Taking One For The Team

Sure, Brian Ratigan was talented. But was he tough?
In August of 1989, Ratigan arrived on campus at Notre Dame as a freshman linebacker. Earlier that summer Ratigan, the Gatorade Player of the Year in Iowa, had undergone surgery for torn cartilage in his knee.
"I tried to practice right away and my knee really got swollen three or four days into training camp," Ratigan told writer Lou Somogyi in a story that recently appeared on und.com, Notre Dame's athletic site.
During one of those early practices, Ratigan pedaled a stationary bike. One day head coach Lou Holtz, who eight months earlier had led the Irish to a national championship, approached, fixed his eyes on the freshman, and stopped. said Dr. Lou.
With that, Holtz continued on. Ratigan hopped off the bike, grabbed his helmet and begged to return to action. Ratigan would eventually go on to play for the Indianapolis Colts and become an orthopedic surgeon.
In the last two weeks Penn State linebacker Chris Colasanti has played with a broken hand ... and recorded 25 tackles.
Last Saturday Virginia Tech left guard Greg Nosal had the end of his pinkie finger sheared off when it got caught in an opponent's face mask. the 6-6, 293-pound Nosal told Norm Wood of the Newport News Daily Press, explaining his surprise when he doffed his glove to find the source of the blood dripping down his arm.
Trainers iced Nosal's finger, shot him up with painkillers, bandaged his hand, and then allowed him to return to action. The tip of his finger was found inside his glove.
"I didn't think twice about going back in," Nosal said.
Kyle Rudolph may be the best tight end in the nation, but the 6-6, 265-pound Notre Dame junior has been fighting a hamstring strain since July. On Tuesday, after three weeks of dismal performances by Rudolph and of his coach, Brian Kelly, insisting that Kelly answered the opening question of his press conference, which pertained to Rudolph, by saying,
The diagnosis: an avulsion of Rudolph's hamstring, meaning that the tendon, which attaches the muscle to the femur, had come off the bone. There are three tendons per hamstring muscle, and Rudolph had suffered two avulsions. The injury had nagged Rudolph for more than two months, and perhaps the avulsions did not occur before last Saturday's win over Pittsburgh.
But we'll never know for sure. An MRI was not done on Rudolph's leg until Monday. Friday, Rudolph will undergo surgery in South Bend to repair the two avulsions. He faces four to six months of rehabilitation.
Football is a violent sport played by tough individuals (even this relatively soft scribe is typing this with a permanently disfigured right pinkie, an injury he never had fixed because he did not want to forfeit his senior high school season).
There's and and the line is often so thin that no one sees it. Or wants to. Player or coach.
"It was a Sunday conversation, literally with our training staff and doctors," Kelly said on Tuesday when asked if he and his training staff could have been more vigilant.
How much can you know? Are you hurt or are you injured? Just minutes before uttering the previous quote, Kelly was asked about the status of Rudolph'sup, Tyler Eifert, who has missed the past two games with a shoulder injury.
"I couldn't tell you specifically other than he had a strain, a ligament strain," said Kelly.
Rudolph is a stoic and courageous individual who, at 6-6 and 265 pounds, is built like a comic book superhero. While his closest friends on the team, such as quarterback Dayne Crist, may have known that Rudolph was ailing, the media did not. Rudolph is not only the best player on the offense; he is the type of young man who'd feel responsible for letting his teammates and coaches down.
"He's a courageous kid and he's tried to fight through it. Unfortunately, it's led to, you know, him being sidelined for the season." Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly on Kyle Rudolph said Kelly.
Rudolph's injury first became noticeable in the team's fourth game, when he left the field midway through the first half to return to the locker room. After catching 21 passes in Notre Dame's first three games, Rudolph caught just one ball and uncharacteristically dropped another that day versus Stanford.
Asked a few days later to assess how far off 100 percent he'd been that day, Rudolph replied,
This week, however, after receiving his diagnosis and resigning himself to surgery, he was more forthcoming. Asked about his 95-yard touchdown catch in the second game versus Michigan, in which he caught the ball on about the 35 and galloped the final 65 yards to paydirt, replied,(my hamstring) when I was running. I was joking that it would be nice to see how fast I could've run if I'd had two good legs."
Down goes Rudolph, in goes Eifert at Next Man In U., which in this respect is no different than any other major college program. Kelly was refreshingly, if not brutally, candid when he said of Eifert,
He's got to play.
Part of the problem here is that we all know so much more, both in terms of medicine and media, nowadays. In 1964, Ara Parseghian was in Kelly's shoes, a first-year coach at Notre Dame. During spring practice, his starting quarterback, John Huarte, was sacked by teammate Harry Long during a scrimmage. Parseghian had Huarte examined by three different doctors in South Bend, all of whom diagnosed a separated shoulder and prescribed career-ending surgery.
So Parseghian took Huarte, a senior-to-be who had never started for the Irish, to a fourth doctor in Chicago. This one prescribed swimming. No one outside of the football team's inner circle was ever informed of the injury that next season, a season in which the Irish went 9-1 and Huarte won the Heisman Trophy.
Yesterday's legend is today's institutional negligence.
Taking one for the team is still cool, it's just a matter of whether someone gets blamed for it.
"He's got to play."
"I never thought twice about going back in."
Right now, as you read this, Kyle Rudolph is either undergoing surgery or in post-op in South Bend. His surgeon? Brian Ratigan.