The knee lasted nearly 37 years after its magic was gone. That's what Gale Sayers's teammates called him: Magic. Because of the things he did on a football
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So on the morning of April 27, 2009, Sayers lay on an operating table in Elkhart, Ind., where at age 65 he would receive an artificial knee. Orthopedic surgeon Mark Klaassen stood over Sayers, and this is what he saw: three long scars, one running down the front of the knee, another on the inside and a third on the outside, curling around to the back. These were from decades-old open surgeries, "dissections," as Klaassen calls them. "The multiple scars made the surgery technically a little more involved," he says. "Because you don't want the skin to die."
Inside the knee Klaassen found carnage. Sayers's anterior cruciate ligament was gone; the posterior cruciate ligament was stretched and frayed. There was evidence that the medial collateral ligament had been sewn or stapled at some point in an effort to create stability (a practice common at one time but later found to be ineffective). A half-inch wedge of his tibia had been sawed off in an osteotomy, a surgical procedure designed to redistribute weight away from an arthritic surface. Almost no cartilage remained, and as a result, the joint was filled with dust and fragments from bones rubbing together for many years.
It was not the worst knee Klaassen had ever seen. But it was by far the worst on which the owner had been actively exercising. "This thing was utterly shot," says Klaassen. "And Gale had been jogging on this knee. All I could think was, Wow, that's a lot of pain tolerance. This is a unique individual here. Very determined. Very stoic."
Even more remarkable, the knee in question was not the knee that first derailed Sayers's career, when he was famously hit by a diving Kermit Alexander of the 49ers at Wrigley Field in November 1968. That was the right knee, and Klaassen says that one is in rough shape too. But the left, first injured in 1970, had become much worse.
Klaassen replaced the damaged pieces of Sayers's left knee with a two-pound, state-of-the-art prosthesis made of polyethylene, titanium and a cobalt-chrome alloy. The surgery took 60 minutes, after which Klaassen disposed of the old bone and tissue. Sayers stayed one night and then went home to Chicago. "It was time to get it replaced," he says, "so I got it replaced."
