Greatness Assailed
June 25, 2009, by Homme De Sept-Iles
“Like so many other running backs, O.J. eventually got stopped by a knee injury. No matter how great a running back is, a knee injury will turn him into an average runner. It’s always sad to see that.
O.J.’s knee injury happened when he was with the Bills: then he got traded to the 49ers. He was still there in 1979 when I started out as a CBS analyst. On a sweep, O.J. tried to get around the corner but he couldn’t cut. He still had his great vision. He saw the hole. But he couldn’t plant his foot hard enough to cut sharply through the hole. When you plant a foot that hard, the shock doesn’t go into the foot, it goes into the knee joint. And if a running back can’t trust his knee to absorb that shock, he can’t cut hard enough to avoid a tackler.
On his sweeps against the Rams that day, O.J. had to run out of bounds. One tackler nailed him late, which annoyed me.
You shouldn’t be hitting him late, I remember thinking, because when O.J. was O.J., you couldn’t have done it.”
John Madden
One Knee Equals Two Feet
1986
Jove
Related posts:
Subscribe to the Podcast