My Achilles heel is my Achilles
Empathy for Tyrese Haliburton
Like Tyrese Haliburton, I too have torn my right Achilles tendon while playing basketball. Today I write as a true domain expert on what lies ahead for the All-Star.
When we say Haliburton tore his Achilles playing basketball, we mean of course he went down in the opening moments of Game 7 of the NBA Finals after a spectacular start to the contest draining 3s on the favored opponent’s home court.
Conversely when we say I tore my Achilles playing basketball, we mean I was playing H-O-R-S-E in the driveway with my nine-year-old nephew in May of 2023. Nevertheless, these two very different settings in fact hosted similar mishaps.
Haliburton wasn’t making any kind of extreme or demanding move when his Achilles snapped. On the contrary, he was making a simple move, one that anyone playing any level of basketball executes constantly, pushing off on the ball of his right foot.1
Well, me too. I was taking a casual shot at the basket as I’ve done who knows how many hundreds of thousands of times since the day my parents put up a hoop at our house when I was six. This time as I pushed off on the ball of my right foot my tendon snapped. I had never experienced the injury before, so I was unsure of exactly what had just happened. I knew only that it was bad.
Haliburton went down in a heap and, quite understandably, pounded the floor in frustration. I on the other hand was determined to be stoic. This was the evening of Day 2 in a four-day gathering of the extended family at the home of my brother-in-law in St. Louis. I didn’t want to hamper the festivities. Let’s just play it cool, I thought. I can take care of this when we get home to Boston.
My attempt at stoicism failed instantly. There was no question of putting even the slightest weight on my right foot. I immediately confronted the grim and stubborn fact that I use the foot in question quite often.
In my basketball mind this should have been like a sprained ankle. This should get better over the next two or three dozen hours. Only later would I learn I had in fact suffered the most severe form of a torn Achilles. As a result my inability to put weight on my foot just stayed exactly the same. So did the high level of pain.
There was zero healing over the next 48 hours. This was new in my experience and rather maddening. The low point was making a fairly tight connection at O’Hare on the way home. This entailed a frantic hobble over a distance between terminals that in my mind clocked in at about 20 miles.
The following day I hopped into an urgent care clinic in Boston, and the doctor asked me what the trouble was. I said I didn’t want to intrude on her expertise but I thought maybe I’d torn my Achilles. She had me plop down on the table on my stomach, she did the Thompson test, and in a matter of seconds she said yes, you tore your Achilles. Go to the ER at Mass General. Four hours later I had crutches, a boot, and most crucially a referral to a specialist.
Of course I did a deep dive online on Achilles injuries. Before doing my research I’d wondered whether I needed to just grit my teeth and at least try to ignore this pain. Maybe it wasn’t really that bad. Then I came across a comment by a WNBA coach who compared her own Achilles injury to childbirth. So maybe I’m not exaggerating this, I thought.
My specialist’s practice turned out to include work for a Division I athletic program. He was interested in my ESPN gig and eagerly discussed the NBA playoffs as he did his thing. The doctor applied gel to the back of my right ankle and then scanned the tendon with a probe attached to his iPhone. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “See?” He handed me his phone but I had no idea what I was seeing. He dumbed it down: “Full rupture.”
I have virtually no memory of the surgery. My wife drove me home afterward and put me to bed. I do remember that while she was out picking up my prescription and even after she returned, our dog Pearl stayed in the bedroom during the day which she never did. She was standing watch over me.
Haliburton is 25 and he’ll doubtless recover like a 25-year-old NBA star should. Aaron Rodgers is at least a hair closer to me in age, and that fall when he went down with a torn Achilles in the first game he vowed he’d return that same season. I thought, my friend, you have no clue. (Rodgers did not return that same season.)
I did physical therapy and pondered whether endeavors like picking up marbles between my toes or rotating my elevated foot both clockwise and counterclockwise were aimed more at my mind than my Achilles. Possibly the true benefit of PT was both analytical and psychological. Regularly scheduled assessments showed I really was making progress.
Naturally there’s a difference between you or I or any normal human recovering from a torn Achilles and Tyrese Haliburton once again performing at the level of one of the best basketball players in the world. For me, recovery meant nothing more ambitious than walking and navigating the world outside the home, including and especially stairs.
When I tore my Achilles in May, my wife and I were concerned about international travel we’d already booked for September. Could I even sit in a plane for that long? But when the time came I was fine. Four months to the day after my injury I had no problem logging 20,000-step days as an eager tourist. My right leg felt different but that feeling was constant and not exacerbated by activity.
More than two years later my right leg still feels different, but that’s because I’m typing this and thinking about my right leg. If I could borrow my specialist one more time I’d ask him why this happens. It’s not really an injury in the usual sense of that term. I didn’t fall. No one collided with me. I made a perfectly normal motion and disaster struck. This occurs even with world-class athletes in their 20s. Seems like a bit of a design flaw.
Ideally, Haliburton has a dog. And I do miss Pearl.
Haliburton’s vulnerability was enhanced by the fact that he’d already suffered a calf strain. On the other hand this happens with full-strength legs too. Boston’s Jayson Tatum was making a similar move when he tore his right Achilles last month in the Eastern Conference semifinals. So too was Villanova’s Justin Moore in the 2022 Elite Eight.