By Tom Brennan
Quarterback Alex Smith just dropped a bigtime dime on the Washington Football Team!
In an interview in GQ Magazine, Smith says the team never expected him to come back from 17 surgeries to have his leg completely reconstructed.
The 36-year-old proved them wrong by starting six games for Washington in a season that culminated in him winning NFL Comeback Player of the Year.
While many people who witnessed Smith’s gruesome Nov. 2018 injury had expressed skepticism about a potential return, the biggest doubters came from inside his own building, Smith says. It’s a shocking revelation from the quarterback who did not mince words in saying, “They didn’t want me there.”
As training camp was set to begin last summer, Smith learned from his own team of doctors that he’d been cleared to return, something he never expected to hear.
“I got this big round of imaging done,” Smith recalled to GQ. “And all the doctors—all the military doctors, all my doctors here in DC—were like, ‘You’re good to go.’ I never thought I’d hear those words. They were like, ‘If you want to play football again, you can do it.'”
Asked whether the Washington Football Team was surprised to hear he was ready to go, Smith said, “They were. They never thought I was coming back. No one there. I did all my rehab outside of the building. They do ACLs and stuff like that. But walking in with what I had, it’s like you got three eyes.”
“So there was a very small group of people that actually thought that I could do this,” Smith said when asked for the team’s response to his return. “I think the rest of the world either doubted me, or they patronized me. ‘Yeah, that’s really nice that you’re trying.’ When I decided to come back, I definitely threw a wrench in the team’s plan.
“They didn’t see it, didn’t want me there, didn’t want me to be a part of it, didn’t want me to be on the team, the roster, didn’t want to give me a chance. Mind you, it was a whole new regime, they came in, I’m like the leftovers and I’m hurt and I’m this liability. Heck no, they didn’t want me there. At that point, as you can imagine, everything I’d been through, I couldn’t have cared less about all that. [laughs] Whether you like it or not, I’m giving this a go at this point.”
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