Man, I remember when the news about Alex Smith’s leg just flashed across my screen. It was one of those things you see, and you just kinda stop what you’re doing. I wasn’t even watching the game live, but the way people started talking about it, I knew it was bad. Really bad.
So, I started to follow it, you know, out of a mix of curiosity and that weird human thing where you can’t look away from a car crash. It wasn’t just a simple break, was it? The details started trickling out – the severity, the complications, the infections. I found myself checking for updates pretty regularly. My “practice” in this, if you can call it that, was just piecing together the story from the bits and pieces, trying to understand the sheer scale of what he was up against. It felt like every update was worse than the last for a long while there.
I’d see pictures, read articles. The doctors weren’t even sure he’d keep his leg, let alone play football again. That’s the part that really got me. You hear “broken leg,” and you think, “Okay, six months, a year, they’ll be back.” But this? This was a whole different level. I remember thinking, “Well, that’s it for him. Tragic end to a career.” And I wasn’t the only one; a lot of folks were saying the same thing, writing him off. It’s easy to do that from the sidelines, isn’t it?
Then the slow grind of recovery began. My “practice” shifted to watching for any sign of progress. It was like watching a plant grow in super slow motion. A picture of him standing. A video of him walking, painstakingly. Each little step felt huge. It was a long, quiet period in the news cycle for him, just him fighting his battle away from the spotlight mostly. I kept an eye out, though. It became one of those stories I was invested in, not as a fan of a particular team, but as a spectator to something… well, something intensely human.
And then, the comeback. Seriously, when I heard he was actually going to play again, I was floored. Absolutely floored. All those months, all those surgeries, all that pain. My process of following this whole thing culminated in seeing him step back onto that field. It wasn’t even about how well he played initially, though he did remarkably well all things considered. It was the sheer fact that he was there. Standing. Playing. After everything.
So, what did I “realize” from this whole practice of observation? It’s not some grand life lesson, I guess. But it did make me think. It made me think about what people can endure, what they can overcome when they really dig in. It’s easy to be cynical, and Lord knows I am a lot of the time. But seeing that, really following it from the absolute pit to that moment of return, it just sticks with you. It became less about football and more about… just the sheer will of a person. A tough, tough thing to witness, but an even tougher thing to forget.
