Washington Redskins’ quarterback Alex Smith suffered a gruesome leg injury in November of 2018 that has had him sidelined since. In fact, it seems so long ago that I can barely remember it before hearing about the recent developments that bring it back to light.
Now, Smith says in an interview with ESPN that he almost lost his life in the moments after breaking the leg.
The injury happened after he was tackled by J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans. Left with a compound fracture of the tibia, Smith developed a serious infection that developed during his recovery process. Eventually he says that infection turned life threatening.
Hope you were able to catch Alex Smith on @OTLonESPN this morning. Here is my accompanying news story: https://t.co/kGiUAKuiwR
— Stephania Bell (@Stephania_ESPN) February 1, 2020
Here is what Smith recalls vaguely about it all.
“I had a pretty serious infection … they had a lot of complications with it. … [the] next thing I remember is waking up several weeks later faced with the decision of amputation or limb salvage at that point.”
Perhaps the most startling part of the story is that Smith has not ruled out a return to the NFL. It sounds as if he will make a comeback attempt.
“There’s enough there that I can go out there and play … Knowing that, yeah, failure is a possibility … I need to prove that I can come back and play quarterback in the NFL, and if I can do that, that would be great and it’ll get figured out.”
It’s admirable that after a long and somewhat successful career where he’s reached his ceiling and made plenty of money, that Smith would like to play again to prove to himself his own resilience. In a league that is seeing an increasing trend of players retire early, it seems that this scary incident is driving the competitor within the long-time NFL veteran.
