Many are not aware of how serious his injury was
Not yet in uniform, Grant Hill rolled up the sleeve of his dress shirt to reveal a scar running from the back of his left elbow to the top of his triceps.
This is the scar, created by doctors removing skin and arteries to patch the incision on his left ankle, that made Hill push back his comeback and think about life and death, not just running and jumping.
The untold story of Hill's comeback from four ankle operations is the staph infection that came afterward, hospitalizing him for a week and forcing him onto intravenous antibiotics for six months. Now a year and a half later, Hill is finally comfortable discussing a scary unplanned detour on his road to recovery.
"I didn't like to talk about it, and the team kept quiet about it," said Hill, whose ankle problems transformed one of the NBA's most promising young stars into its most famous gimp.
But the ankle was only part of the problem after the infection set in. Staph infections can kill, and Hill's condition was severe enough that it took six months of treatment with the strongest antibiotics available to rid his body of the bacteria.
"As time goes by, I'm more comfortable talking about it," Hill told the Associated Press on Sunday. "But I look at it as a blessing because it forced me to slow down and really say 'Let's get this thing right.'"
Five days after Hill underwent a major surgical procedure in March, 2003, in which doctors re-fractured his ankle and realigned it with his leg bone, he developed a fever and convulsions.
His wife, Tamia, rushed him to the hospital.
"When we both saw the reaction of the people at the hospital, we knew there was something wrong," Hill said.
Doctors removed the splint around his ankle and discovered the incision was infected. Hill had developed red and black welts on his leg, and the shaking and convulsions progressed to the point where orderlies had to hold him down.
"He was in the living room and his teeth were chattering, and I thought he was just being overly dramatic, like he was a bad actor or something, but he was truly delirious," Tamia said in a telephone interview. "We got to the hospital and they took him in on a stretcher.
"It was bad, and I don't think we realized even then how bad it was."
Luckily, the infection hadn't spread to the bone.
Hill's slow recuperation, including getting hooked up to an IV machine three times a day, erased any ideas he had about returning during the 2003-04 season.
He now believes the extra downtime prevented him from attempting the same type of early comeback that derailed his recovery from three previous surgeries to repair the ankle he first injured late in the 1999-00 season.
"I've never been close to dying, and I don't know if I was close, but it was as close as I've ever been," Hill said. "It scared me, and I think it was a good thing in the sense that it forced me to slow down."
Hill now says he has absolutely no pain in his ankle - or in his incision-scarred left arm - as he makes a comeback that many thought would never happen.
He has had no problems running full speed, stutter-stepping, backpedaling or cutting while averaging more than 34 minutes through Orlando's first seven games - including a pair of back-to-backs.
Hill, who says he's through with ankle operations, takes the court each night knowing one more roll of the ankle could put an end to a career that has included an Olympic gold medal and six All-Star appearances in his early years with Detroit.
"He just had a feel for the game ... playing the point like Magic Johnson. He'd post you up, come off pick and dribble, shoot, drive. Man, he could do it all," said Sixers guard Aaron McKie, a teammate of Hill's with the Pistons.
Hill accumulated 29 triple-doubles with the Pistons (his last was in March 1999) before he became a free agent and went to the Magic in a sign-and-trade deal that netted him a US$93 million contract.
He played only four games his first season in Orlando, 14 in 2000-01 and 27 the next year, each season ending with surgeries that have left him with a total of four screws in his ankle.
Intimately familiar with medical procedures, Hill recently commandeered the team's X-ray machine for a furtive picture-taking excursion and screw-comparing session with new teammate Steve Francis.
"I didn't count, but there was a lot of them," Francis said. "It made me put into perspective that even though (ankle injuries) happened to me a lot of times, he's been through a lot more." What Francis didn't know was how the screws only told part of the story. The scar on Hill's arm takes it to a whole new level.
Associated Press
