It was the first play of the fourth quarter in the Labour Day Classic in Regina, and Winnipeg Blue Bombers linebacker Thiadric Hansen felt something while running downfield to cover a punt.
“I just started running, and all of a sudden it felt like somebody tripped me,” is how Hansen, on the phone from Germany, described it on Friday. “So I just fell over. In the video you see how I tried to get up and twist my head around to see who tripped me.”
There was nobody there.
Two months earlier, a similar thing had happened to Hansen’s teammate, linebacker Kyrie Wilson, in Toronto.
Wilson was starting to cover Argonauts running back Andrew Harris on a swing pass, but never got there.
“It felt like somebody stepped on me,” Wilson, on the phone from the airport in Los Angeles, said. “But nobody was around me. It was weird. Not like you’re really hurt.”
When head athletic therapist Al Couture hears that, he knows he’s about to deliver a harsh message: while they’re not feeling any real pain, the player’s season is over.
“The last seven we’ve had, they all say someone kicked me,” Couture said. “And no one touched them. And sometimes they’re adamant: ‘So-and-so kicked me, and I’ve got a heel bruise or something.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I was watching and no one kicked you.’
“And I’ll know right there I probably don’t even have to assess them. They’ve ruptured their Achilles.”
This past season, Couture had to break that news more often than in any other season in his 20 years with the Bombers.
Winnipeg lost five players to Achilles tears, their seasons disintegrated due to one of the strangest and most serious injuries in football.
When the fifth one happened – defensive back Nick Taylor tore his in the Banjo Bowl – I wanted to ask Couture what was going on.
The Bombers deferred that interview to the off-season.
“I’ve never had more than two, actually, in any given season,” Couture told the Winnipeg Sun this week. “You’re like, ‘What the heck, man?’ That really sucks. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was last year. After the year off, who knows? I had really no reason to expect that this year.
“But it’s football. It keeps me on my toes, and nothing really should surprise me.”
It began, ominously enough, in training camp, when linebacker Robbie Lowes tore his Achilles – on his 26th birthday, no less.
A couple weeks later, defensive back Mercy Maston went down in camp for the second straight year.
Maston’s case was particularly shocking. He’d first torn an Achilles while with Edmonton. Winnipeg signed him early in the 2019 season, and he was part of that year’s Grey Cup run.
In training camp 2021, he tore the same Achilles a second time, missing the entire season.
This past year, Maston tore the Achilles in his other leg.
“Really freaky,” Couture said. “You can’t find much in the data about that. That was a brutal day. You go through all the work, more challenging rehab because it was the second time we did it. And then your other one tears?”
On July 4 in Toronto, it was Wilson’s turn.
Couture ran out onto the field, but at first Wilson wasn’t sure why, because he didn’t feel much.
While there’s almost no pain, players usually can’t walk. They have nothing to push off with.
“You just know something is off, if that makes any sense,” Wilson, 30, said. “They took me back into the locker-room, and the doctor came in… he examined it and said, ‘Yeah, it’s your Achilles.’ It hurt, because, man, I felt like I was having a good start to the season. I got a little bit emotional.”
Delivering that news Couture calls one of the worst parts of his job.
“I usually tell him right when I put my hands on it,” he said. “You can feel with your fingers. It’s like mush. There’s a two-inch spot of mush. I immediately tell them. And it sucks. But you just can’t sugar-coat it. Guys respond differently. Usually it’s tears.”
Hansen, 29, felt that mushy spot at his own heel after trying to cover that punt in Regina.
“I had some hope,” he said. “I thought maybe it’s the Achilles, but I could move my foot, so I thought maybe it’s not. But they said it’s full torn. And when I took my shoe off, you can touch where your Achilles was, and there was no resistance, nothing. You can just go in.”
The first thing through Hansen’s mind?
“How long?” he said. “And then…”
He took a deep breath as he recalled the news sinking in.
“Because it was my first real injury, it was, ‘Oh, damn. Hopefully I don’t miss too much. Let’s see how I do.’ ”
A week later, the 34-year-old Taylor went down, No. 5 on the season.
Couture’s rehab room had its own Achilles wing.
None of the victims had any warning signs or symptoms.
With such a jump, though, Couture has looked for common denominators, anything that might tie them together.
“I definitely went down the normal rabbit hole of the shoes they were wearing, the surface they were on, the medication they were on, their age, previous injuries or some kind of predisposing factor,” he said. “It led me to nothing.”
All five happened on different fields. Even with the two in training camp, one occurred at the stadium, the other at the practice field next to the adjacent soccer complex.
There was no snow, ice or even rain to make it slippery.
“And all wearing different shoes,” Couture said. “God, one was on defence, another was on special teams, another one was home, another one away… that’s pretty tough to start to narrow down.”
A season earlier, after the CFL resumed play following the cancellation of the 2020 season, Saskatchewan suffered seven torn Achilles.
And while Couture consulted with the Riders medical staff at the time, he could only chalk that up to the long layoff and perhaps a specific drill that took out four players in one pre-camp workout.
So for now, he’s left to conclude this past season was just rotten luck in Winnipeg. A statistical anomaly, with a very human cost.
“Essentially that’s the conclusion we’re at,” Couture said. “I remember going about a five, six-year stretch without getting one. But if I were to average out all the years, it averages out to one to two. This makes up for the five years I went without.
“But if I start seeing we have five next year and five the year after that, then you start diving into things more.”
That’s a dive he hopes he never takes.
pfriesen@postmedia.com
Twitter: @friesensunmedia
Hansen’s Achilles tear ‘like an explosion’
Not all Achilles tears are exactly the same, although the rehab is long and arduous for them all.
Nine months is the typical prognosis.
That would take Blue Bomber linebacker and special-teamer Thiadric Hansen to June, somewhere around the first few weeks of the 2023 CFL regular season.
“With the Achilles you never really know until you run full-speed,” Hansen said. “At the beginning it’s always high-risk. I’m really in no rush. I have the whole off-season now. And I’m in good hands with Al and the crew there.”
Hansen went to his native Germany for Christmas, but he’ll be back in Winnipeg, mid-January, to resume rehab with Bombers head therapist Al Couture.
Couture says there are two different tears: one occurs where the tendon attaches at the heel, another a couple inches higher, mid-tendon.
Hansen’s was the latter, but it wasn’t exactly clean.
“The doctor described it like an explosion,” Hansen said. “So there was a lot of tissue around.”
Couture says it’s like “two different ends of a rope” that’s torn.
“Some of them have been a little more mangled than others.”
Five Winnipeg players suffered the season-ending injury this past season.
Hansen says seeing how positive teammate Kyrie Wilson was after going down, Week 4, helped keep him in a good frame of mind.
The injury used to keep players on the shelf for closer to 12 months, but surgical techniques have improved.
“The surgery they did, I asked some doctors that I know, and they don’t have the surgery here,” Hansen, living in Flensburg, near the German border with Denmark, said. “They’re not familiar with it. So not a lot of people have it, yet. I have a friend who tore it a month before me, and he got the old surgery. And while I was out of the boot and rehabbing, walking, he was still in the boot, crutches and stuff.”
Couture says a decade ago, the injury was often career-ending. Even today, the rehab is difficult.
“So you’d better have a really good work ethic or it’s going to end you,” he said. “You could say that about a few surgeries, but the Achilles would be the tops for that. You have to be really patient at the beginning.”
That wasn’t always easy for Hansen.
“I was trying to get out of the boot earlier,” he said. “At home I could walk pretty fast without the boot. Of course Al didn’t want me to. I just did short walks, controlled walks, in the house. And every time I stepped outside I put the boot on.”
Occasionally, he’ll forget about it and do something he shouldn’t.
“I had some scary moments,” Hansen said. “I just forgot about it, and came home and jumped on the bed. And during jumping it hurt. Five days ago I slipped in the sauna, doing rehab, and came off it, it felt weird. You realize you’ve got to be careful.”
Seeing the almost daily progress encourages Hansen, even if his calf muscle remains a little atrophied.
“You see how crazy the leg muscle, especially the calf muscle, is reduced while you’ve got the boot on,” he said. “I’m still trying to get that back. It’s still a little bit skinny. I’m happy it’s during the off-season.”
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