Alex Smit needs to stop this.
Everyone and I mean everyone had reservations about him coming back and seriously injuring himself.
He did an amazing thing coming back, but you can see that he had severe limitations and it was best that he retired before his luck ran out.
For some reason, he is still taking shots at the Washington Football Team.
Still, he did not understand the tactics his coaches used to keep him sidelined. First, they placed him on the Physically Unable to Perform list, even though world-renowned doctors had pronounced him physically able to perform. At camp, players wore GPS trackers, and none traversed 4,000 yards a day on average like Smith, whose coaches asked him to carry extra weight, push sleds and hurdle bags for drills—tasks he had never done in 15 pro seasons, let alone before his leg had to be rebuilt. Smith believed the team wanted to see if it could break him, and if that sounds paranoid, the team physician agreed with him. They seemed to be asking, Dr. Robin West says, “What can he withstand?”
Smith found the coaches “patronizing,” meaning he believed they preferred a cute story, the comeback already at the end. His father, Doug, says he believes the team “sabotaged” the return. None of the Smiths could figure out why. The coaches could worry about the injury and his future, but they were not experts. “I’d rather have somebody right in my face say, What are you thinking?” Smith says. “It pissed me off.”
(Rivera, as part of a statement to SI provided by a team spokesperson, says: “I was scared to death about putting [Alex] back out there and that is something I struggled with every day. It’s unfortunate that he feels we patronized him because I can tell you that was not our intention. At the end of the day, I commend Alex because he proved everyone wrong and exceeded any reasonable expectations that anyone had set for him. He not only made it back onto the field but led us to the playoffs. It was a truly remarkable feat.”)
It is just a strange thing to take shots at the team that give you a chance.
If someone bad would have happened it would have been Rivera that had to live with that.
Flip the page for video of Smith’s come back.