Toughing it Out
November 19, 2007 09:20 PM | General
November 19, 2007
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Old-time Baltimore Colts lineman Art Donovan once joked that back in the 1950s football players didn’t have cruciates. “We didn’t know what cruciates were back then?” Donovan deadpanned.
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| After four knee surgeries, a broken hand, sprained ankles, thigh contusions and mono, Marc Magro is still going strong.
Dale Sparks/All- pro Photography |
Well today Donovan could easily be saying the same thing about Marc Magro, West Virginia’s Six-Million-Dollar-Man-of-a-linebacker with a reconstructed left knee that even Maj. Steve Austin would admire. Last year, Magro played the entire season with a torn ACL.
“Most guys are done after that happens,” says West Virginia’s facemask-breaking fullback Owen Schmitt. “He toughed it out and played through it.”
Magro says he knew what he was doing.
“You don’t like to have regrets but I kind of regret not having surgery,” Magro said. “I was very functional last year but there were a few games when my knee would come out of socket and that is very dangerous. I have strong leg muscles and when my leg muscles would get tired if I was in there for 10 plays or something, then I could feel my knee slide and potentially I could have torn everything really bad.”
Hmm.
And that wasn’t the first time Magro has done something like this. Back in high school, he went almost the entire summer with his knee locking up on him before he decided to get an MRI done. He mistakenly thought he had just sprained his knee after making a funny slide into second base in a JV baseball game earlier in the spring.
“They said I had a torn ACL and a torn meniscus,” Magro recalled. “I remember crying and thinking I’ve only got two weeks before my junior season of football. It was a big year for me and they told me that I couldn’t hurt my knee any worse and that I could play on it.”
After the season when he finally went in for surgery, the doctors informed him that miraculously his ACL was fine and that he only needed to have his meniscus repaired. It was the immaculate recovery!
“I always mess with our trainers and tell them that my ACL grew back,” Magro joked. “I told them it was going to grow back this time but it hasn’t.”
Tolerating pain is a Magro family trait. Marc says his dad goes to the dentist to get his teeth drilled without any anesthesia. His mom won’t tolerate his complaining of a sore throat or a sickness.
“She says for being a big football player that I’m really soft,” he laughed.
The worst pain of his life came earlier this fall when he came down with a nasty case of mono. Magro said it nearly brought him to his knees.
“I just remember that I was so sick and I went into Coach Rod’s office during the first week of camp and I said, ‘Coach I can’t do this.’ He told me to go home and don’t come back until I was better. My throat was so sore and I could barely swallow,” Magro said. “That was one of the worst pains that I had to endure.”
Having seen Magro play an entire year on one leg, Rodriguez didn’t need much convincing this time around.
According to Magro, playing last year with a torn ACL was actually less painful than having to deal with the post-surgery pain he’s going through right now.
“They take a third of your patella tendon and graft the ACL and that tendon is very irritated,” Magro admitted. “I’m nine months out of surgery and most people would be getting back from doing everything right now and feeling comfortable and I’ve played almost a full season.”
“The things he’s gone through …,” Schmitt says. “People say well look what you’ve gone through. What did I do? I lifted a couple of weights and I was lucky enough that I was blessed with some strength. He’s a self-made man. Ask him for his driver’s license when he was in high school. Oh my God!
“He had a neck that was this big,” said Schmitt, forming his fingers into a circle about six inches wide. “Now he’s got the biggest neck on the team.”
Magro also has the biggest heart.
“I really don’t even go in for treatment anymore,” Magro says, explaining that there is really nothing left in the knee to ice anyway. “I’ve learned to take care of it on my own. I really dislike wearing things that I don’t need to wear but I’ve been wearing a knee sleeve since midseason.”
That’s Magro simply preventing the unpreventable, of course.
Making the injuries he’s endured so tolerable this year is the fact that he is by far having the best season of his career. Magro is second on the team in sacks with seven, second with 11 tackles for losses, and third in tackles with 60. He came into the season expecting to be a two-down player but now it’s a detriment to the defense if he comes out of the game at all.
“This is my senior season and I’m enjoying it,” Magro said. “I do think I’m having my best year since I’ve been here and I think it’s a combination of a few things. Being here for five years, and being around football this much for five years, it really comes together and you really understand the game better than you realize when you’re younger.”
Magro also realizes that he will eventually probably need to have knee replacement surgery. He admits it’s a sobering thought.
“I was lying on the training room table the other day and I asked the trainers, ‘What are the chances that I’m going to need knee replacement surgery?’ They said very high. I like to snow ski and stuff like that so I will need to get it fixed,” Magro said.
Sports Illustrated once did a diagram of Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente documenting all of his maladies. The difference between Magro and Clemente is that Magro will never tell you what’s wrong with him. It’s only after the fact that he will admit that he’s hurt. Call it the Magro family credo.
“I’ve been pretty healthy besides my knee and my (broken) hand,” Magro says with a straight face and scarred nose. “I’ve had three surgeries since I’ve been here – one in high school. I’ve had sprained ankles, turf toe, contusions and mono.
“Oh, and my nose was gashed which I will probably have surgery on at the end of the season.”
A nose job, too? Now that’s something even an old-timer like Art Donovan would have never considered. Then again, have you ever seen Donovan? Trust me, it wouldn’t have helped.
