Part of the presentation filed for today’s dead-tree edition story on Jerome Burney was exactly how he suffered four fractures over the course of his career.
It’s good blog fodder, too, so here it is:
SEE RELATED:
1. Sept. 28, 2006: Burney was playing defense during a defensive drill and went back on his heel. “My knee kind of fell out of place and I tried to crack it back in and wound up fracturing my left ankle,” he said.
Outcome: Missed six weeks and ultimately redshirted as a true freshman.
2. Feb. 17, 2007: The day before Maryland visited Clemson, Burney went up for a rebound in practice, came down and felt limp. “I noticed every time I tried to run up the stairs or push off my left foot, it would always give me aggravating pain,” he said. He practiced through the injury, but had it examined two weeks into postseason workouts. The diagnosis? A stress fracture in his fourth metatarsal.
Outcome: Sat out 12 weeks, but came back to have a relatively healthy redshirt freshman season.
3. Dec. 9, 2008: Two days after the Terps defeated George Washington, Burney fractured the third metatarsal in his right foot —- and thanks to both his past experience and time spent in anatomy class, knew exactly what was wrong when it happened. “[An assistant] was complaining ‘Why can’t you go hard’ and I said ‘I can’t,’” Burney said. “People were saying ‘C’mon, Jerome, dunk.’ I was like ‘Nah, I can’t do it.’”
Outcome: Didn’t dress for more than six weeks and did not play again until Feb. 17.
4. Feb. 27, 2009: During a close-out drill in practice, Burney was chopping his feet, only to feel a crack on the last step —- what was eventually found to be a fractured sesamoid bone in his right foot. “I tried to play on it, but I couldn’t push myself,” he said. “With the metatarsals, I had the adrenaline to play through it. Even the adrenaline couldn’t get me to play through this.”
Outcome: Missed the rest of the season and has done little on-court work in the months since.
—- Patrick Stevens
