World Cup '94 / 45 Days and Counting : A Painful Lesson : Serious Knee Injury in '93 Has Given U.S. Soccer Star Balboa a New Perspective

By JULIE CART

May 3, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It was a misstep, nothing more. An awkwardly placed foot that came down in an unexpected indentation. At any other time, with any other foot, perhaps the leg and attached body would have traveled on without mishap. Perhaps.

But this foot wedged into that hole and didn’t budge. This body twisted this knee so that the joint’s stabilizing structure snapped with a loud pop! that sent an emphatic message to the brain.

Marcelo Balboa had processed the message before he hit the grassy ground, before his teammates had rushed to him, before his mother in the the stands had begun to sob. It was not one of those cinematic moments, he said, in which your life passes before your eyes. It was much worse. Balboa saw his long-nurtured soccer career pass before him and keep on moving, as if it cared not a whit that he wasn’t able to stand and follow it.

Balboa learned much as he lay crumpled on that soccer field, while trainers and doctors tested and waggled his limp knee into crazy angles. He discovered that it is possible to love something and for that thing to be indifferent to your love. He learned that his ardent love was not enough, and not enough even when tempered with respect. Marcelo Balboa’s lesson was this: Learn to be grateful.

Who would care to be a cliche? It is not flattering to have your life viewed as something predictable or common. But the outlook for Marcelo Balboa, pre-April 17, 1993, was typical of that of most athletes, even professional ones. He could perform any daring stunt without fear. He was certain that his body would do whatever he asked of it. It always had, always would.

He had meant to study harder in high school, but there were so many sports to play. He had intended to graduate from college, but he was offered a great opportunity to play soccer. He wanted to develop outside interests, but when he wasn’t at practice he was so tired. For Balboa, life was something to do when you can’t play soccer.

His life was one-dimensional, but he knew it and didn’t care. Balboa had played in the 1990 World Cup finals. He had played more minutes with the national team than any other American for the last two years. He was a key figure on the team and was on course to play in this summer’s World Cup. How many Americans can say that? They were paying him to play soccer. Life was good.

That was pretty much Balboa’s psychological landscape before his right foot found that recess made by a long-erased football yard line. In that otherwise forgettable game--the U.S. national team against Iceland--Balboa’s world changed because his ability to play soccer was taken from him. The snapping sound his teammates heard was the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee tearing under stress. Also found was a partial tear of the medial lateral meniscus cartilage.

After Balboa was taken off the field and given the initial injury assessment, after the team’s doctor and trainers had returned to the game, Balboa went to the showers and cried.

“It hit me big time,” he said the other day. “Everything I had worked so hard to get up to that point was gone. I was the player of the year in 1992 and everything had been going so well for me. I was just starting to play well in the beginning of ’93. All I saw when I was in the shower and I was crying was the World Cup go by and I wouldn’t be there.

“Everything I had worked for went by me. As a soccer player, everything you work for is the World Cup. Great, I played in 1990. But I saw 1994 going by without me and that really hurt. I didn’t want that to happen.”

That was on a Saturday. Sunday morning, Balboa had an MRI test of his knee. The next day Dr. Bert Mandelbaum confirmed what Balboa had feared: he would have surgery immediately and the usual recovery period was 9-12 months.

Balboa, though, did not accept the time frame the doctors gave him. Everything would have to be accelerated, he said. He wanted the surgery immediately, then an aggressive rehab program. He got what he asked for.

After the operation, Balboa went to his apartment in Laguna Nigel. For six hours a day a passive-motion device attached to his right leg mechanically bent and straightened it to improve his range of motion. A plastic sleeve around his knee circulated cold water to keep swelling down. Two surgically implanted tubes drained pooling blood from the knee.

On the fourth day after surgery, the physical therapy began. After seven days, the stitches came out. For the next four weeks, Balboa was fitted with a hip-to-ankle brace that was so constricting it allowed him to sleep only on his back, fitfully.

The pain was one thing, but the work involved in rehab was quite another. For an athlete who thought he was tough, this was a revelation.

“I’ve always heard people say, ‘You have to ride the bike, you have to do this for rehab,’ ” Balboa said. “The first thing Dr. Mandelbaum said after surgery is, ‘We’re going to put you on a real aggressive program.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, all right. No big deal.’ I go to the therapist. He gets me on the table and we start doing (range of motion) patterns with his hands. I did about five of them and I couldn’t do any more. It was absolute pain.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘This is going to be tougher than I thought.’ Then (the therapist) said, ‘Today is nothing. Wait until we get the stitches out.’ As we went on day by day, it would get harder and harder and longer and longer. I never realized what kind of effort I’d have to give.”

The surprise was even greater because Balboa’s best friend on the team, Fernando Clavijo, had already gone through a similar rehab on a knee and told him it wasn’t so bad. The second week into rehab Balboa confronted Clavijo with his friend’s light assessment of the work required and Clavijo simply laughed. “I lied to you,” he said.

Balboa is 26, but he was quite young when he realized his father’s soccer skills had passed directly to his older brother, Claudio. Balboa’s strategy was to run and run. He figured that fitness would compensate for a lack of natural ease with the ball.

Luis Balboa coached his sons until they were well into their teens. He had played professional soccer in Argentina, then as a defensive midfielder for the Chicago Mustangs of the now-defunct North American Professional Soccer League.

Claudio and Marcelo would join their father every Sunday to watch Spanish-language soccer telecasts. They played in a youth soccer league in Cerritos. They grew up with soccer, but they also played water polo, football, baseball, whatever sport was in season.

Luis made Marcelo choose. Too much time spent on sports and not enough time on schoolwork, he told his son. The boy’s grades were not good, even though he was smart. You may play a sport, but not four or five, the father said. Marcelo chose soccer and football. He became a star.

“By the end of high school, I had offers to go to the best schools, but I didn’t have the grades,” Balboa said. “I was lazy. I didn’t want to do the work. I realized that when I wanted to go to college and I couldn’t go where I wanted to go.”

Instead he went to junior college and played with the national under-20 team. He transferred to San Diego State, where his fame as a talented defender was equaled by his reputation as a private person whose interests extended to soccer, period. That focus was about to be tested.

“In high school, I didn’t go to one party,” Balboa said. “I wasn’t interested in the drinking. I didn’t get into that until college. San Diego State was a party team. I got involved in that and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be part of a team that was known for drinking.”

Then Bob Gansler called and asked if he would like to play full time for the U.S. national team that was trying to qualify for the 1990 World Cup.

When soccer was taken away from him, Balboa was left with no outlet for his competitive drive. Physical therapy became a substitute for soccer.

“Anyone who puts in six hours a day, seven days a week for five months with no complaints and no setbacks . . . that says a little about that person,” said Rudy Rudawsky, the U.S. team trainer. “He came to every practice. Every practice. He didn’t have to. He could have dropped off. He never did.”

Balboa listened to the therapist’s predictions about when he would return, but in his mind he subtracted two months from each estimate. When they said he would be running in six months and practicing again in eight, he figured he would be running in four months and practicing in six.

To accomplish this, Balboa extended himself. He was told to do X, and he did X+. When Balboa was cleared to ride a mountain bike, Rudawsky shepherded Balboa and Clavijo through the hills of Laguna Nigel. As the players raced downhill ahead of him, Rudawsky didn’t see Balboa fly off his bike and cut his right knee. Balboa had made sure the trainer stayed to his left.

He also insisted in maintaining his routine, as if it might make the injury go away. That meant sleeping, as usual, in his bedroom on the second floor. No one saw the many times he missed a step and slipped, or was there the night he fell down the entire flight of stairs and lay for many minutes, still and in the dark, afraid to move.

His family watched as Balboa struggled to recover. On Friday nights, his mother came over and stayed until Sunday, cooking and helping as much as his pride would allow. His father--who had never been injured in his career--was awed by his son’s dedication.

“To our family, soccer is our love,” Luis Balboa said. “But if Marcelo hadn’t played, it wouldn’t have changed anything. We are so proud. Even as a father, I was impressed with how hard he worked to rehabilitate his knee.”

He returned to action with the team on Dec. 5, 1993, playing for a few minutes in a game against El Salvador. Balboa came on as a substitute and immediately began running around with no apparent plan. He took a shot the instant it presented itself.

“I was like a puppy,” he said. “I was so happy to be out there. I was going to go out there and run and have fun again.”

Now that he’s back as the team’s full-time sweeper, Balboa is doing what he used to do, but with a new outlook.

“I learned a lot about myself,” he said. “The whole thing made me realize that I had to look after soccer and what was going to happen to me. Since 1988, when I started with the team, I never thought about anything but soccer. I was going to school, I knew I was getting an education, but I didn’t really think about it. Once I got hurt, I kept on thinking, ‘What happens if I can’t come back and play soccer? What am I going to do?’

“That’s when I realized there’s more to life than playing soccer. There’s other things I want to do. I want to go back and finish my degree. It’s very important to me now.

“You take things for granted when you’re healthy. Between practices, I used to sit in the house and watch TV. I wouldn’t do much. You realize you have to go out and enjoy life. I was kind of letting life roll by me. I was playing soccer, coming home and relaxing. Now I go to movies, play golf, jet ski. It wakes you up. It’s like a reality check. You see what your life was and now you see what it’s like without soccer. Let me tell you, at that point my life looked pretty bleak without soccer.”

Player Profile

* Name: Marcelo Luis Balboa

* Birth date: Aug. 8, 1967

* Place: Chicago

* Height: 6 feet 1

* Weight: 170 pounds

* Position: Defender (sweeper)

* Club: U.S. national team

* Debut with national team: Jan. 10, 1988

* Debut opponent: Guatemala

* Caps (international matches): 86

* Goals: 9