For a guy who has had plenty of injuries, the one that scared him the most was never acknowledged by the team as an actual injury.
Texans defensive end J.J. Watt explains in an item for The Players Tribune that a staph infection gave him more concern than anything else he has endured -- and he has endured two major back injuries, torn abdominal muscles, torn adductor muscles, a broken hand, a dislocated elbow, and more.
“One Friday night last season, I noticed some weird bumps on my knee,” Watt writes. “I thought it was a rash, so I went and asked our trainer if he had any cream. He looked at my knee and said, ‘That looks really bad. We have to get you to the hospital right now.”
Watt initially thought the trainer was joking.
“I could see in his face that he was serious and actually a bit panicked,” Watt explains. “As it turned out, he saved me in a big way. At the hospital, they immediately put me on three hours of the strongest antibiotic IVs. I went straight from the hospital to the team plane and we flew to Jacksonville. Once we landed, there were two more hours of antibiotics that night and two more the next morning before the game. The medicine had completely drained me, but I played -- and we won.”
After the game, trainers resumed IV antibiotics for watt, and on the flight back to Houston a team doctor told Watt that, if the trainer hadn’t recognized the problem, Watt could have lost his leg.
Watt was added to the injury report the day before the game as questionable with an illness. And the postgame comments made it sound like a traditional illness, not a limb-threatening bacterial infection.
“Couple days ago. Yesterday? I don’t even know,” Watt said upon being asked when he got sick. “It’s OK. We got a good staff and they took good care of me.”
Apparently, reporters used the wrong spelling of staph.
The staph/staff infection story starts an essay that ends with Watt declaring that, despite his health struggles, he’s not thinking about retiring.
“I’m just getting started,” he writes.
Above all else, the first-person account of Watt’s injuries and illnesses should remind all fans and media that these human beings who play football go through a lot to prepare themselves for action -- and their love of the game causes them to continue to choose to do what they have to do to get healthy and play, even if doing so puts them in line for more injuries, more surgeries, more discomfort, more rehab, more risk of long-term health problems.
