Former Utah Utes quarterback Alex Smith, now of the Washington Football Team, was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes this Sunday. The program detailed Smith’s path from a broken tibia and fibula in his right leg to a flesh-eating bacteria that nearly led to the amputation of his leg to his 17 surgeries and comeback to lead Washington to a division title and the NFL playoffs.
Here’s what Smith said during his appearance:
On his injury:
“It was one of those places, a quarterback, you know, OK, they got us, you know, secure the football and just kind of get down.
“I immediately knew that it was broken. The visual was the most alarming thing for me to look down and know that my leg was broken. It wasn’t straight, bending in a place it shouldn’t bend.”
- On the surgeries to repair his right leg:
“We were in the hospital approximately a month. They had to remove quite a bit of a muscle and tissue from my lower leg in order to get the infection under control. Then faced with the reality that, ‘Hey, we still might have to cut off your leg.’ For me that to hear those words is hard to deal with as a professional athlete. I think I took that for granted for so long my body, my health.”
“Just wondering, I mean, would I ever be able to go on walks with my wife? Would I ever go to play with my kids? Crazy reality, and so I’m really, really thankful to be here.”
- On the external fixator that he wore on his leg for 10 months:
“It looks medieval, but it’s really advanced orthopedics, and so I wear this metal cage that’s bolted into and pinned into my leg and it holds my leg and bone in place while it heals.”
- On his recovery process at the U.S. Military Center for the Intrepid:
“The rest of the world was telling me, ‘Yeah, go be happy with the rest of your life and hopefully you save your leg and that’d be great. Whatever you can do beyond that is icing on the cake.’ That was not the mentality down there. That was the exact opposite, that it’s okay to dream about playing again. It was OK for the servicemen and women. They wanted to go back and try and serve and to do triathlons and, and be elite, to go chase it.”
- On mentoring Patrick Mahomes in Kansas City:
“I think the thing that jumps out to me from our relationship is from day one, the mutual respect, and just what a good person he was. I was going to be a good teammate. I wasn’t going to be selfish. You know, I signed up to play team sport and, and I was going to do my part.”
- On deciding to return to football:
“I’m not crazy. I wasn’t going to do this if I didn’t obviously hear from the experts, and so to hear finally from the experts that, ‘OK, you can,’ for me a bit of a gut check, you know, do I really want to do this? Do I put myself out there? Do I walk across those white lines potentially again in live action?”
On potentially playing next year:
“This year has only emboldened for me that I can play at this level. I feel like I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me saying they feel like my mom when I’m playing and how concerned they are for me.”
You can watch the entire 15-minute piece here.