For Coviello, Play in Pain Is Just a Refrain : College football: A regular in the trainer’s room, SDSU linebacker fights off injuries.

At this point, it looks as if Andy Coviello’s body will outlast his football career. But it’s going to be close.

There are seven games remaining on San Diego State’s schedule. Seven games for football to find a healthy part of Coviello’s body to attack.

The game has tried to take him out before. It has left him with two bad knees and a bad shoulder. It has gone after his back.

It has worn him down, left him exhausted enough to be victimized by the flu. Which is where he was this week, bed-ridden on Monday and Tuesday before returning to practice on Wednesday.

But he will play Saturday when the Aztecs play host to New Mexico. No doubt about that. He always plays.

Coviello and football have cut a deal. The game will never make it easy for him. And he will never back down.

“He bounces back from health curveballs and somehow hits them over the fence,” SDSU trainer Brian Barry said. “Or at least puts them in play.”

Coviello’s injury list is longer than Al Capone’s rap sheet. His file in the SDSU trainer’s room is thicker than any in a police department.

If Coviello’s football career were a board game, it would be “Operation.” This is a guy who suffered a broken leg when he was 7 during a pick-up football game with his brothers on his parents’ front lawn.

“Injuries don’t hamper my performance,” Coviello said. “They just aggravate me.

“Sometimes, I think they help. They get me more mad, more intense and I feel like an underdog. I feel like the other guy has something on me. If he has two good knees and I have one, I feel like I have to go harder.”

He gets his own cups of coffee while he’s in the trainer’s room. Just helps himself. Why not? He’s a regular.

He averages about 14 hours a week getting treatment for chronic tendinitis in his left knee. He had surgery after last season, but the tendinitis didn’t go away. The knee has been involved in too many hours of practice and too many tackles.

Coviello, an outside linebacker, plays football like a kid rides the bumper cars. He is all over the place and he likes to run into people.

“He loves to fly around the field,” said Damon Pieri, SDSU free safety. “That’s why he gets hurt a lot. He’s real hyper. I think he only needs about four hours of sleep a night.”

By all rights, Coviello’s football career could have ended any number of times by now. He suffered an anterior cruciate ligament sprain in his right knee during his first spring of practice with SDSU, after transfering from Sacramento City College in 1990.

During the week of the New Mexico game last fall, Coviello took a helmet in the back from his roommate, linebacker Lou Foster. Coviello lay motionless on the ground for more than 30 minutes while trainers and paramedics carefully scraped him off the field and onto a stretcher bound for the hospital. It was just a bad bruise. He started that Saturday.

The tendinitis in his left knee is so bad--despite the surgery--that he was scared he wouldn’t even be able to play this season.

He has started every game, but it practically takes a small army to get him ready. His practice time is monitored--he typically skips Thursdays and Fridays. He receives three or four treatments a day, seven days a week, at approximately 30 minutes a treatment.

“It’s nothing I like to brag about,” Coviello said. “As much as I like (the trainers), I wouldn’t like to see them that much.”

But the injuries continue to stack up. He suffered a right shoulder sprain/separation Sept. 21 against Air Force. He re-injured the shoulder Sept. 26 against UCLA, when he also bruised his left hand.

The hand injury, it turned out, was no big deal.

“Hands are a given,” Coviello snorted.

But knees aren’t. As if the tendinitis in his left knee weren’t bad enough, Coviello hyperextended the same knee in the first quarter Saturday at Hawaii.

Coviello stayed down after a play, in obvious agony, pounding the artificial turf and grabbing at his knee. It looked worse than bad. It looked season-ending bad.

Barry rushed out.

“Andy, what’s wrong?” Barry asked.

“I don’t know, man,” Coviello said. “I don’t know if it’s my ACL or patellar tendon or what.”

“Do you want to try and walk?”

“Hell, no.”

So they called for a medical transport chair to wheel him off. They slapped ice on the knee as soon as he reached the bench. A couple of minutes later, Coviello looked at Barry.

“This should hurt a lot more. Why doesn’t it?” Coviello demanded.

Pause.

“I’m going to walk on it,” Coviello said. “Is that OK?”

Barry said yes.

Then: “I’m going to jog on it. Is that OK?”

Barry said yes.

Then: “I’m going to play. Is that OK?”

Barry said yes.

Coviello finished with a team-leading eight tackles.

“I thought for sure I was done,” Coviello said. “But it was more of a fear feeling than the actual injury. Any time the knee is touched or banged a little bit, I get real nervous.”

Just call him Coviello the Cat. The man with nine football lives.

He was always reluctant to wear knee braces because he thought they slowed him down. But the SDSU medical department convinced him to wear them and then, during a practice on the Wednesday before the Wyoming game last year, he took a hit that wrecked one of his knee braces. When he took it off, it was bent at a 90-degree angle.

Coviello’s knee was OK, but the problem was having another custom-made brace made before the game. Barry was able to get Mike McBrayen at DonJoy, a company that produces some equipment for SDSU, to make a brace and ship it via overnight mail to McBrayen’s father in Casper, Wyo. McBrayen’s father is a season-ticket holder to Wyoming football and, sure enough, he was able to deliver the brace to the Aztecs in time for the game.

“That’s the kind of luck Andy has,” Barry said. “Good and bad.”

His teammates got a kick out of the time a couple of weeks ago when Coviello was interviewed before the UCLA game. A television station was doing a feature on the Aztec football complex and, when the subject of the trainer’s room came up, Coviello was an expert.

“It was pretty funny,” tight end Judd Rachow said. “He knew the whole procedures, all the therapy techniques, everybody’s names. . . . “

Said tight end Ray Rowe: “I’m always getting on him about throwing his body all over the place. That’s why he is always on the sideline with ice all over him.”

Coviello’s father, Ron, who lives near Sacramento, said Andy has ignored injuries “ever since his first bloody nose in little league football.”

Said Coviello: “Ice is a healer for just about everything.”

Although he is rarely 100%, Coviello is vital to SDSU’s defense. He had 50 tackles last year and tied for the team lead with three sacks. He has started each game this season. He can usually be found near the ball.

“You’d like to have 11 players on the field at the same time with his attitude,” SDSU Coach Al Luginbill said.

Said outside linebackers coach Ed Schmidt: “He plays every play like it is his last--and it might be, the way he flies around.”

No, there aren’t many players who can match Coviello’s intensity.

“Sometimes, during practices and games, we’ll bet each other on who is going to make the next play,” Foster said. “A dollar, a Slurpee, or who will buy dinner . . . That’s when we really start having some fun.”

Coviello and the coaches talked about his redshirting this season and playing his senior season next fall, but Coviello wasn’t interested. He figured it would give his knee a chance to heal, but it would also set him back a year. Coviello, a criminal justice major, has plans. He would eventually like to work for the FBI.

“I like the fact that beat cops do their job, but I think the real crime is up higher, and the only way you can stop it is to have more power,” Coviello said.

Specifically, he would like to work in the narcotics division. He figures that may be the closest feeling he can get to playing football.

“I’ve always loved adrenaline,” he said. “It’s a weird thing. People who know me know what I’m talking about. I thrive on getting pumped up.

“If I could get into narcotics, I’m sure there would be some adrenaline rushes there. I’ve read about and done research on narcotics, and I think that is the only thing that would suit me. . . .

“I love the game, but I think I love the adrenaline rush more than the game. It’s like a high. It’s almost impossible to explain, but when I get it, I don’t want to lose it.”

Andy Coviello and the Doctor’s Office

Injury: Right knee, anterior cruciate ligament sprain When: Spring 1990 Comment: Healed with rest over summer in time for 1990 season Injury: Bruised back When: Nov. 14, 1990 Comment: Taken to hospital but played at New Mexico on Nov. 17 Injury: Left knee tendinitis When: Chronic in 1990 Comment: Had surgery last December; tendinitis continues to bother him Injury: Right shoulder sprain/separation When: Sept. 21, 1991 Comment: Happened in second quarter of Air Force game; He continued playing. Injury: Right shoulder re-injured; bruised left hand When: Sept. 26, 1991 Comment: Shoulder re-injured a couple of times during game; he continued playing Injury: Hyperextended left knee When: Oct. 5, 1991 Comment: Happened in first quarter of Hawaii game; he continued and led team in tackles