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The Doubt It was July 25, 2006, and Dr. Pat Smith was at home packing for vacation when he got the call. It was MU’s head athletic trainer, Rex Sharp. The news was bad. “It’s obvious that we’ve got at least an ACL,” Sharp said. “You should probably come down here." Smith, MU football’s team doctor for more than 20 years, made his way to Faurot Field to find a freshman wide receiver named Jeremy Maclin propped on a table in the locker room. Maclin had gone up for a pass during a workout and got tangled with junior safety William Moore before landing awkwardly on his right knee. When Maclin got up, he had trouble walking, so Moore helped carry him into the small locker room inside the tunnel. What many recall as a simple ACL tear was actually much worse. Maclin had also torn his posterolateral corner, a combination of two other ligaments, one behind the knee and one on the outside that help stabilize the ACL. When Smith tried to straighten the leg it went into excessive hyperextension, bending so far past straight that Smith says it “looked like a banana.” Smith does about 150 knee surgeries a year and says few are as serious as Maclin’s seemed.
Viewing the MRI the next day, Smith noticed how close the damage was to Maclin’s peroneal nerve, a nerve in the knee that controls movement in the foot, which, when damaged, would end any career no matter how well the ligaments were reconstructed. “He was only a couple millimeters from stretching that nerve out,” Smith says. “And if you do that, you aren’t going to be running.” Cindy Parres drove to Columbia for the MRI. Both she and Maclin left in tears. Maclin had never missed a game, let alone a whole season. He was without football and two hours from home. He told teammate Sean Weatherspoon that he considered quitting and going back to St. Louis. “I had such high expectations for myself, and to do that to my knee … it was just devastating,” Maclin says. Maclin debated with himself: Should he go home to family, or endure surgery and rehab? Eventually there was an education to consider and a love that wasn’t worth walking away from. “I like the game more than that,” Maclin says. In the weeks leading up to the start of what should have been his first season at MU, Maclin rehabbed as many as 12 hours a day under the guidance of Sharp and his staff. The muscles around his knee would spasm as trainers attempted to restore full range of motion. Sharp says that work was probably as painful as the original injury. Weatherspoon remembers walking into the training office during an early muscle stimulation workout to see Maclin in tears. But just as Maclin stepped up to Frost’s lecture back in Kirkwood, he stepped up to rehab. Sharp wanted him running by November; Maclin did it in October. Trainers and coaches figured he might be full strength by postseason workouts; Maclin could’ve played in that year’s Sun Bowl if he hadn’t already been declared ineligible for the season.
In his first timed run with no knee brace, just six months after tearing three ligaments in his knee, Maclin ripped off a 4.38 second 40-yard dash – elite speed by any measure. Seven months later Sharp and Smith stood on the sideline as Maclin ran back a punt against Illinois, cutting with the same right leg they thought might cripple his career. “Just a couple of millimeters,” Smith says. “Sometimes, things have a way of working out.” The Choice Besides the occasional smile, one that could put anyone at ease, there isn’t much getting in. Sitting at the kitchen table of his Columbia townhouse, it’s evident that he doesn’t see the need to look back. He’s already been there. He’s already done that. He knows how to use it all when he has to, and that’s enough. What else could you want to know? Beyond the occasional appeal to the past for perspective, Jeremy Maclin is very much in the moment. And that’s why the press conference was so important. Ask him about the choice to leave MU after two seasons, and how hard it was. Look at my press conference, he responds. And he’s right. It’s all anyone needs. It’s where an entire community got a look into the heart of the young man who was so instrumental in altering a program and its history. When he announced his decision, in front of the media, family and friends, the tears came. While the idea of home has been a fluid one, it’s never lacked importance. This is a kid with the state of Missouri and a St. Louis Cardinals logo tattooed on his arm. The same kid who knew halfway through his recruiting visit flight to UCLA that he couldn’t be a Bruin; it was too far from home. If this was ever about his college football legacy, it wasn’t about that for long. Yes, he was concerned about not being eligible for Memorial Stadium’s Ring of Honor because he wouldn’t graduate. And yes, he wants to be remembered as one of the greatest Tigers of all-time. But the real pain was in leaving what MU had become. It was more than a springboard to the NFL. It was family. It was home. To go forward means he has to leave behind everything that got him here.
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“With the amount of ligament damage he had, I had doubts that he would ever play again,” Smith says.
He began asking Sharp to let him run. He wanted to test himself. He wanted a 40-yard dash. And in January, during team testing, he got one: