Easing the pain

This is a story about pain, and by extension, this is a story about Georgia Schweitzer.

No, this is not about the sharp pain of a dislocated shoulder, or the numbing pain of a stress or divot fracture.

Schweitzer knows these pains all too well, and she treats them like you or I would treat a mosquito bite-nothing but an annoyance.

This pain penetrates much deeper.

This is the pain of a dream unfulfilled. And this is the story of one woman's ambition to erase that pain.

The red carpet had practically been laid out for her. A dazzling 23-point, MVP-worthy performance against Chamique Holdsclaw, the Tennessee Volunteers and a sea of orange in the East Regional final made her the toast of the Final Four. Then came an efficient 13-point, five-rebound game against Georgia in the national semifinals, and the women's basketball world was ready to crown a new champion and anoint a new darling.

For the reserved Ohio kid, a dream was about to come true.

Then came the two-hour nightmare.

"Some days, things just don't seem to be going your way," Schweitzer said of her performance against Purdue. "I couldn't catch a break or get anything going my way. Normally, once you do one good thing or something, you kind of feed off that.

"I just didn't seem to be able to do anything. I was very disappointed. I spent all summer thinking about that and using it as motivation."

But before Schweitzer could even begin doing anything in the offseason, she had to deal with her shoulder-the same shoulder that would dislocate on a whim all last season, the same shoulder that prevented her from raising her arms high enough to throw an overhead pass.

Schweitzer went under the knife just two weeks after her team got back from San Jose; the doctors told her five months, and Schweitzer laughed.

The workaholic wore out the path from her apartment to the Finch-Yeager sports medicine building. The sessions were grueling, and the shoulder always complained.

But there was also the pain.

"I went [to rehab] three times a week, and I kept saying, 'What else can I do, what else can I do?'" Schweitzer said. "The therapist (David Roskin) said I made his hair turn gray and fall out. A lot of people with the same type of injury come out real tentative, and I started swinging that thing around right away. And I tried to do everything I could; that's probably why I got back so fast."

Two months after the surgery and three months before anyone thought she would play again, Schweitzer began making her way down the road that would take her from role player to go-to player.

As one of only two starters to return to the Blue Devils this year, Schweitzer knew she would have to reinvent herself completely. Gone was the shy guard who did all the listening and not nearly enough of the shooting. Enter the vocal team tri-captain that does much of the talking and nearly all of the crunch-time shooting.

And to get here from there, Schweitzer did what she knew best-pushing herself to the absolute limit. The daily routine seemed almost torturous-the crack of dawn runs around Wallace Wade, the strength sessions in the weight room, the grind of organic chemistry and the pickup games at night.

But before she drifted off to sleep, there was always the pain.

"When you get so close to something and you lose it, it's actually a little more motivational than if we would've actually won the national championship," Schweitzer said. "It lasts a long time. The whole summer, any time I started to feel like, 'Oh, I didn't want to get up this morning,' it was real easy to recall the losing."

When the mind-numbing training finally gave way to actual competition in November, Schweitzer took little time in establishing herself as the team's No. 1 option. In back-to-back games against Virginia and Virginia Tech, Schweitzer poured in 51 points and emphatically announced that the bobbing ponytail no one really knew about was a serious candidate for ACC player of the year honors.

But the one thing Schweitzer just can't seem to overcome returned to haunt her again. In a late-season game at Wake Forest, Schweitzer was inadvertently kicked in the leg while running downcourt, and a whole summer's worth of work hinged on a fragile bone.

Doctors called it a divot fracture in the right fibula, trainers called it a great deal of pain and Schweitzer called it another petty annoyance.

This pain did not rival the other pain.

But in every game since that contest, Schweitzer has asked to come out for a breather due to a throbbing right leg. Normally, asking to come out of a game ranks somewhere below getting a root canal on Schweitzer's to-do list.

"It's very hard for me to mentally stay in the game when I'm feeling I'm not giving maybe all that I can possibly give," Schweitzer said. "And that's probably the hardest thing for me; the pain is really not that bad."

But then again, Georgia Schweitzer just wouldn't be Georgia Schweitzer if she weren't playing through some form of a broken leg and mangled arm. Injuries just don't matter, because if she stared hard enough, past the upcoming ACC tournament, past the NCAA regionals, she'll spot the ultimate analgesic.

Then, there would be no pain.