Bitter tea....

One of the miracles in the evolution of American football is that medicine - and especially surgery - has kept pace with the stupefying escalation in the size and physicality of the athletes.

We remember the way it was before the advent of arthroscopic surgery. Practically every time a knee injury called for surgery, it was sayonara for the year, or two years, maybe even forever. Every knee operation was considered grave, and the healing process interminable.

Many outstanding football players had their careers destroyed by the kind of injuries which, today, could be easily and safely repaired by arthroscopy.

All of this passed through our mind the morning we opened a paper and spotted a simple line in the obituary section: "Al De Rogatis, 68, Sports Broadcaster."

Al De Rogatis had certainly been a broadcaster, and a very good one. He had also been an extremely charming man, a top executive in a famous insurance company, and, before all of this, a great football player who had a potentially legendary career destroyed in his fourth year with the New York Giants.

A 6-4, 240-lb. All-American tackle at Duke, he had an outstanding rookie season in the NFL and then two All-Star years in a row, before a blown-out knee sent him into surgery.

Fourteen years later, we sat with him alongside a sparkling pool in Puerto Rico, making small talk about the NFL project that had brought us there. We noticed that he kept one leg straight out in front of him.

"Is that a souvenir of the ball game, Al?" we asked.

He looked down at his stiff leg for a moment, then said: "No, that was just a present from a surgeon."

We smiled, thinking he was joking, and then, surprisingly, he was explaining:

"I went down in a game against the Eagles. I knew it was bad, and I wasn't surprised when they told me I would need surgery. But they assured me that there didn't seem to be any complications and that the knee would probably be as good as new after the operation.

"I knew better, of course. Knees never came back as good as new, not in those days. And so I had my surgery.

"I was groggy and in pain when they brought me back to the room, and I needed some painkillers when I went to bed.

"It just didn't feel right the next morning. The leg ached and when I tried to move it, nothing seemed to happen. The leg felt dead. Maybe I was dumb. Maybe it was fear. but somehow I knew - I just knew - that the knee was gone.

"When the surgeon walked in, I just stared at him. He stepped over to the bed and raised the sheet, and looked down at the leg. Before he could touch it, I said: "You... You crippled me. That knee is gone. You butcher!"

De Rogatis had spoken the words coldly, viciously, just the way he had used them on the surgeon. "I know," he said, "I must have sounded like a lunatic."

And then we were back in Puerto Rico; the pool was sparkling, the sun shining, the birds singing, and we sat there drinking it all in, living the great life.

The kind of life that De Rogatis enjoyed for the next 30 years. The stiff knee? He could live with it. The memory of what had been taken away from him? The layman would never understand.

Great athletes, like Al De Rogatis, appreciate the things they have, but they never forget the things that were taken away from them, that only they could be put a value on - like never again playing the game you love and never achieving your rightful little piece of immortality, like making the Hall of Fame.