The Road Back Gets Longer : O’Neal’s Knee Mending More Slowly Than Hoped
In mid-January, a prominent South Lake Tahoe orthopedic surgeon, Richard Steadman, performed minor arthroscopic surgery on the left knee of Charger defensive end Leslie O’Neal.
The fervent hope was that Steadman’s operation would provide O’Neal and the Chargers with the optimistic prognosis they had been awaiting since a freak accident on an end sweep that shredded cartilage and ligaments during the 13th game of O’Neal’s rookie year of 1986.
Instead, Steadman discovered that the joint of the knee was healing more slowly from the major surgery than was originally predicted. He also found arthritis developing in the cartilage.
O’Neal, the eighth player selected in the 1986 NFL draft, had progressed to the point where he was jogging and sprinting backward and forward. Steadman ordered him to indefinitely stop running during subsequent workouts.
Suddenly there were new and dark questions about a future that had once been so bright. And there was essentially still only one answer:
-- “I don’t know,” O’Neal said when asked what the revelations of the January arthroscopy meant to his extensive rehabilitation.
-- “I don’t know,” O’Neal said when asked if he expected to participate in the Charger’s mini-camp May 20.
-- “I have no idea,” O’Neal said when asked if he expected to be ready for the team’s summer training camp in July.
This is not good news for the Chargers, a team that is beginning to identify its final needs for this year’s NFL draft, which will take place April 24-25. Whether O’Neal is able to play in 1988 will have a direct bearing on what direction the Chargers take in the selection process. It also will influence indirectly their continuing efforts to trade for a suitable replacement for retired quarterback Dan Fouts.
“We have been told he will be able to participate in the mini-camp,” Al Saunders, the Charger coach, said. “At what level of efficiency he’s going to be is really unknown. How effective he’s going to be coming off that injury is something we’re going to have to monitor very closely.”
“Any scope (arthroscopy) is a setback,” Steve Ortmayer, the Chargers’ director of football operations, conceded. “But we’re keeping a very positive perspective on Leslie O’Neal.
“He had a severe knee injury, and we continue to be aware of it all the time. We believe if anybody can come back from it, it’s people like Leslie O’Neal, people like Kellen Winslow.”
Winslow is the Charger tight end who suffered a serious knee injury in the middle of the 1984 season. He missed the rest of that year and started only six games in 1985 before he returned to the lineup full-time in 1986.
Many people have compared Winslow’s injury to O’Neal’s. O’Neal says that is a mistake.
“I think my knee (injury) was a little bit more severe than Kellen’s,” he says. “Plus, I think my knee is healing differently than Kellen’s. I don’t think he had the joint damage that I have.”
O’Neal’s rehabilitation schedule calls for six, sometimes seven, workouts a week. He spends much of his time commuting between San Diego and Steadman’s South Lake Tahoe office. As part of the program, he rides a stationary bike, lifts weights and uses an elastic “sport cord” as an aerobic conditioning and strengthening device.
He said Steadman’s January orders to postpone running weren’t the end of the world.
“I can still get the same things accomplished as far as riding the bike and squatting and so forth,” he said. “I’m just not pounding on the knee right now.”
At the time of the major operation, doctors said it would take at least 15 months for recovery. It now has been almost 16 months. Winslow returned exactly one year after his injury.
O’Neal expects to play football again and hasn’t given up on returning for the 1988 season. At the time of the injury, he was leading the Chargers in tackles with 81 and sacks with 12 1/2. But he admits he was “disappointed” by the results of the January arthroscopy.
Less than a week after the December 1986 surgery, O’Neal asked Steadman what might hamper his recovery. Steadman said the cartilage concerned him, but added he didn’t have any patients whose cartilage hadn’t healed.
Now, for the first time, O’Neal has talked publicly and freely about the possibility that he won’t return to the Chargers.
“If I have to walk away from football, I think I will be able to do it with a cool head,” he said. “But I will miss it from the standpoint that I didn’t prove to myself how good I could be. I didn’t reach that potential. There are a lot of things I have learned since I’ve been hurt about the game and about my game that I would like to use out on the field.
“I don’t see myself being an assistant coach trying to teach people. I don’t have that type of patience. It would burn me too much inside to see other guys trying to do what I feel I could perfect. So, from that standpoint, I think it will be tough. But then again, I did all that I could do, and I can’t complain.
“I didn’t ask to be hurt, but it happened. I deal with it. I had fun the year that I played . . . being around . . . meeting different people . . . being in the limelight. That was fun. But it eventually comes to an end anyway.”
The week before the O’Neal injury, Gunther Cunningham, the Charger defensive line coach, said, “Brains is what really separates Leslie from the rest of the pack. He is by far the most intelligent player at this stage of his career that I have ever seen.”
That was after only 13 games.
The week after the injury, Cunningham said the loss of O’Neal was “the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my coaching career.”
“It was such a sad thing,” said teammate Lee Williams. “Leslie had everything in front of him. To be so dominant at this stage of his career, the sky was the limit for him.”
Added Cunningham: “People haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg of his talent.”
O’Neal has acknowledged the difficulty of the decision the Chargers will have to make if he can’t play in 1988.
“They kept me around this past year; do they want to keep me around this year hoping that I’ll play toward the end of the year?” he asked. “And if I don’t play the whole year, is it worth it to keep me around the final year (1989) of my contract to see if they can get something out of me?”
In August 1986, O’Neal signed a four-year contract with an option year worth a reported total of $1.9 million. Marvin Demoff, O’Neal’s representative, said O’Neal has insured the contract against injury through Lloyd’s of London, the British insurance brokerage firm. That means if O’Neal is released before the contract expires, Lloyd’s must pay him the balance.
“We have our fingers crossed,” team owner Alex Spanos said Wednesday. “We think there’s more than a 50-50 chance he’ll be playing for us this year. But exactly when?”
Ortmayer gave no indication that the Chargers are considering releasing O’Neal, now or ever. But O’Neal has considered that they might.
“They also have to think about if I can play, how many years do I have?” he said. “When my leg finally gets well, can I go play eight years and not have anything to worry about? Or when I get back on the field, will my leg be so bad that it’s going to deteriorate in one or two years anyway?
“I can’t make them keep me around. And if they cut me, I don’t know if I’ll be picked up by anybody. Who wants to take a chance on my knee? I think I have potential that has to be reckoned with. But I can’t use my potential if I can’t get on the field.”
When O’Neal was 5 years old, his father was disabled by an industrial accident in the family’s home town of Little Rock, Ark. He had two broken knees and one broken hip.
O’Neal’s father has struggled through several operations since then. He progressed from a wheelchair to crutches to a cane. And then it was back to crutches again when a hip replacement operation went bad. He is 57 now, and doctors say another operation might solve the problem. But O’Neal’s father isn’t sure he wants to endure all the pain again.
O’Neal said his father’s problems have caused him never to feel sorry for himself. He says he didn’t even need to talk to his father about his own injury.
O’Neal refuses to second-guess himself for not wearing a knee brace the day he was injured. Earlier in the year, he had been wearing the brace. But every time he began to sweat, the brace would slide down on his leg and impede his mobility.
The brace’s manufacturers say the injury would have been less severe had O’Neal not discarded their device. Charger physicians say there’s no way of knowing that to be true. In any event, O’Neal hadn’t been wearing the brace for several weeks before he got hurt.
The injury occurred when Colt running back Albert Bentley attempted to sweep left end. O’Neal was in pursuit of the play when he accidentally bumped into teammate Woodrow Lowe, a linebacker.
The damage was so extensive by the time O’Neal got on the operating table that Steadman had to graft part of the patellar tendon onto the area where the anterior cruciate ligament had been. According to O’Neal, they did this by cutting off a piece of the tendon, connecting it to the top part of the bone, running it through the knee and attaching it to the bottom part of the knee with screws.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the rehabilitation for O’Neal is not knowing how much to work to do or when the knee needs rest.
“I’m used to my body giving me signals when I’m tired,” O’Neal says. “But with stuff inside the knee, you really can’t tell. You can’t tell what damage you’re doing to the cartilage.”
O’Neal disdains publicity and will tell you that hype belongs at the front door of the circus. But on this spring day, the physical rehabilitation could wait. Talking was mental therapy.
This was the same Leslie O’Neal who had demanded to meet with Spanos face-to-face before he signed his first contract. No other Charger had ever made a similar request.
“You don’t pick a wife by phone, do you?” O’Neal explained at the time.
This was the same Leslie O’Neal who, according to Cunningham, never carried out an assignment in practice if he didn’t understand the principle behind the concept behind the order.
This was a thoughtful man still looking for answers. The conversation turned back to the future.
“You’re a survivor,” the visitor said in what was half-statement, half-question.
“You have to be,” O’Neal said after a pause. “You have no choice. You survive or you die. I don’t want to die yet.”