He’s So Tired of Waiting : For Bryan Riggs, Injured Titan Linebacker, the Comeback Is Almost Complete

While the Cal State Fullerton football team donned pads Wednesday morning for the first time this season, Bryan Riggs worked out in a pool and then stood by the sidelines, full of the knowledge that his wait was almost over.

That afternoon, he put on pads for the first time in almost a year--for the first time since he sustained a season-ending and career-threatening injury in the third game of the 1986 season.

“It kills me watching,” Riggs said, watching.

It is one of those things that you are supposed to put out of your mind, but he can still retrieve the bits of information effortlessly: “Sept. 13. Against Idaho State. Early in the second quarter.”

That’s when Riggs, an inside linebacker who had dropped back to protect against the pass, turned to sprint toward a receiver and hit a teammate straight-on. His right knee hyperextended, and he was carted from the field. His only-just-begun season was over, and the Titans had lost their leading tackler.

Three days later, Riggs underwent five hours of reconstructive knee surgery and began the slow, unsure process of coming back.

By many accounts, the process is nearly complete. That’s fortunate for the Titan defense, which returns five starters from a unit that allowed nearly 30 points a game on the way to a 3-9 season in 1986. Had the injury occurred later in the season--even later in that same game, said Steve Hall, Fullerton defensive coordinator--the season might have been too far along for Riggs to be granted a hardship season. Because he was, he is still around, the only fifth-year player on defense and one who is crucial, Hall says, to its fortunes.

Just how fully Riggs will return remains to be seen. So far, Fullerton coaches are impressed with how little the surgery seems to have affected his speed and mobility. One thing that remains to be seen is how he will be affected by apprehension about possibly reinjuring the knee. The plan is for him to take it easy through the remainder of training camp, continuing with only once-daily workouts. When the Titans open the season at Hawaii Sept. 5, Hall expects Riggs to be a starter but to play perhaps only half of each game, particularly early in the season.

Riggs, at 6-feet 2-inches and 230 pounds, has run a 4.7 40-yard dash and bench-pressed 470 pounds. He had just begun to come into his own last year when he was injured, Hall said.

After he transferred from Grossmont College in 1985, Riggs did not have a particularly good season. But after 2 1/2 games last year, he was the Titans’ leading tackler with 25, and the coaching staff had high hopes for him.

When the extent of the damage to the ligaments in his knee was discovered, there were those who figured he had played his last game.

“A lot of guys, they didn’t think I could do it,” Riggs said.

The damage was to a group of ligaments sometimes referred to as the “unhappy triad” because they have ended so many careers, said Dr. Joseph Cummings, the team doctor who performed the surgery.

Riggs, though, said he became determined to come back while sitting on the sidelines the day of the injury, numbed by painkillers and with his knee strapped.

“I had no doubt,” he said.

The first day in therapy, he lay flat on a table and tried to lift his leg. He couldn’t. But before the end of that day’s session, Riggs said, he could.

“I knew then I was going to be doing good,” he said. In two months, he gained back two inches in the thigh of his atrophied right leg.

The biggest question early in his rehabilitation wasn’t when he could play football again, but whether he’d be able to walk down the aisle with his June bride, Dana. He did, and it has been his wife, he said, who kept after him to work, and massaged the knee nearly every night, a practice he said speeds recovery.

His recovery so far may have surprised some, including his surgeon, but not the Fullerton coaches who work closest with him.

“Only because I know Bryan,” said Kirk Harmon, the linebacker coach.