ChiefsPlanet - Chiefs Jamaal Charles has to put all his trust in his rebuilt knee

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/04...es-has-to.html

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ST. JOSEPH -- See his face. Nearly 11 months ago. Detroit’s Ford Field. There goes Jamaal Charles, carted off the field, tears in his eyes, his future dangling by a torn ligament in his knee.

“Dreams,” he would say much later, “went straight up everywhere.”

The Chiefs’ running back would miss the rest of the season, and instead of moving closer to becoming an NFL superstar, Charles instead was sentenced to surgery and months of rehab and training to repair the ligament and strengthen the muscles that protect it.

But what about his mind? For all the talk and concern about the health of Charles’ knee, more important, perhaps, is his ability to trust it to withstand the tests it’ll face during this and future seasons. An NFL player, and in particular a running back, cannot perform at the level that he and others expect if his mind does not yet trust his body to not betray him again.

“Some of the time the pain is not really there,” Charles said. “Sometimes it’s just in your head.”

Watch him go. This past Thursday. The practice fields at Missouri Western State University. Charles catches a pass, plants and zips toward the sideline. The knee does not buckle, and it does not hurt. He keeps running until the whistle blows.

This is a glimpse of the old Jamaal Charles — before the injury. This is one of the things he trained for. Doesn’t matter how quickly his legs are moving. These are baby steps.

After surgery, about a month after suffering the injury, Charles began rehabilitating his knee twice a day in Pensacola, Fla. He would rise early, enduring stretches and strength exercises, some of them painful, and sure, he said, there were days he just wanted to remain in bed.

“I had to want to be back on top again,” he said. “I had to do all the right things.”

Even months later, his left leg felt weaker than his right. Was something wrong? Was his body not responding to the treatment?

“Some days,” he said, “I thought it probably won’t ever be right when the season starts.”

Eventually the strength returned, and it was time for a new test. The Chiefs held Charles out of offseason practices, instead assigning him to jog or scale a hill near the team’s practice facility. The knee kept holding up, kept passing the tests. With each next step, Charles’ confidence grew. But the tests kept getting more difficult. He was asked to run. Then pivot and change directions. Then try it all like he once did.

His body held strong, but his mind remained skeptical. The thing about an injury is that you didn’t plan on it; sometimes you can’t explain how it happened at all. So who’s to say it won’t happen again in that one second you allow your mind to relax? After all, that’s how it happened in the first place, when you weren’t thinking about it.

The problem is that coaches and trainers tell players that the surest way to get an injury is to try to prevent one. The more you think about it, the more likely your brain will tell your body to tense up, which restricts natural movement. Add to that disposition a 270-pound defender coming at full speed, and anyway, there’s something unnatural about all this that, somehow, Charles will have to reconcile between now and his next big test. It’s the biggest, actually: when he’s forced to turn off his mind, trust his body and play as if nothing can undo what these last 11 months have accomplished.

“He still has to go out there in a full-contact situation and know that his knee has gotten stronger,” Chiefs coach Romeo Crennel said. “Then he will know for sure: ‘Hey, I’m good to go.’ And then he’ll get back to what he was.”

Turn the page. This Friday night. Arrowhead Stadium. That’s the first time since he got hurt that Charles will face defenders who have one objective: take down the ball carrier any way possible, and who cares about his knee or what his health means to the Chiefs or his future.

Charles admitted last week that, even now, after all this, he’s not yet 100 percent. He can say that his knee feels fine, and maybe it does, but until there’s belief, he will not be what we remember — what he wants to be again.

“I wouldn’t be out here if I couldn’t take a lick,” he said. “I wouldn’t be practicing in full pads if I couldn’t take the contact with the other players on the field.”

The best thing that can happen to Charles, the Chiefs, and the fans who understand that this team is unlikely to succeed without him, is for an Arizona defender to plow into Charles on Friday night — maybe hit him low on the left side — and for Charles to pop up and jog back toward the huddle. It is a gruesome way to build trust, but that is the only way.

“Then they say: ‘Hey, the knee held up. It’s strong, and I can do what I need to do,’ ” Crennel said. “So now they kind of forget about it.”

Charles said he keeps approaching the tests the same way he looked at rehab: It’s necessary, and in time, maybe he won’t even think about that second in Detroit, the hours it took to overcome it, and the months he hopes the proper things were done to shield him from that experience from here on.

“In your mind, you’ve got to zone the pain stuff out and just go with your heart,” he said. “If this is what you really want, you’ll come out and stop crying about it.”