Fox Strives to Keep His Feet on the Floor

When Derek Fisher’s eyes reddened in Los Angeles, so did Rick Fox’s in New York City.

When tears lingered and dropped from Kobe Bryant’s jaw line onto his golden uniform, so too did Fox’s dampen his T-shirt in a Midtown hotel room.

The Lakers had tried and failed last spring, falling somewhat ingloriously in six games in the Western Conference semifinals against the San Antonio Spurs. They barely had any fight left by the final quarter of that final game, and while they were able to cling to each other on the bench, Fox, respected among them as a veteran and captain, was propped up in his Manhattan suite, recovering from delicate surgery on his foot.

Still perhaps three months or more from recovery, Fox said this week he decided then that he would not let his career pass, nor a Laker dynasty fade, without an effort to save both. That was before Karl Malone, before Gary Payton. And while their free-agent signings confirmed to him that he could not miss this next season, it was the sight of defeat that pushes him through the arduous rehabilitation that is not nearly done.

“It really hit me that what had happened to me physically was not as painful as what happened to us as a group,” he said. “What hurt even more was that I chose to have the surgery and had to sit there and watch teammates go through the pain of losing that game. I was going through the same pain. I was crying just as hard as those guys, in part because I couldn’t be there with them.

“I thought, it couldn’t end that way. It couldn’t end that way. It was at that moment, I didn’t care if I was ever the same basketball player, but I knew I wanted to be a basketball player again for this team. I wanted to be back on the floor with a Laker uniform on making an attempt to climb back to the top, to stand up there again. Losing that championship, by the means we lost it -- not being deep enough or good enough to sustain the injuries we had -- that was enough to challenge me.”

On May 12 at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, Dr. Jonathan Deland and Dr. William Hamilton repaired a tendon in Fox’s left foot, torn two weeks earlier in a first-round playoff game against the Minnesota Timberwolves. He had hobbled through a game or two before the tendon detached, and as Fox prepared to leave the team for the surgery, his teammates had gathered around him. Led by Coach Phil Jackson in the guest-room-small visitors’ locker room in Minneapolis, the Lakers thanked Fox for his spirit, for his fight in a season that began with him standing knuckles-to-chin with Sacramento’s Doug Christie and would end with him standing in a toe-to-knee cast.

Some guys move on, watch the mailbox for the paychecks, order up the Haagen-Dazs. Not Fox, whose voice always did turn thick when he spoke of playing alongside Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, of once-in-a-lifetime memories replayed thrice, of quitting before he had ever played anywhere else.

His career perhaps in peril with what doctors have called an unusual injury, Fox rushed off to surgery, plunged into rehabilitation and today can’t help but think he’ll be able to do something -- anything -- in training camp. Veterans report to Honolulu on Oct. 2; the first full-squad workout is the following day. Jackson said last week that a December return might be realistic, using a timetable Fox himself has offered occasionally.

The cast, crutches and boot are gone -- “Had that bonfire ceremony a few weeks back,” Fox said -- but the recovery remains.

“The injury is uncommon, because it is more typical that athletes injure their Achilles tendon,” Deland said Wednesday. “But his progress has been as we’d expect and we do expect him to recover fully.”

They can’t say when that will be.

Fox spent much of his summer in Tempe, Ariz., at Athletes’ Performance Institute, a rehabilitation and training center frequented by professional athletes, or trailed by any of three physical therapists. Fox admitted he could use an extra month, but beyond that put no boundaries on his return. It will be sometime between today and, he hopes, the moment the Lakers really need him or he needs them.

“I’m getting to a place where I’ve paid the type of attention to my body all summer where I can’t help but expect to be rewarded for that,” he said. “I hope my body will respond. If I would have waited any longer than those two weeks to get that surgery done, then, yeah, I wouldn’t know and I would have put the Lakers in a place of uncertainty of my availability for the season.

“When I say that, I mean our team is pretty much settled in February. By the halfway point, you pretty much know what you’ve got. So, anything on top of that is more of an insurance policy. Being a part of this team as an insurance policy as a player in this league and as bright as the future looks for this team would be a pleasure and an honor. Would my ego settle into that? If that’s what’s best for the team, you better believe it. Is my ego driving me now to play a substantial role? Of course.”

As for a reasonable goal to be on the floor with nine other players, end to end again, playing the gritty defense and the selfless end of the triangle again, Fox chuckled and said, “Training camp?”

“It’s the strangest thing,” he said. “Working with my [physical] therapist, I get in such a mental state, it gets to this time of year, you start thinking about getting your body right, getting your mind right. You start getting it all lined up back in August. God bless the different therapists who have been with me, traveling the world; they’ve seen sides of me I’m sure they don’t understand.”

They would stress patience, he said. He would grip their necks and shake.

“I can’t think like that,” he said. “If I started thinking like that, then it would be July, and then August. I had to push myself mentally. I had to think in terms of beating the odds, staying ahead of schedule.... I had to think, ‘The sooner the better.’ I can’t let myself get to the point where rehab became my yearlong existence. It has to be more about moving toward being back in a setting that has me practicing and playing.”