Phillip Daniels Has A High Pain Threshold
Posted by Matt Terl on October 12, 2009 – 5:06 pm
One thing head coach Jim Zorn really seems to enjoy in his weekly day-after-the-game press conferences is describing the injuries players have received. He’s rarely satisfied with your basic sprain/strain descriptors, and likes to go into loving, borderline-obsessive detail in his descriptions.
This can get pretty disgusting. Example A: today’s talk about Phillip Daniels.
“We had Phillip Daniels get an MRI this morning on his biceps,” Zorn said. “He did tear the biceps off the lower part of his arm. He is gonna play. It’s not gonna get any worse, and it’s something that he’ll take care of after the season’s over, reattach it. So he’ll lose maybe a little bit of strength or rotation in his arm.”
Okay. I’m not a big weightlifting guy (as anyone who has ever met me can probably guess), but even I know what the biceps is; ever kid who has ever made a muscle knows what the biceps is. And tearing it off the lower part of your arm sounds frankly excruciating.
If I tore my biceps, I’d probably stay in bed for a month. But Daniels? “He is gonna play.”
Daniels said that the first thing he asked the doctor after the MRI was if he would be able to play again this year. The doctor gave him a yes-but. “‘If you do it later,’” he said, per Daniels, “‘you’ll have to do a whole reconstruction.’ And I said, you know what? To keep playing, keep my career going, I’ll take the reconstruction.”
This is the sort of injury, apparently, that’s not going to get worse with further use, and it’s all just a pain management question. “I handle pain pretty good,” Daniels said. “I’m pretty tough. It’s something you’ve gotta deal with. It’s just part of football.”
This kind of surprised me, since I thought the biceps was the kind of muscle that might come in handy for a football player. Daniels set me straight. “Yeah, it’s important,” he said, “for all the things you do motion-wise, day-to-day, but it’s football. The movements we do, pushing and everything like that, everything’s fine. I can still push, still get people off of me.”
Two people who were not surprised by any of this? Daniels’ fellow defensive linemen Chris Wilson and Anthony Montgomery.
“He is pretty tough,” Wilson said. “He’s old, but he’s tough.”
“Man, you really don’t need that muscle in there,” Montgomery added. “There’s a lot of muscles around it that help. You don’t always need that muscle, just for certain movements. So if he’s locking somebody out and it gets turned out, that’s probably what would hurt it. But just locking people out … don’t worry.”
“He could put a brace on,” Wilson suggested.
“Man, just rub some dirt on it,” Montgomery said. “He’ll be all right.”
Wilson shrugged. “He’s a powerlifting champ, man, he could benchpress people with one arm.”
“It ain’t nothing that’s gonna affect his game,” Montgomery finished.
Since Montgomery himself has been inactive for five games and we were talking about injuries anyhow, I figured this might be a nice segue into a status update on him. And the status was surprisingly positive.
“I’m getting better, man,” he told me. “I’m gonna do some individual [drills] this week, hopefully play Sunday.”
This got Wilson really fired up. “That’s what we’re missing,” he said, slapping his legs for emphasis.
Daniels, meanwhile, is not only planning to play through the pain, he’s hoping turn his injury into an asset. “Nobody’s running my way now,” he said. “Hopefully, they think I’ve got this injury, maybe they’ll give me some action.”
(Photo by and courtesy of Brian Murphy.)
Tags: Anthony Montgomery, AnthonyMontgomery, Chris Wilson, ChrisWilson, Phillip Daniels, PhillipDaniels, washington redskins, WashingtonRedskins
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