CPM.
Six days after I returned home, Dania arrived with a pair of crutches.
“Are you ready for these?” she asked.
“If you say I am,” I replied, “I am.”
DANIA AND I WORKED TOGETHER six days a week, a minimum of five hours a day, for the next two years.
She guided me every moment, and no day was ever the same. I saw rehab as climbing Mount Everest—an inch up, an inch up—and no one ever climbed it in a day.
Dania refused to put limitations on me. She came to understand me as a person and changed her professional acumen based on what was needed for the type of injury, individual, and athlete my case represented. When so many counted me out or said I was finished, she did not; her therapies and encouragement would get me through every challenge.
But she had help. Or I should say, we did. A couple of winged guardian angels.
Aldo and Florence were a mated pair of ducks that came around every day for weeks, landing in my backyard, waddling up to my terrace door, and pecking at the glass as if to say, “Come out, Bernard!”
When I saw them pecking, I’d pull myself into my wheelchair and feed them. They would stay on the brick terrace all day and then finally fly off at dusk.
“One of these times,” I would tell them, tossing handfuls of bird food, “you two are going to see me get out of this chair by myself.”
Of course, they couldn’t possibly have understood me.
But I often imagined they did.
I AWOKE WITH A TERRIBLE THIRST.
I’m not sure how late it was, but it was night time and my first wife was asleep upstairs. I’d fallen asleep in my wheelchair after a long, wearying day of therapy.
Now I desperately craved a drink of water. There was a small adjoining room with a water cooler in it, but getting to the cooler would be a problem. My home’s previous owners had owned a dog, and they’d attached a pet gate to the door frame. Though we always kept the gate open, my chair was too wide to clear it, and I was not yet comfortable enough on crutches to do more than get from my custom bed to the wheelchair.
I stared at the gate for a long minute. The thought that I could not get a glass of water upset me. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
Suddenly I wheeled myself across the room to the stairs. There was a kitchen on the second level of the house, and one of the sink cabinets had a toolbox in it.
I’d had an idea.
Climbing out of the chair onto the stairs, I sat down on a bottom step and pulled myself up the rest of them backward, one by one, on my butt. When I got to the top, I shimmied across the kitchen floor, took a pair of pliers out of the toolbox, then slid back across the kitchen to the stairs and worked my way downstairs again.
Back in the workout area, I slid across the floor to the gate and grinned at it like a wolf.
“You know what I’m going to do now,” I muttered, holding up the pliers.
That gate would no longer block me. I tore it out of the wall and got my drink of water.
The next morning, my wife couldn’t understand why I did it.
“Why didn’t you call me?” she said.
I just told her it was something I needed to do myself.
But the truth was, I needed to prove something to myself. And I’d done it.
If I could go to those lengths for a drink of water, I knew nothing in the world would keep me from playing basketball again.
SOMETIME IN MAY I was fitted for a leg brace and started getting around a bit more on my crutches. One morning toward the end of the month, I took my first steps without them.
The day before, Aldo and Florence had made their regular appearance on my patio, pecking at the glass, sticking around till sundown, and then taking wing.
They didn’t show up that day. Or ever again. It made me a little sad, but I thought I understood what had happened.
I could walk. I’d be okay without them. I felt they knew it.
They knew.
And they’d gone wherever guardian angels go when they are no longer needed.
“BERNARD,” DANIA SAID, “YOU’RE SWEATING.”
“Am I?”
“Yes,” Dania said. “Like crazy. Is something wrong?”
“No… no… nothing.”
It was May 31, my fifth week of rehab. I could now walk haltingly with a brace on my right leg. Major motion in the knee now went from 20 to 105 degrees. It wasn’t totally straight, and it didn’t totally bend.
Dr. Scott had wanted me to begin a swimming routine to advance my progress, and one of my neighbors, a few houses down, offered the use of his outdoor pool. Since I lived in an area where the homes had spacious grounds, it was a long walk. But walking was part of my gait training, and Dania and I went there together in our bathing suits.
“Be honest, Bernard,” she said. “It isn’t even that warm out. Is walking still that difficult for you?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said, and hesitated. “I’m just really scared.”
She looked confused. I didn’t blame her. I needed to explain.
“I’m petrified of water,” I said. “When I was a kid, my mother always told me, ‘Boy, you stay away from that water.’ And now they’re telling me to go into the water.”
Dania seemed dumbstruck. But I was telling the truth. I would not go to the beach or public pools when I was young. My mother forbade it. For some reason, water scared her to death, and she passed that fear on to me. I never learned how to swim.
When we finally got to the pool, Dania’s eyes opened wide. She could not stop laughing. A few days earlier, I’d phoned a local swim shop to have various items delivered there. A life preserver, a kickboard, a snorkel, scuba goggles and fins, nose plugs, ear plugs… whatever I thought would keep me afloat. It was enough equipment for a team of navy frogmen.
After a few minutes, Dania persuaded me to wade into the shallow end. It was maybe two-and-a-half, three-feet deep, but that was as far as I would go. I must have looked ridiculous standing there in water barely up to my knees.
Eventually, Dania convinced me to lie flat on my belly on the water while she held me up with her hands. Then she got me to bend my legs and stand from that position. I realized that at six foot seven, I wasn’t going to sink.
Once I felt safe in the water, she taught me to kick. Then stroke. Then kick and stroke rhythmically. Then kick, stroke, and lift my face out of the water to breathe.
It was a long process. But thanks to Dania, I overcame my fear of water and learned to swim. It was indispensable to my gradual healing.
These days, when Dania and I get together and reminisce, we laugh when one of us tells the story. But I’m as proud of that accomplishment as my consecutive 50-point games. And more grateful to Dania than I can ever hope to express.
IT WAS THE END OF JULY. Week thirteen of my rehab.
I swam in the pool for an hour, doing what Dania called kick-pull-swim drills.
They were difficult. One lap you did nothing but kicking. The next lap you only pulled using your arms, no legs. And the third lap, you did a full swim. I’d become a good enough swimmer to pull through the water without using my legs at all.
When I was finished with the hour of swimming, Dania looked thoughtful. We were still in the pool.
“I feel we can start jumping drills today,” she said.
“Right here?”
She nodded. “We’re gonna start mimicking what you’d do at the basketball court,” she said. “In the water, it won’t have as much force.”
“PUSH! PUSH! HARDER!”
It was August and hot. I was on the Cybex machine, a high-tech isokinetic cross-trainer that could adjust the resistance at every point in the range of movement. It gave a computer readout of how many pounds of force I was able to impart with my right leg relative to my left. We were looking for parity on both sides, but it would be some time before we achieved that.
Dania drove me relentlessly.
“Harder! Push!”
I went deep and pushed down with my legs. The Knicks had installed the $35,000 Cybex in my house. Per my request, the team had given Dania whatever she wanted at their expense—a leg press, a treadmill, a stationary bike, electrical stimulation devices, other things. But the Cybex was the most important piece of equipment in my rehabilitation.
“Push!”
I grunted, my Game Face on, sweat dripping down my forehead.
And I pushed.
I TROTTED SLOWLY up the right side of the court, dribbling the basketball, a relaxed tempo. I loved the sound of the dribble.
It was week twenty-three, early October, and I was about to take my first layup since the injury.
A month earlier, we’d gotten permission to use the pool and gymnasium at Ramapo College in New Jersey, not far from where I lived. Dania would get to my house between 3:15 and 3:30 in the afternoon, and we would do about ninety minutes on the machines. Afterward, we’d go to Ramapo, where I would swim in an Olympic-sized pool and then go on the court.
I started out in the gym with a little trotting, sidesteps, and walking figure-eights. Within two weeks, I was doing some uncontested shooting drills called walk-throughs. I would follow them with two laps around the gym, and later three. Next we added very basic slide drills and taking foul shots.
Dania had been a phys. ed. major before she became a therapist. She’d spent a year coaching basketball for high school girls, so she had a sense of the skill sets involved in the game.
We would sit and plan what we were going to do. I’d give her elements of my regular practice routine, and we would tone them down or change them. Whatever worked for us.
Now I dribbled, dribbled, reached the hoop, and put the ball up against the board with one hand.
It fell in. I looked at Dania as she recovered the basketball.
“Progress,” I said.
She nodded and snapped the ball back to me.
STANDING UNDER THE NET, off to one side, I went up and tapped the ball off the backboard with two hands. Tapped the ball, tapped the ball, tapped the ball. Each time I went up to tap, I was jumping up. Then tapping, coming down, going right back up, tapping, tapping, like that, back and forth.
It was a drill I’d done my whole life so I could be quick on rebounds. I needed to regain my explosiveness under the hoop.
We were deep into October.
Progress.
“RIGHT! LEFT! LEFT!”
I faced Dania with the basketball. She was slight, five foot four or five. A foot and change shorter than I was. We must have been a sight as she shouted her orders.
We’d added slide drills on command, the very same court drills Gil Reynolds had made me do on the court. I would slide and run sideways to the left, right, at an angle forward, an angle backward. My body was either erect or bent for the low post, my hands out to defend.
“Left, right!”
It was almost seven months into our work together.
We were coming up on a big test.
NOVEMBER 8, 1985, week twenty-eight.
I had difficulty jumping off my bent right leg on a hard left-side layup drill. I couldn’t get the lift. But that was okay. I had no problems jumping off both legs. I did something else that day. We were always prepared to make adjustments.
Sprinting hard to the basket, accelerating on the dribble, I sprang up off the floor, high off my left foot, the ball coming up in two hands…
Airborne.
I dunked. My first dunk since the injury. A rim rattler.
I turned to Dania.
“Not bad,” I said.
She smiled. “Pretty good, I’d say.”
We kept it secret. We were concerned that if people heard about it, they would think I was ready to come back. And I wasn’t. There was a great deal of speculation among the press about my return, but I didn’t speak to them. I didn’t want any wrong or inaccurate information getting out. It was too soon to raise expectations.
Three weeks later, I was fitted for new orthotics for my running shoes. My right foot was bothering me a little, and that was holding me back. I also had some soreness in the back of that knee. But I was jogging full court, and doing outside shooting and layups at a decent speed. I was seeing improvement in my right leg jumps. I was getting more height.
Throughout the month of December, I increased the frequency of my full-court drills. Toward the end of the month, week thirty-three, I was able to start a running program.
I decided to have a Christmas Eve press conference. The Knicks organized it to be held at Madison Square Garden.
Dave DeBusschere and Dr. Scott were present, along with a gaggle of print, TV, and radio reporters. Seated at a podium in front of the Knicks banner, I told them things were going well, but still I couldn’t give them a time frame for my return.
What I didn’t say was that, for the first time, I knew would be able to resume my career.
IN MARCH 1986, week forty-four, we took my basketball work over to the Knicks training facility at Upsala College. The move had great significance. I wouldn’t have made it unless I knew, at last and without a doubt, that I was coming back.
Giddy as a little kid, I asked Dr. Scott to come with us and challenged him to a full-court footrace. We raced from one side of the court to the other. He won—I couldn’t keep up! I was twenty-eight and he must have been in his forties. I couldn’t keep up.
That was okay. I’d built up my skills from the time I was in third grade. Little Spal. I could do it again. I was reassembling the puzzle. It had to be done step-by-step.
I’d come home every day, pat myself on the back, and then put my rehab out of my mind. Otherwise, it would have consumed me.
I opened up to other things. I started listening to live jazz, going out to jazz clubs at night. I came to know the musicians and understand the similarities between their approach to playing music and mine to playing basketball. Both involved passion, discipline, study, and self-expression. Both were rhythmic and musical.
Working out at Upsala, I got to the point where I wanted to simulate game action. Dania was fine with playing the role of an opposing player. I would have her stand in front of me, like a defensive guard, when I was coming up court for a layup. At first, she was stationary and I’d just run around her. But after a while, she’d move from one side to the other, or feint toward me, like a player.
I wore my Game Face every day during those sessions. It didn’t intimidate her. It had intimidated other players, but not Dania. She understood me.
I sometimes wondered if she realized the difference it made when she’d agreed to come to my home in the early days. I needed isolation at that time. I needed to push the world away and operate in a zone without anyone else around but her. If I’d had to go to a physical therapy center, I wouldn’t have made it back.
A few weeks into our workouts at Upsala, Dania arrived looking peaked. When I asked what was wrong, she said she’d been nauseous and vomiting. She thought she might have a stomach bug.
As it turned out, she and her husband Ron were having their first child. When I learned about it, I told Dania I no longer wanted her to do basketball drills with me. I didn’t want us taking any risks with her pregnancy. She didn’t want to stop. She insisted she was okay doing the work. But I finally won the battle.
Ron was also a trained therapist, an excellent one, and he took over all the basketball work. Dania and I would do weekends in the pool at Ramapo, and Ron would work with me at Upsala. Sometimes she’d come to observe, but she no longer did on-court stuff.
It would take me another full year to prepare for my return to basketball. Besides working out with Ron Sweitzer, I had Mike Dummett, a six-foot-seven, 235-pound Upsala player, come in to rebound and play some one-on-one. I added a jump shot to my game, which I didn’t have before the injury. Not a mid-range. A long shot. Deep in the corners, deep on the wings. I knew I was going to need it, because I’d lost some of the explosiveness that had always let me get by players.
In late March 1987, I felt ready to step back on an NBA court. But I hadn’t yet made the announcement or even informed the Knicks. With only two weeks or so left in the season, I didn’t have much time.
I needed to choose a date… and not just any date.
In my mind, it had to be the right one.