We’ve never met in person, have just messaged online, and the first thing my new friend says to me when I approach is, “Are you okay?” Confused, I shrug and respond, “Yeah, why?” not sure what she’s referring to. “You’re limping,” she says, nodding at my leg. “Oh, yeah,” I say. “That’s just how I walk.”
A simple explanation, the acknowledgment of a limp without a story, without a past or future. And what is there to say, really? My knee is destroyed from years of abuse and neglect? That I feel thirty-five years older than I am? I wasn’t about to tell her about the sports medicine specialist who held my X-ray up and said, “Wow, that’s gnarly. You’ve got arthritis everywhere.”
Anything I might say would be at once too much and not enough. Somehow an overshare and tragically inadequate. I don’t know where to begin. That, and there is no end, because as old as this pain is, it feels forever fresh. And this new friend’s observation reminds me that this isn’t a private matter, that people can see my pain, that they can bear witness to the consequences of wanting something so bad, you’ll destroy your body in pursuit of it.
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My junior year at Drexel, we had the best start in Drexel women’s basketball history. We upset major programs like Villanova and Penn State; we won several games by 30 or more points. We had all the ingredients for a championship run: several knock-down three-point shooters, a post player with finesse, vision, and a great jumpshot, and another post player who could stop anyone on the floor, would kill someone for a rebound. More than anything, everyone wanted the same thing: to win the championship and to go to the NCAA tournament. Though every team says that, it’s always easy to tell which ones are willing to sacrifice things like ego and jealousy to make that dream a reality. And that year, we were that squad, and we knew it. God, did we know it.
During a Christmas tournament, the eleventh game of our season, there were just a few minutes left in a blowout game against the University of Texas at San Antonio and I was still in the game. This was unusual—up thirty points, my coach typically pulled the starters and got the subs some playing time. I charged up the court in a two-on-one fast break, my post player, T, running along my right side. I jump-stopped at the foul line, drawing the defender, and fed T a bounce pass for an easy bucket. But the second I landed, my knee hyperextended, then collapsed under me.
I didn’t fall, but I hopped on one leg off the court, cursing up a storm. I didn’t cry. That much I remember. Because I only cried out of emotional agony, when I knew an injury was serious and I would be sidelined. But this didn’t feel so bad, maybe just a sprain or tweak. My athletic trainer ran over and examined my knee, seemingly unconcerned, then wrapped two ice bags to it, one on the front and one on the back. Nonchalant, I limped over to the bench and cheered on my team, certain that nothing could get in the way of us and this Cinderella season.
The next day I woke up, rolled out of bed, and my leg gave out on me. I’d torn my second ACL, the first one while playing soccer in high school. Just like that, my season was over. I had surgery and nine months of rehab to look forward to. I had the end of the bench and street clothes to look forward to. A pained smile, hands that chapped from clapping so much. And a team that, whether I liked it or not, had a season to play without me. The show must go on, with or without all of its actors. I could also look forward to a profound depression I tried to treat with my usual remedies: drugs, booze, and sex. My close friend, a field hockey star, was the same way when she injured her foot and had to sit out for several months. I’d sit on her couch drinking a rum and Coke while she threw herself off buildings in Grand Theft Auto.
My injury was the end of my world as I knew it, but the coaching staff still had a world that was spinning and very much alive. They needed to focus on winning. They cared about me and my recovery, but sometimes they forgot about me. Not in a malicious way, not that that made it hurt any less. Being sidelined from the game meant that I was also sidelined from their attention and praise, something that made me feel desperate and crazy. With an ACL tear, I was of no use to them. But I wanted to be useful, I wanted to stay relevant. In their minds and to the sport.
What I know about being an injured baller: I was afraid to lose my coaches’ love, especially that of my head coach, the one I had the most fraught and tense relationship with. I don’t know that I had the insight or intuition to know it at the time, and if I did, I was too ashamed to ever allow myself to confront that fear. My coaches were, in many ways, my second set of parents, and I wanted to be the best kid for them, to play well and perform for them, to earn their love. To say, See, all your sacrifices were worth it; I am a good investment; I’ll make you proud yet.
After nine months of rehab, the doctor cleared me to play, with no restrictions. I threw on my brace and began practicing in the lead-up to a trip to Italy. Once every four years, the Drexel team travels to another country and plays against professional teams there. What I know now is that my coaches were arguing over whether I should play in the Italy games or not since they didn’t matter or count towards our record. And my head coach, who wanted to make sure I’d be ready for the season, beat out the others. It was settled: I would play. And I wasn’t about to argue—I felt like a rabid tiger eating its way out of a cage.
We went to Italy, I played, and mere minutes into the second game, I received an outlet pass from someone—it bugs me that I don’t remember who—and sensing that my defender was crowding me, I turned and stepped around her, my knee wanting nothing to do with that shit. In retrospect, I should have run her the fuck over. Hyperextension, a pop, and an ACL torn to shreds. Again.
To this day, when I speak to my assistant coach, she still gets a little defensive: “I told Coach not to play you in Italy.” I don’t know if I’m comforted or disturbed by the fact that it’s been thirteen years and she hasn’t gotten over my injuries either.
Either way, I don’t resent my head coach’s decision to play me in meaningless games. I resent what came after.
Later that evening, once we made it back to our hotel in Rome, my head coach texted me to come to her room to talk. I knew what she wanted to discuss before she even said the words, “Do you want to play on a torn ACL this season?”
My answer? A resounding yes. No thoughts or doubts, not a moment of hesitation. It was my senior year—I didn’t want to miss out on another season. I wanted what I wanted, and as would become a refrain for me and basketball, I could see no future beyond it, couldn’t imagine the long-lasting effects of this split-second decision. All I saw was the court before me, pulling my teammates into a sweaty huddle.
It’s a tale as old as time: a player gets hurt, the coach needs them, there is inspiring music, the player gets out there and saves the day. That’s what I imagined would unfold. It would no doubt hurt to play without an ACL, the very important ligament that connects the femur and tibia and stabilizes the knee, but I didn’t even want to think about how much more it would hurt to sit out another season. All of the pain of playing on a torn ACL was better than sitting on the sideline, watching other people do the one thing I love.
Considering all the pearl-clutching about what decisions young people make with their bodies, it’s wild to consider that this type of decision is being made all the time and is almost universally praised and celebrated. But gender-affirming care? Nah, no, of course not—that’s dangerous.
It may come as no surprise, but playing my senior season on a torn ACL absolutely destroyed my knee. It was bone-on-bone all season, and countless times, a doctor had to drain my traumatized knee in preparation for a game because it was swollen beyond recognition. Usually, it took more than one syringe to remove all the fluid. In these moments, my head coach would hold my hand. Whether out of care for me or her own guilt, I’ll never know. Despite how much pain I was typically in—an eight or nine out of ten, not that I’d admit that when asked—I was weirdly proud. I thought what I was doing was noble. And my coach’s small act of love reinforced that I’d made the right decision, that I was in fact doing a selfless thing for my team and coach.
We didn’t win a championship that season—we lost in the conference finals to a #10 nationally ranked Delaware team. Losing felt even more awful than usual; that wasn’t how it was supposed to go, in the deluded grandeur of my mind. Because of my sacrifice, we were supposed to win it all. The pain, the immobility, the inability to jump off my left leg—they were all supposed to be worth it.
We didn’t get an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament, but we did go to the WNIT, another national post-season tournament. We beat Fairfield at their place, and after the game, when we lined up and slapped hands, the coach held my hand for a beat and said that I was a hell of a point guard and that he was impressed by my sacrifice—even more reinforcement. Someone, I guess, had told him I was playing on a torn ACL, a weakness Fairfield had no doubt tried, and failed, to exploit.
Next up, we had Syracuse on our home court. In the stands was my AAU coach, who, after tearing her ACL too many times, had two knee replacements already in her forties. I watched her struggle getting up the bleacher stairs with her walker, her son at her arm. When I told her over Facebook chat that I’d been playing all season with a torn ACL, she called me a dumb motherfucker.
We lost that game, and just like that, my college career was over, seemingly as quickly as it had started. And though I’d always planned on playing professionally overseas, something in me told me I shouldn’t even try. I figured no agent was going to take a liability like me. After graduation, I got a job coaching at the college level. I was so eager to play again, even if it was just pick up and practice with the team I coached, that I cleared myself to play five months post-op. In high school, I’d been cleared by a doctor after three and a half months, but that was an anomaly, one of those things that goes into a journal article later, labeling me as a sixteen-year-old white female who received a hamstring ACL graft.
Post-grad and post-op, nobody in their right mind would have cleared me at five months to play, especially given the beating I gave my knee all season, but now that I was done playing college ball, I didn’t have a doctor and athletic trainer overseeing my every move. I didn’t have a rehab program specifically tailored to my needs. I went from all hands on deck to get me back on the court to nothing. I felt abandoned. I think it was the first time it hit me that I was disposable, that we all were, that we players were on an assembly line of talent, and when we reached the end, it didn’t matter much whether we fell in the trash or not. Selfishly, I wanted them, the coaching staff and athletic department, to still care about me, to still offer support and help, but they had their new players and current team to tend to.
But these were my mentors, my parents, for four years. How could parents just let their kid go like that?
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Now, thirteen years post-grad, my knee is always in some degree of pain. On good days, the pain is in the background, a dull ache throughout the joint that falls into rhythm with the rest of my body. On other days, my knee locks up on me and I can’t bend it for an hour or two, a sharp pain shooting through the back and random parts of my kneecap. And on the worst days, after doing a new activity or sport, I can’t see my kneecap, the joint is so full of fluid, and it hurts to walk, to sit, and to squat down to examine the baby lizard my kid is pointing out in the backyard.
This isn’t like the heartache of the sideline, of yearning for the game—I tend to like this type of pain. I’d probably love it if it didn’t limit my functionality. This chronic pain, it’s what I know; it’s familiar. It reminds me of my time playing college basketball, of my devotion to the sport, of the glory, the love, the love, the love, and of everything I put my body through for my team, for the pursuit of success. But also of my stupidity, the naïvety of my youth. At this point, the pain’s become a part of me.
Am I glorifying my suffering? Maybe, but I don’t know any other way. So many athletes do it, though we may not necessarily call it that. We call it two-a-days, we call it soreness, we call it devotion. We call it pushing ourselves, we call it shooting extra threes until our arms fail, we call it running suicides until we puke. We call it outworking our opponents. We call it can’t stop, won’t stop.
We also call it team ice bags, we call it passing the Icy Hot back and forth, we call it ace bandages and deep tissue massages, we call it complaining, we call it cursing our coach out over the ten extra sprints at the end of practice, we call it walking stiff-legged and broken to class, moving as one groaning amoeba. There is something communal about shared pain, though everyone’s was different. It was our team’s connective tissue, less frayed and eroded than the tissue in our bodies.
Though all college athletes knew pain, there was one team at Drexel that pushed their bodies to unimaginable limits: the wrestlers—my best friend, G, and his boys. They starved and parched themselves, they sweated it out, they rode the stationary bike on the bus on the way to a match. And they hit the mat, hit the mat, hit the mat, their bodies running on nothing but fumes and a tireless desire to win, to take the other guy down in a blood-hot moment of triumph. Most nights, my teammates and I would walk up the few flights to the wrestlers’ apartment, where we’d play Nerf basketball or video games, where we’d drink and make music videos, where the wrestlers would pop Percocets like it was nothing, where they were always itching and scratching like a two-step—itch then scratch, itch then scratch, like you could see the itch arise in their bodies just as they were about to reach for it. We never asked specifics, we knew they were in a lot of pain. It was pre-season, the coach was running them into the ground, we knew it well.
This was before the opioid epidemic was headlining every paper, before we, dumb kids in pain, knew that the pain relief couldn’t last forever, that Percs would only bring new pain. I didn’t say shit, didn’t ask G or any of them to stop; I thought they knew what they were doing. It got them through, and I thought that was all any of us could ask for.
In high school, my soccer teammate got a concussion in our district playoff game. She was our star defender, the reason teams could barely get a shot on goal. Instead of sitting out, she took some Vicodin and played in our next few games. All for a shot at the state championship, which we ended up losing. I think about her every time I read about another football player with a traumatic brain injury.
In her ballet memoir, What We Become in Flight, Ellen O’Connell Whittet says, “My young pain didn’t yet feel like a chronic injury, but a necessary part of pushing myself to dance beautifully and as fully as I could. In fact, having pain made me feel like I belonged in that circle of hot teenage girl bodies. Now, none of the girls dance anymore. I wish we had known when we were sixteen that summer evening that pain wasn’t a sign of bravery.”
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About six or seven years ago, I discovered rugby. I discovered the adrenaline of tackling and being tackled. Of the play almost never stopping. Of pushing your body to unbelievable levels, the disgusting beauty of it. Coming from basketball, I’d never known an intoxicating rush like colliding with another person full-speed, taking someone down to the ground with a viciousness that shouldn’t even be allowed. Of course, I knew my knee wasn’t in any shape to take this type of beating but that wasn’t going to stop me.
One practice, I saw someone twice my size on a breakaway, carrying the ball toward the try zone, and I wasn’t about to let her score, so with horrible amateur form, I tackled her to the grass, our knees banging into each other so hard, I was stunned. I hobbled over to the sideline, got it taped up, and went out onto the field for more.
I can’t help but think of that famous pre-season training camp scene in Remember the Titans when Denzel Washington as Coach Boone says, “What is pain?” The team does quick feet, they do up-downs, they’re drenched in sweat, they’re filthy, they’re fucking exhausted, but they keep going. “French bread!” they yell in unison. “What is fatigue?” “Army clothes!” Then he puts his hand to his ear: “Will you ever quit?” “No,” they say, “We want some more, we want some more, we want some more.”
As a kid watching that scene for the first time, I was inspired. That’s fucking right, I wanted to say—let’s keep pushing. Now that I have some distance from that world, I want to scream at those football players to listen to their bodies, to welcome rest and recovery. Not that they’d listen—all they’re thinking about is the here and now, never about what comes next. And despite knowing what I know now, I don’t listen to me either.
In rugby, I took hit after hit and I felt alive, even as my body begged for relief, even as my body became covered in bruises; I felt alive because my body became covered in bruises. My neck was killing me from a tackle gone wrong. My knee was constantly covered in an ice bag. I threw countless ibuprofen down my throat. I relished every moment. That is, until I juked a defender, making them fall, and ran the length of the field for a try—until my knee gave out from under me the second I crossed the try line, and I had to say goodbye to yet another sport.
I was twenty-seven years old. How many times was I going to retraumatize my knee for the sake of sport, for the sake of everything sport gives me? It turns out, a lot.
In his book, Things that Make White People Uncomfortable, Michael Bennett, former NFL player, discusses the prevalence of pain addiction in football players as well as boxers and MMA fighters. “In college you are immersed in this really intense environment, with a regular amount of high impact physical pain, and then, if you don’t make the pros, that kind of physical expression just disappears.” While I didn’t play a high impact sport, I get it. And from my short time playing rugby, I understand needing such a high amount of contact—it’s a different place of existence, a different dimension. As an elite athlete, you go from an extreme environment, pushing your body to its physical limitations, to deprivation. It’s hard to feel the smaller stuff after that.
Even now, I still lift every day, and I often lift to excess. I want big, strong muscles, but I also want that old sore feeling back, that pathological embodiment, that can-think-of-nothing-else-but-the-pain, it hurts so good. My pain and pleasure wires have not necessarily crossed, but maybe fused.
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After I quit rugby, I tried to accept the fact that I probably should no longer play sports. I tried to reconcile my body’s limitations and my desire to keep playing—it felt like an impossible task. My friend who once threw herself off buildings on Grand Theft Auto often talks about how early in life athletes must confront what it means to lose bodily omnipotence. Non-athletes, who are non-disabled, might not feel their body aging or losing functioning until they’re much older. But as college athletes, we felt it if we didn’t eat the right meal or stretch well enough—we’d have no strength, we’d be slow to the ball, we wouldn’t be able to perform at our peak ability. And then of course, our omnipotence is really challenged when we are injured, both acutely, when we have to accept that we aren’t all-powerful, and when we experience chronic pain and disability down the line.
The poet Han Olliver writes, “I used to exist before sickness / I have to believe I exist now, even if there is no after.” Can I believe in my own existence when there is no end in sight to my knee pain and dysfunction? If, for the rest of my days, I have to turn down friendly invites to play soccer, rugby, touch rugby, beach volleyball, pickup basketball, or even Spikeball, have to point to my knee and explain one wrong step could set me back for weeks or even months, that even now, as we stand here and have this conversation, my knee is beginning to shake, tired from holding me up. In the times that I say yes to an invitation to play, that I break my pact with myself, I am not thinking about those inflamed, sore, punishing weeks or months—I am thinking about each play as a small sliver of joy, of power, of intoxication. I am thinking about belonging, about being worthy in the eyes of my team. I am thinking about when I am most myself.
The question that comes up for me, time and time again: how can I exist as my whole self without sports? How can I believe in my own existence without the promise of a big game ahead? I’m afraid that without sports, I will disappear. Disappear as in, vanish, yes, but also disappear as in, fade, as in sidelined on the court of my own life.
