Much to my chagrin, injuries are a tragic and inevitable part of sports. Athletes push their bodies to exhilarating limits, enabled by the brain's release of adrenaline and endorphins. But thrills don't make an athlete's ill-fated arrival at the limit any less harrowing.
Last April, Chicago Bulls point guard and reigning MVP Derrick Rose was forced to reckon with his body's vulnerability. Rose, as explosive as any athlete on the planet, saw an opening in the Philadelphia 76ers defense and propelled toward the basket. Rather than running through the layup, he decided to jump stop under the hoop an instinctive judgment he's made hundreds, if not thousands, of times. With his horizontal momentum mostly halted, he tried to spring vertically towards the basket to complete the layup, but his knee buckled. Rose suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and hasn't suited up since.
I struggle to make sense of how an injury impacts an athlete's psyche. Are they constantly preoccupied with getting hurt? Do they imagine the risks as remote in order to avoid confronting the fickleness of their lifestyle? As an unremarkable physical specimen, I barely even identify with my body. Four years at Dartmouth have magnified this feeling. Each time I internalize a new academic concept or make a friend laugh, I want to give myself a hearty pat on the brain, not on the back.
"I have a body but I am a mind," Brian Jay Stanley wrote in The New York Times. "My body and I have an intimate but awkward relationship, like foreign roommates who share a bedroom but not a language. As the thinker of the pair, I contemplate my body with curiosity, as a scientist might observe a primitive species."
This feeling of remoteness cannot, must not exist for the elite athlete: a concept Rose understands but one that is all together missed by a critical mass of Bulls fans.
On March 9, ten months after Rose underwent surgery to repair his ACL, a Bulls source acknowledged that Rose was medically cleared to play and was participating in full contact practices. When he indefinitely postponed his return, criticism followed, ranging from the reasonable "he's acting like a tease" to the repulsive: "he doesn't care about the Bulls, only his next max contract."
"Whenever I get sick or injured, I am dismayed to discover how little control I have of my life," Stanley wrote. "My relation to my body resembles a privy council's relation to an adolescent king. I am thoughtful and wise and know best what to do, but my capricious body possesses the power and final authority, and I must tiptoe round its whims."
A successful athlete represents the perfect integration of body and mind. The body flawlessly executes that which the mind imagines, no tiptoeing necessary. But the athlete's ignorant bliss, so carefully doctored by weights and trainers and tape, is shattered upon his or her first confrontation with injury. Though Rose's knee was officially "healed", according to ESPN Chicago's Melissa Isaacson, Rose "told the Bulls that until he feels in his mind' he can confidently dunk off his left foot in a game situation, he is not 100 percent mentally ready to return to competition."
I can only provide a birds' eye view of Rose's situation, so I caught up with alpine skier Jake Perkins '14 for a first-hand account of his recovery process and the trials in recalibrating his mental-physical balance.
"My injury destroyed the confidence that my mind had in my body," said Perkins, who tore his ACL, medial meniscus and lateral meniscus in a ski-racing crash last year. "Every day has been a fight to reestablish the blind faith that I had always had in my limbs. I spent the entire ski-racing season wondering if my body would do what I asked of it. After three surgeries and seemingly endless recuperation, there remains a disconnect that I am struggling to overcome."
The critics reached a fever pitch as Chicago entered the second round of the playoffs against title-favorites the Miami Heat. Bulls center Joakim Noah couldn't take it anymore.
"If you tore your ACL and you have to be the starting point guard and have the expectations that Derrick has, then maybe you can judge," he said. "But everybody who hasn't been in that situation before should really shut up."
