Earl Campbell's back is killing him — so badly, in fact, that the man hasn't slept in a bed for almost seven years. He spends a fair amount of time in a wheelchair, and he can't get around on his feet without using a walker. Man, what he'd give to be able to hop into his van and drive, to sail alone on the open road, no music on the radio, no sound in his ears but the hum of tires on highway.
But he can't. Not right now. Earl Campbell's 52-year-old body hurts him so much that he relies on a driver — his longtime friend James "Sugar Bear" Yates — to take him to work, or to fetch a can of Sprite at the 7-Eleven, or run him up to visit his brothers and sisters in Tyler. The most indomitable running back in the history of Texas football — as a collegian and a professional — has come to know what it is to be vulnerable.
Campbell's biggest problem, as he describes it, stems from the discovery of three large bone spurs on his spinal column several years ago. Doctors wanted to remove them, explaining they were covering nerves in his back, causing atrophy in his muscles. No way, not yet, said Campbell, a man who feared no defender but cringes at the mention of an MRI machine. He decided to tough his way through it.
"Well, Earl, you'll be back in about a year," the doctor told him.
When Campbell finally did have the surgery to remove the spurs, he says, doctors told him afterward that he'd never walk the same, that he'd never be the same. His reaction: "I'm going to prove you wrong."
So at the end of his rehabilitation program this summer, Campbell started lifting weights at UT — something he'd never done as a player — hoping to power his body up, to heal his back through strength and will.
The doctors implored Campbell to stop, told him he was hurting himself in the weight room. "So now Earl just rests his back," says Campbell, his voice a little weary, clearly resigned.
He says he's been told, with rest, that his back will improve — but it might take a year, or a year and a half.
"I live a funky life now," says Campbell, glancing down at a bag of pistachio nuts that rests by his left hand. He dreams aloud about working side-by-side with the hands at the family ranch in Tyler, as he used to.
"Sometimes, I wish I would have never let that guy operate on me. Sometimes, I wish I had just continued to take pain medicine. I didn't know that a back was so important."
http://www.statesman.com/sports/content/sports/stories/longhorns/12/09/1209campbell.html
