Experience Apture: See How Apture Can Enhance Your Website

Tiger's knee is not the first

The injured knee of Tiger Woods has the potential to add to his legend. Tiger follows a couple of sports myths, whose knee injuries clearly impaired their careers, but made them greater considering what they achieved and could have achieved.

Perhaps beginning with the enigmatic Mickey Mantle, the "Commerce Comet," a cornerstone of the fabled Yankee dynasty of the 1950s and early 1960s, the knee has been a major part of the American sports psyche. The Mick may have been the most physically gifted baseball player of all time. Casey Stengel, the wizened manager of the Yankees, expected Mantle to break all of the records of Babe Ruth, not unlike the expectation for Tiger to break all those of Jack Nicklaus. Mantle could hit for power and average, and was the fastest man in baseball.

In his rookie year in the World Series against the New York Giants, he was sharing the outfield with the revered Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, who he would replace. On a fly ball, the Mick caught his spikes on a drain pipe in Yankee Stadium when he slowed to allow DiMaggio to catch the ball, and tore up his knee. In 1951, there was no arthroscopic surgery. This was the first, and most famous, of Mantle's knee and leg injuries, and Mantle played in constant pain, legs wrapped for every game, for the rest of his career. Despite this, he won the Triple Crown in 1956, and hit over 500 home runs, many of them in dramatic fashion. He became, according to Hank Aaron, the best one-legged ballplayer ever to limp through the game. Mantle's epic perseverance for the next decade and a half became the stuff of legend, not completely overshadowed by his off-the-field problems.

The very name of Gale Sayers describes his effect on the National Football League when he arrived in 1965. The "Kansas Comet" played for the Chicago Bears, and was impossible to catch, as his speed and moves made his physical feats unpredictably brilliant. The expectations were that he would surpass the records of the great Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns, who retired that same year with the rushing record in hand. And like Mantle, he looked the part. But in 1968, an injury to his right knee cut him down. At a time when such an injury was thought to put an end to a football career for a running back, Sayers put himself through painful rehabilitation, for a comeback in which he remarkably led the league in rushing in 1969. An injury to his left knee in 1970 effectively ended Sayers' career. But, like the Mick, his legend was amplified both by what he did despite the knee injuries, and what he could have done but for them.

Tiger's knee is the latest to challenge a young sports marvel. He has already, by winning the U.S. Open this year at Torrey Pines with one good knee, been transformed from a great athlete to a mythic one. The full extent of the Tiger myth, like those of the Commerce and Kansas Comets, will be formed by how and whether he overcomes his knee injury.