'Like tug-of-war and rope broke': Ex-Colts doctor explains Tyrese Haliburton's torn Achilles

Indianapolis Star

14 hours ago

INDIANAPOLIS -- Dr. Patrick Kersey was watching Sunday night just like the rest of Indiana Pacers nation, watching what coach Rick Carlisle said caused his heart to drop, watching what brought tough NBA players to tears, watching as Tyrese Haliburton collapsed and started pounding his fists on the court.
"You can use whatever symbols you'd like here. My reaction was oh (expletive)," said Kersey, a sports medicine physician with Ascension St. Vincent in Carmel. "I would say I immediately knew what happened. You could see it and you could see the kind of retraction and my heart just fell into my stomach. I was just crushed."
Kersey was watching as a huge Pacers fan, but also as an expert on just how devastating the injury the All-Star point guard suffered in the Pacers' Game 7 NBA Finals loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder Sunday night, a torn right Achilles tendon. Kersey spent nearly 15 years as a team physician for the Indianapolis Colts, part of that during the Peyton Manning era. He is also the medical director of USA Football.
IndyStar talked with Kersey Monday in detail about the injury Haliburton suffered. He has not treated or seen Haliburton as a patient.
"A torn achilles is the big kind of connective tendon that leads from your heel bone to the back of your knee or your calf muscle. It is the connective tendon that connects the muscle to the bone, and it is very high-end functional and how we push off, our toe pushing off.
'So a tear of that tendon actually disrupts the ability for that mechanism to work and so a torn tendon would be no different than you and I in a tug-of-war and the rope broke."
"The strain is actually some minor degree of fiber tearing. A strain is muscle and tendon. A sprain is ligament. So when you hear the strain word and people are like, 'What does that mean?' Well, some of the fibers in that muscle or tendon have been disrupted. So there's thousands upon millions of those fibers and when you talk about a strain, it's some of those fibers, and I'll use jeans as an example.
'Back when we were growing up, you couldn't really have frayed jeans. That wasn't too cool. Now it's pretty cool. But, fraying fibers of your fabric is a good example of what a minor strain would be, where some of those fibers have disrupted, or they've given way, or they're not as strong as they were before."
"There's a bunch of variable potential answers there, but it's kind of a scenario that makes stress in that area a little to a lot more vulnerable. So, if you strain a muscle like your calf, that actually puts some of the tissue around that a bit vulnerable because it has to do a little extra work. It has to be a little extra strong or flexible and, to an extent, the vulnerability is not actually the injury itself, it is actually the forces around that maybe exceed the body's ability to handle them.
'And so probably Tyrese's scenario was that strain made him a little sensitive or a lot sensitive to higher end forces that potentially stress that Achilles tendon and maybe in its weakened state, it gave way."
"With an Achilles disruption, if the rope tore, and tore in half, that has to be put back together. And so surgery will definitely be required to re-approximate or put those kind of frayed ends back together so they can heal. Those are generally kind of sewn or tied back together like you would similar (to sewing fabric back together).
'And then that will scar and heal over periods of time. It is a little bit of a vulnerable area and takes a bit of time and so recovery is anywhere between eight to 10, 11 months. So, it'll be a bit of time before he's probably back playing basketball."
"Probably crazy activity and use over the last couple years. He hadn't had a break in a long time. That he had an injury a few days ago, that was definitely a contributor, and then he's trying his tail off. He's given everything he has to give effort to play that game and Mother Nature gave us a graphic demonstration of kind of product failure."
"Eight Achilles disruptions I think in this NBA season does seem to sound like a lot. That's quite a few. In the scale of number, I think it does seem a little on the high side. And maybe we're just more drawn to it because of our attention, watching and those kind of things. But that does seem like a higher number."
"These guys are as high-end competitive athletes and individuals as you can imagine. Telling someone not to play is, that's their livelihood. He would have chewed your arm off to get in that game. No one wants to play more than they do. And you know, it is, it's heartbreaking. I mean, I still have a knot in my stomach feeling bad for him."