Rebound

Red light. The Kid hadn't stepped onto the court yet. She was too busy being composed on the sidelines, the pep band blaring and the opening night lights glaring but she... she was just quiet. She made her way to the center circle. She took her secured spot. She bent her knees and slowly looked up toward center court.

Green light! The ball lofted up and slammed itself right into the long, thick hands of The Kid, who charged all by herself down the court, a bull of a defender straight ahead in her path. She knew that obstacle was going to move her way and follow her up to the hoop, and she knew she just had to keep on doing it her way--the fast way.

Yellow light.... The defender didn't budge, and The Kid, confused, tried to go up off her left leg instead. She pushed up, but that second option--the second leg--wouldn't let her. That leg turned one way and her knee twisted around the other, just like that, like wrenching off a bottle cap. The Kid crumpled to the floor and clutched her knee, tried to move by herself but couldn't, not without some support from a family she would soon come to know.

The Kid had gone from layup to hiccup just in the first five seconds of the first game of the women's basketball season, her first since a freshman year in which she burst into the starting lineup with a fiery star turn of jumping, slashing and crashing at year's end. But now she had torn her anterior cruciate ligament, had lost the physical ability to keep her charging game churning, and she had thrown her steady demeanor into a state of uncertainty. It was November 6, 2002, and Monique Currie, for once, didn't know where to run to next.

Lucky for her, then, that Duke's sports medicine team was already synched up and ready for her, moving faster and in more directions than even Currie could on the basketball court. While All-American teammate Alana Beard and courtside trainer Joe Angus each supported an arm to help Currie off the floor, Yale- and Duke-trained orthopedic surgeon Dr. Alison Toth was already on the phone. Within ten minutes, Toth had scheduled an MRI for halftime, but Currie, wanting to stay as close to the game as possible, remained to watch Duke crush Premier Players in the rest of the exhibition game, and didn't take Toth up on her offer until right after the final buzzer.

So Currie simply went to the next building over from Cameron Indoor Stadium, a mammoth yellow structure joined at the hip to the football stadium. The outside reads "Wallace Wade Stadium" in blue block letters, but a few glossy windows below that it says, "Duke Sports Medicine," marking not just the football press box but the friendly, neighborhood state-of-the-art health facility.

From there, the diagnosis was straightforward: An isolated ACL tear with no surrounding damage; you're out for the season, kid, but no sweat--surgery's in two weeks.

On November 19, Toth herself performed the reconstructive surgery, one of over 75 ACL replacements she performs each year. Director of the Duke Sports Medicine Center Dr. Claude T. Moorman--who went head-to-head with Toth when he was team doctor for the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens and she was a physician for the runner-up New York Giants--has divided up his top physicians to specialize with individual teams. Rather than being the only team physician and having to take care of several hundred athletes like at many other colleges, Toth had been on road trips with the women's basketball team, had been to most of its games and knew Currie, so she was playing the family doctor, but conducting an arthroscopic procedure that would just be the beginning of Currie's road back.

"He was on it from day one," Currie says. "He was on me all the time, making me work hard. I know I'm not the easiest person to work with, and he was just always there for me. He was always positive, always trying to encourage me to keep working hard."

Mullenix admits that he has to work double duty when guiding athletes past major injuries, making sure his patients know just how large the mountain they have to scale will be, emotionally as well as physically. He didn't think that Currie did a good job of grasping the idea of what would be a year-long upward battle when she came out of surgery and into the training room, where there would be no room for the fire that Currie displayed on the basketball court, where the fire would seep into her once-calm off-the-court behavior that had for so long kept her in balance.

"To be honest, she was kind of behind the curve for a while," Mullenix says. "But that curve changes, and unfortunately it's not an exact science, and people respond differently to the healing process and to the rehab process. And we struggled for a while, she and I, in that she wasn't progressing as quickly as I would've liked to have seen her. Moreso with her strength--she was working hard, but I still think some people come back quickly. But she's been one that's taken a little longer."

Currie went to the Yoh Center three to six days a week, churning through exercises in the training room after the football team cleared out each afternoon, and by mid-January, eight weeks after surgery, the only thing she had to show for herself was that she had made it to the pool. But this wasn't just another pool; this was a deep-water pool with high-powered jets and weight-altering mechanisms on a submerged treadmill, where Currie would train herself to run again.

And the Yoh Center is just the rehabilitation venue for the Duke Sports Medicine Center. When it comes to research, the Mike Krzyzewski Human Performance Research Laboratory--the "K-Lab" for short, real short--might even one-up its structure across the football field. With wires connected to guinea-pig athletes in a 22nd Century-style lab, Duke puts orthopedic surgeons, biomechanical engineers, kinesiologists, exercise physiologists and plenty of other -ologists to work on breaking ground in research, with a keen eye toward preventing injuries before they even happen. Duke's varsity teams get a secret, futuristic weapon to help them stay healthy, and it's stealthily hidden somewhere in that big, yellow building behind Wallace Wade.

"It's great to have the facility right here," football coach Carl Franks says at practice, sports medicine's home just an errant pass away. "When somebody gets hurt, we don't have to take 'em to the next town, we don't even have to take 'em just a couple of blocks to the medical center. We take 'em right up into our press box, where we have x-rays and floorscans--we have all the facilities right there. So I think we're probably in as good a shape as anybody in the country."

Women's basketball coach Gail Goestenkors counts her blessings too. Currie's quick, neighborhood care was a godsend compared to the "much more difficult task" Goestenkors went through when she was an assistant coach at Purdue. There, athletes with a severe injury had to travel to a hospital an hour and 15 minutes away in Indianapolis to take an MRI that had been scheduled a week or two earlier, only to have to wait that same amount of time to set up surgery.

Currie was three and a half months out of the operating room at the beginning of March, when she had made it out of the water and onto a land treadmill. She still had to simulate a lighter weight than her own, though, and saved standing on her own two feet for cheerleading. While Goestenkors and the Blue Devils pushed ahead through the ACC Championship Tournament, of which she had been the MVP one long year earlier, Currie was relegated to the sidelines and to this state-of-the-art basement. All the while, her urge to get back on the court--any court--grew with each successive Duke win. But "they" said she needed to stay for the first summer session to continue rehab, and "they" didn't want her to be cleared to play with the team until the beginning of the new school year.

Resigned to reality but feeling the urgency of "next year" coming at her, Currie raced to get through the summer. Half a year post-surgery, she had made it to the bare minimum of the standard six-to-twelve-month recovery period and was humping through jumping drills and getting stronger. By mid-summer, Currie deemed herself ready to play full-speed basketball again. Mullenix, having preached the importance of approaching the uphill battle one too many times, decided it was time to give The Kid a wake-up call.

Currie went up against her first major test, a long and grueling check-up that could put her back on the court, back on the run. Mullenix wanted Currie to see how much she had retrained her legs to function by putting her through intense cutting, jumping, pivoting and running--really running now--drills. She failed; the drills were too hard for her, and her knee had not fully re-learned its job.

Currie had tried to run the yellow light, but it turned red during that physical. So Mullenix pulled her over. "They all want to play before they're ready," Mullenix says. "And the big challenge is to get them back out there and let them play, but not do it before they're safe to do so. My goal is to get everybody out there. I'd love to not be busy. I try to avoid repeat customers, so to speak. And sometimes the challenge is to let them know that when they think they're tired of rehab and just want to play, that they're just not ready to play yet."

Breakdown, breakthrough.

In failing, however, Currie had realized her weakness. She would stop the complaining, moving from what Mullenix describes as the "just enough" attitude to "the over and above" principle. She jumped and jumped and jumped in her drills with Mullenix, who bumped and shoved her around in rebounding drills and forced her to fall on her leg awkwardly. She was re-living the injury with this middle-aged, polo-shirt-clad guy who had pushed every button on that banged up body of hers and let drip every bead of sweat from under the bandana that has become like hair to her she wears it so much. But, finally, she'd bow to the expert. "Sometimes we're not trusted right away and have to prove to them that we know what we're doing," the expert says, very seriously. "So for a while it was kind of tough for her to buy into that, and now that she has, she's making great strides."

Indeed, since taking the second half of the summer off to do rehab back home in Potomac, Md., Currie has made quite a return to her second family. She passed the test this time, and Toth gave her the heads-up for returning to play with the team--a clearance the stoic Currie can't help but smile about when it's mentioned. She knows it's not the full green light, that she's not 100 percent healthy yet. Sure, she still has to meet Mullenix twice a week. Sure, her dark leg brace betrays her at captain-led pick-up games. Sure, she'll get knocked around in the post for a while. And, sure, opening night is coming up in a few weeks--an exhibition game against Premier Players, no less. But she's in good hands now, hands that she says "got everything down perfect," hands that she can trust.

Mullenix brings his hands together, stepping out of his slow drawl to ramble about Currie's maturity since the summer, about how he sees her challenging her younger injured teammates in practice and in the training room. And after all this, after a year in neutral with "they," is she going to be ready to start racing where she left off when Premier Players come to Cameron on Nov. 4, 2003?

"She better be," he declares strongly, yet with just a tinge of tenderness.