Leonard Weaver's long shot to return to football

This week, Leonard Weaver drove past the gate and into the Eagles' NovaCare Complex for the first time in months. His return was bittersweet. Weaver was there to make official something he already knew, but could not embrace.

Weaver ate lunch in the cafeteria, greeted some coaches, then walked down a corridor lined with framed photos of past Eagles Pro Bowl players. He paused for a moment at the image of himself in his midnight-green No. 43 jersey, carrying the ball in the open field. Then he moved on.

As Weaver made his way through the team's training room, he greeted Moise Fokou, Antonio Dixon, and Jamar Chaney - former teammates of his who are rehabbing injuries. Unlike Weaver, those players remain on the roster. And unlike Weaver, they are reasonably certain they will return to football within several months.

From the training room, Weaver walked to the back of the complex, where there's a rehab facility that's open to the public. There, all the Eagles logos and mementos end. In a drab, featureless room, Weaver was examined by the Eagles' head physician, Peter DeLuca, as part of a checkup that was required for the former Pro Bowl fullback to continue getting the $6.5 million he was guaranteed under his contract.

DeLuca was upbeat about the progress Weaver had made since their last meeting in July. But then DeLuca had Weaver "dorsiflex" his foot - basically, bring his toes closer to his shin. While the movement was improved from July, it still wasn't normal. Or as Weaver put it a few hours after exiting the complex, maybe for good: "I failed. My foot didn't work."

This was not a surprise - the physical was a technicality for Weaver, who was released last summer after failing a similar exam at the start of the Eagles training camp.

"My heart is to get back," Weaver said afterward, "but it's not going to happen this season. It's tough."

A little more than 17 months ago, Weaver suffered one of the most gruesome NFL injuries ever YouTubed, his left leg crushed backward during the Eagles' 2010 season-opening loss to the Packers. His life is different, but not bad. He has a house in Miami, with palm trees, near the water. He has a new fiancée, Keira Jones, a business manager from the recording industry he met after cutting a gospel album, as yet unreleased. He sees a lot of his sons, 6-year-old Leonard and 3-year-old Dewey, who still live up here, where Weaver maintains a second home. He has his dogs, some business interests, including a company, LTW Enterprises, that stages events. He continues to come up with ideas about ways he might help impoverished kids, as he tried to do when he was playing. He has guaranteed money from the contract he signed in the offseason before the injury, when Weaver was a reigning Pro Bowl player, widely acknowledged as the NFL's best fullback in 2009.

What Weaver doesn't have is the ability to move his left foot fully, even after nearly 18 months of rehab, much of it incredibly painful and tedious. He's as athletic and powerful-looking as ever, within a couple of pounds of his playing weight. If you stood the 2009 Weaver up against the 2012 Weaver, in street clothes, you probably couldn't tell the difference. But the difference is huge.

"As of right now, no, I can't run like I used to," Weaver, 29, says.

Teams have called, he said, but he isn't ready to run for them. After another year away? Well, who will call about a 30-year-old fullback whose last substantive action was in 2009?

Weaver's story is not one of those triumphant athletic comeback stories you read so often, in which a little medical science and a lot of hard work combine to amaze us. This is about what happens when there are no miracles, when one day you are entering the prime of your career, and then one oddly angled collision changes your life forever.

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Sports medicine these days seems so advanced that the phrase "career-ending injury" sounds almost quaint, a relic from another age, a time when Gale Sayers limped off the field in black-and-white, or when surgeons couldn't fix Sandy Koufax's elbow.

But even in the 21st Century, there are career-ending injuries, and all of those who saw what happened to Leonard Weaver on Sept. 12, 2010, at Lincoln Financial Field came away with the stomach-lurching feeling that they had witnessed one.

Weaver's journey toward a life beyond football began a little less than 3 minutes into the second quarter of the Eagles' 27-20 loss to the Green Bay Packers, that season's eventual Super Bowl champions. The score was tied at 3, Eagles' ball at their 39, first-and-10. On Weaver's first carry of the day, his only carry of the day - probably the last carry he will ever experience - he churned his 6-foot, 250-pound frame left, although the play was designed to go right. As Weaver leaned forward, his planted left leg collided with the helmet of Packers linebacker Nick Barnett. Weaver's weight pulled his body ahead as his leg was driven backward. He flopped to the turf, never crossing the line of scrimmage.

"That was the worst pain I've ever felt. I've never been shot, but I'll tell you what, it had to be worse," he recalled. "It was just all up and down my leg, up and down my back, this burning sensation. It was like somebody lit a match and it went all over my body, and it just continued. It was crazy."

Weaver thinks about that play a lot these days. "It plays back so vivid, man, it's crazy," he says. "If I go [where the play was designed] I might hit my head on the goal post, but for some reason, I went backside.

"I remember [Packers linebacker] Clay Matthews trying to get guys off of me, [Eagles tackle] Jason Peters and those guys trying to help me up. I remember crying, just loud, man, asking God why. Why am I here?"

Weaver was helped to the sideline, where he boarded one of those equipment carts they use for seriously injured players. He was taken to the X-ray room underneath the Linc, where he was told he had a torn anterior-cruciate ligament. He was then deposited in the training room, where he sat and watched the rest of the game on TV with a trainer.

"They didn't take me to the hospital right away," he recalls. "They wanted to wait until the doctors got in there [after the game] . . . I cried. I cried my eyes out, man."

The trainer iced and massaged Weaver's leg. Even so, it swelled grotesquely. Weaver said his left knee "had to be about three softballs big, man. So we had to wait about a week, a week-and-a-half for the swelling to go down for the MRI."

The torn ACL, which is a season-ending injury, was the least of Weaver's problems. The knee also had a torn posterior lateral corner. Much worse, there was nerve damage. Weaver couldn't raise his left foot.

"The muscle in the front of your leg that helps you [flex your foot]? Completely destroyed," he says.

Three surgeries followed, one in which a length of muscle and tendon was removed from the bottom of his foot and literally buttoned to the top. Afterward, Weaver more or less lived in Birmingham, Ala., for more than 6 months, so he could rehab under the auspices of the man who had performed his knee surgery, famed orthopedic surgeon James Andrews.