Eagles Notes | Punter warns of long recovery for hernias
Eagles Notes Punter Dirk Johnson noted that everybody was different when it came to healing. He also pointed out that Sheldon Brown warned him that his sports hernia would be a painful, lingering injury, and Johnson's Eagles teammate was right.
Eagles Notes
Punter
Dirk Johnson
noted that everybody was different when it came to healing. He also pointed out that
Sheldon Brown
warned him that his sports hernia would be a painful, lingering injury, and Johnson's Eagles teammate was right.
This, of course, is relevant because starting tight end L.J. Smith is the Eagles' latest player to be sidelined by a sports hernia. Smith underwent surgery to repair the problem last week, and his status for the start of training camp late next month is in question.
Smith, who is entering the final year of his original rookie contract, and the Eagles would love to think that the tight end will be ready for the start of the regular season and make it to the finish line without incident.
Johnson knows from experience that there's no guarantee.
"Everybody is different," he said. "It can affect everybody in different ways. I just know it's not a fun thing to go through. I just know you really have to battle through the pain."
Like Smith, Johnson discovered his sports hernia during the minicamp stage of the off-season. The punter had surgery in June, missed most of the preseason, then opened the season as the Eagles' punter. In retrospect, he wasn't completely healed.
"Having surgery, you always hope it's going to be fixed," he said. "When it happens now, it's not like the beginning of the off-season and you've got nine months to heal. I'm sure [trainer] Rick [Burkholder] and his guys will do a good job, and L.J. is a strong guy, so he should be OK."
That's what Johnson wanted to believe two years ago.
"That first minicamp, I felt some pain and it just never ever got better and then it just gradually kept getting worse," Johnson said. "That's when I realized something was wrong."
His season ended after seven games, and he needed a second surgery to repair the injury.
"In July, the muscle was still intact," Johnson said. "During that [seventh] game, it tore off. You just have to play and go by how you feel. There's no real secret about it. You have to rehab and get better.
"But it's like Sheldon told me, and I didn't believe him. It takes you a year to get back to where you were, because structurally it's just a little bit different. To get back to doing the things you were doing before, it takes time. Any injury, it just takes time."
Playground construction
The Eagles held their annual playground build yesterday at the William Dick School in North Philadelphia.
"I did a lot of community work with both of the teams I previously played for - Buffalo and Cincinnati - but I can truly say . . . this by far ranks among the top events I've ever participated in," linebacker Takeo Spikes wrote in his blog on the Eagles' Web site.
- Bob Brookover