It is a funny thing sometimes how sports and acronyms go hand-in-hand. Sure, you have the network jumble from ABC to ESPN, as well as the alphabet soup of sports leagues. People who follow baseball throw around ERA and OBP a lot. Some who have never taken the ACT even know what the ACC is. Then, you have those folks who can eloquently describe injuries, dropping in narratives of patellar tendons all the while distinguishing between an ACL, MCL, and PCL; plus, there are the select few that would tell you the anterior drawer test is not something best left to an interior designer. (That joke works better at an orthopedist convention.)
Before sitting down to write an article on the topic of knee injuries for a sports blog, I was a little torn (pardon the expression): My only prior knowledge on the matter came from a course taken at the Learning Annex as well as a 3-minute lesson from Wikipedia. Regardless, since the readers’ enjoyment of my written material has often been described as being equivalent to moving pieces of a person’s spine around, I feel like I’m as much an authority on the subject of chiropractics as any sportswriter can be. Thus, I continue.
If you’ve gotten to this point without getting distracted and clicking on the picture of the size 0 model in the margins of this website, I commend you. You are probably also strong enough in mind to know that the ACL — anterior cruciate ligament — is one of the major ligaments in the knee and has often been blamed for ending seasons, destroying careers, and short-changing irony-fearing folks out of their fantasy league jackpots. The other 3 ligaments are certainly important, too, but the ACL is the one that gets all the attention, at least from the sports-consuming society. Put another way, the ACL is LeBron James and the posterior cruciate ligament Dwyane Wade, while the lateral and medial collateral ligaments can be thought of as the knee’s answer to Joel Anthony: makes contributions but most people are neither able to remember nor accurately pronounce their name.
The ACL almost has a mystical quality about it, since most athletes pretty much don’t understand its importance until they are without full use of it. Then, you have the curious case of DeJuan Blair, the Spurs forward who has been able to carve out a basketball career despite having no ACL in either knee. Blair’s knees suffered so much damage throughout his high school career that the major ligament in his knees gradually wore away and disappeared. Yet, legions of other athletes have seen theirs continue to haunt them during their playing days and beyond.
Basketball has certainly seen its share of ACL hell. The Bulls went from title contenders to nearly being knocked out of the playoffs by the eighth-seeded Philadelphia 76ers after former MVP Derrick Rose tore the ACL in his left knee with less than two minutes remaining in Game 1 of the series, a game which Chicago won by double figures and thus generated a maelstrom of controversy for fans directed toward head coach Tom Thibodeau for leaving him in the game. “Unbelieva-Bull!” cried the fans.
If you were watching the Knicks-Heat play in Game 4, you saw Baron Davis collapse to the floor at MSG (another acronym/unhealthy food ingredient). What happened was a gruesome knee injury involving a tear of the ACL, MCL, and patella tendon that will sideline the Knicks’ guard for a year and may spell an end to his playing career, which included an ACL tear while at UCLA. For the Knicks, it wasn’t even their first ACL tear of the playoffs. That distinction went to Iman Shumpert, who ruptured his left knee in Game 1 of the series and is out for 6-8 months.
Timberwolves’ phenom Ricky Rubio tore his ACL during the regular season, cooling off the team’s playoff run. Clippers fans are enjoying a rare playoff run in 2012 but some still wonder what could have been with former prodigious guard Shaun Livingston who, in a 2007 game, came down awkwardly after a lay-up and suffered a left knee injury so horrific, he probably had orthopedists running for the Merck Manual.
The ACL generally wreaks its havoc on sports that require strenuous torque of the knee: basketball, soccer, skiing, and especially football. Tom Brady tore his ACL and missed the entire 2008 season. It led to the rise of Matt Cassel, which was also bad news for the Patriots. The Pats haven’t won a Super Bowl since. Carson Palmer visited knee purgatory during the Bengals’ 2006 playoff run, which turned into a fast-walk toward the exits at a time when the team’s fans finally had a reason to be excited about something. Worst of all, it was caused by a guy named Kimo. Six years later, Palmer simply resides in purgatory as the Oakland Raiders’ starting quarterback.
Some critics of the golfer have suggested that “Pop! Goes the Weasel” was a thinly-veiled reference to Tiger Woods’ ACL woes, though this categorization fails to recognize the half-century that passed between the penning of this nursery rhyme and said knee injury in 2007. Hank Haney, Woods’ former swinger coach, rather, swing coach-turned-National Enquirer correspondent alleges that the tear was suffered during Navy SEALs training. In that case, perhaps the training worked well, since Woods has stayed clandestine, finding a way to stay covert on the golf course for the last four years.
Even the greats can be undone in the most unusual of ways by this feisty ligament. Mariano Rivera was lost for the year due to a rare ACL tear in baseball, which sees its knee injury-equivalent of Tommy John surgeries and torn labrums. Made even rarer was the fact that he was felled while shagging fly balls, about as necessary a task for a pitcher as exfoliating is for a sportswriter.
All in all, there is a lesson to be learned about the ligament that does so much for humankind on a day-to-day basis, yet can be so cruel to athletes in the most inconvenient of times. (Well, maybe two if you use this summation as an excuse to stay off the treadmill for the next millennium.) Next time your team’s favorite player says he’d give up a leg to win a championship, hold your breath.
