Jerry Rice’s fast comeback from knee surgery lasted less than one game, raising questions about whether the San Francisco Pro Bowl receiver pushed his rehabilitation too fast at the risk of his health.
“If we had to do it again, we would do the same thing,” 49ers coach Steve Mariucci said Tuesday.
Rice cracked his left kneecap Monday night, less than 3 1/2 months after undergoing surgery for ligament and cartilage damage on the same knee.
“He was cleared to go,” Mariucci said. “He felt good. He wanted to go and that’s when you put a player back in.”
“It was unfortunate what happened but I wouldn’t go back and change anything,” Rice told KGO-TV Tuesday as he left Stanford Hospital. “I felt like I was ready and I sparked the team at the right time. It was one of those unfortunate things. It comes along with the game of football. I’ll be back. I’m not worried about that.”
Rice was cleared to play in unprecedented speed by Dr. Michael Dillingham, the 49ers team physician, and Dr. Gary Losse, team physician of the San Diego Chargers who provided a second opinion.
Rice practiced full speed with the team for two weeks and appeared to be making cuts in normal fashion Monday night. The 49ers lined him up as a slot receiver and put him in motion so he could more easily evade jams at the line of scrimmage.
The plan was to play Rice for 10-15 snaps Monday night so he could get accustomed to contact, then hold him out of next week’s regular-season finale on the hard artificial surface in Seattle’s Kingdome.
The irony is Rice was hurt on a relatively soft muddy grass field. Had he landed on his right kneecap, he might have suffered the same injury and nobody would have second-guessed his return. But because Rice had played 12 years without missing a game because of injury, the coincidence of mishaps to his left knee provides fodder for debate over the wisdom of his comeback.
Rice’s fast return (typically, such injuries can take up to a year to properly heal) was in contrast to the experience of the Bears this year in the case of defensive lineman Alonzo Spellman.
While 49ers coaches, teammates and doctors had to caution Rice from doing too much too soon, the Bears suspended Spellman because they thought he was too slow in recovering from a rotator cuff injury of an undetermined nature. The Bears thought Spellman should have undergone exploratory surgery. When he refused, the Bears suspended him.
The circumstances of Rice and Spellman speak to the nature of a sport that provides a week for participants to recover even under the best conditions. By December, after five months of weekly games and daily practices, NFL players routinely acknowledge that “everybody is hurting.”
Rice’s return was unusual in more ways than one. As the greatest receiver in history, he had nothing to prove to anyone, nor was his job security in jeopardy. In addition, the 49ers had won the NFC West Division in a romp without him.
“He has more money than any of us, but he just wanted to be out there with us,” safety Merton Hanks said. “He got everybody going. He really uplifted the team.”
Before Monday night, Dr. Dillingham said Rice’s rigorous rehabilitation schedule enabled him “to achieve a level of strength, endurance and flexibility that has allowed medical clearance at this time to return to practice, surpassing our initial expectations.”
Dillingham added: “Dr. Losse found Mr. Rice to have normal stability . . . in his operated knee. . . . Dr. Losse agreed with our assessment that Jerry Rice is ready to resume practice and play without significant increased risk of reinjury to his knee.”
