Only One Person Knows When the Knee is Ready

A milestone will tick past sometime Sunday afternoon, but few will likely take note. No one will stop the clock with 3:32 to play in the fourth quarter of the Chargers’ game with Minnesota and say:

“This was when it happened, exactly 52 weeks ago. This was the moment when Kellen Winslow’s right knee was turned into a plate of spaghetti.”

It doesn’t seem that long, does it? It does if your name is Kellen Boswell Winslow.

That moment will not be a milestone to him because what happened in that split second has been, instead, a millstone.

In the aftermath, the most critical question was not when he might be able to once again play football, but if he would ever play the game again..

I’ll never forget the words of Dr. Gary Losse, the team physician who performed the surgery on Winslow’s knee.

After examining the ligaments in the knee, Losse said they could not be stitched together.

“It would have been like trying to sew together two mop ends,” he said. “. . . It wouldn’t hold stitches.”

Losse became an architect rather than a surgeon, reconstructing rather than repairing. He had to build Winslow’s knee the same way Ernest Hahn built Horton Plaza. It was a matter of starting over because so little could be retained of what remained.

And now all this time has passed, a speck in eternity but an eternity for Winslow.

It is now a matter of when he returns. That is good news, not only for the Chargers’ offense but for the man. That should be the biggest concern.

The Chargers have announced that he has been activated and will be in uniform Sunday, and that gets us to the subject of a little controversy that erupted this week. It was being suggested that he should play Sunday afternoon, or perhaps face a suspension without pay.

It has never been made perfectly clear exactly who was making these suggestions. Since secretaries, assistant equipment men and ticket sellers are not generally tapped as background sources for news reports, I would suggest that such suggestions had to come from a higher level.

I further suggest that they were ill-founded.

It was not for an anonymous mouse in the woodwork to say that Winslow should play. It was also not in the province of a writer, fan, coach, owner or even team doctor.

Don Coryell, the coach, was enraged this week by published reports that someone in the Charger organization was growing impatient with Winslow. He called it garbage.

Unbeknown to the head coach, the so-called garbage was not produced in the minds of over-imaginative writers. Figuratively, it came from up the stairs on Level 1-A at the stadium.

That “someone” was as unqualified as he was unnamed.

You see, no one is really qualified to say when Kellen Winslow is ready except Kellen Winslow. He bears the scars, and the ones on the knee itself are the easiest to heal. There are also emotional scars.

Getting a knee torn apart in a collision on a football field is a little different than falling off a bicycle and getting right back on.

Mentally, Winslow will have to deal with what might be called The Impact Factor. Linebackers don’t handle tight ends as they would fine china. In fact, I wouldn’t let a linebacker handle fine china. It was a linebacker, the Raiders’ Jeff Barnes, who shredded Winslow’s ligaments with a rather routine tackle last October.

With that memory in mind, it is certainly not cowardly of Winslow to be hesitant or apprehensive.

After all, it is his knee.

Of course, the National Football League generally takes the stance that it owns its livestock--heart, soul and knees. And it is true that Winslow is being paid during his rehabilitation.

In that sense, Winslow has a responsibility to the Chargers. He is responsible for playing football as soon as he feels he can play football. If he is not yet at that point, he should not be on the field.

Winslow himself has said nothing on the subject. Usually a rather gregarious sort, he has thus far refused to converse with members of the media. This self-imposed isolation will undoubtedly end when he is once again in uniform on a Sunday afternoon (or Monday night).

Meanwhile, those who would suggest he play immediately if not sooner should also contemplate their responsibilities. Should this man of such immense talent be coerced--even subtly--to return prematurely, those who applied such pressure would be the folks answerable if he went right out and reinjured that right knee.

Obviously, this is a sensitive issue. The NFL has always discouraged notions that any of its franchises would ask that a player perform before he is capable. The party line is to plead innocent of any such breaches of responsibility.

The Saga of Kellen Winslow is wrought with implication that the man is being pressured to get back into the lineup. I don’t care to know that someone thinks Winslow should play. I want to know when Winslow says he is ready to play.