Just Tell Me I Can't (12 page)

T
his is the part they don't see. The sportswriters and talking heads on ESPN often report in passing that an athlete has had “successful” surgery or has started rehab, and then—fast-forward two, three, six, or twelve months later—the fans see the finished product on the field. But in the months or years between injury and comeback lies this, the lonely hours of work in gyms and on obstacle courses and on treadmills immersed in tubs of water. It's tedious, repetitive, and all-consuming, and it's why so many older athletes ultimately hang it up: it's not that they no longer love the game, it's that they can no longer find the drive to push themselves back to their former level.

Those who do make it back tend to trick themselves into this otherworldly commitment. They imagine former rivals in the gym
at this very moment
in order to measure themselves against something, or they invent doubters in their own head that they can prove wrong.

And then there's Jamie Moyer.

For Moyer, rehab is not a means to an end. It's an end in itself. He loves this part, in the same way that he loves his bullpen sessions. He loves it precisely
because
no one sees it, at least no one outside of Team Moyer, the quirky band of comrades he's gathered for the cause. He loves it for the camaraderie he feels with them, for the mission's sense of common purpose and shared adventure, and—just like in those bullpen sessions—for the trial and error and discovery that each day brings.

On this day, Moyer shuts his blaring alarm and bounces out of bed. It is 5:00 a.m. Karen, no stranger to working out herself, she has an appointment with a spinning class in an hour. “Time to go to work,” Jamie says, speaking for both of them. He needn't look far for evidence of what the work means to him; on the mantel in front of him, in the master bedroom of the family's home in the San Diego hills, sits the pitching rubber from the mound of Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park, which he excavated during the World Series celebration in 2008.

Today he'll be throwing for a handful of major league scouts in the backyard of his friend and pitching coach, Dom Johnson. He flicks on the light in his master bathroom and sizes himself up in the mirror. He starts to feel the familiar adrenaline rush: the challenge of all-consuming work is on the horizon.
Damn, I still love this
, he thinks. Most guys his age would dread the thought of what the day ahead would entail. Pain, exhaustion, drudgery. To Moyer, though, it is something else. One more opportunity to get a little better. Evidence that he could do it—that he
would
do it. One more step on the way to showing everyone who had ever doubted him that he still had it.

When Moyer first approached physical therapist Yousef Ghandour to oversee getting his arm and body back into pitching form, Ghandour seemed skeptical. He asked the same thing that so many people did when they first encountered Moyer. “Why, with everything you've accomplished, would you want to go through this?”

“You know what?” Moyer responded. “I enjoy it. People don't normally do this, but that doesn't mean they
can't
do it.”

Still, he had no illusions. “Look, I know the window is closing,” he told Ghandour. “But I feel like I still have a pinkie in the window. If it closes completely, that's okay. At least I'll know.”

Ghandour, a sucker for underdogs, was in.

So was Liba Placek, the fifty-eight-year-old mother of four whom the late NFL legend Junior Seau once dubbed “the Beast.” Moyer wanted Placek, an unconventional strength and conditioning coach—Trevor Hoffman had suggested both her and Yousef to Jamie—to whip him into peak performance shape. She had treated many pitchers, which meant she knew firsthand what an unnatural and stressful act pitching was, that it required the two sides of the body to perform completely different tasks. It was a tough enough balancing act for healthy men in their twenties to pull off; she doubted this forty-nine-year-old could succeed. But she was taken by Moyer's commitment, enthusiasm, and courage. He was risking no small amount of pride—and a lifetime of achievement—to make it back. How could she, a woman approaching sixty who ended each group session at her Del Mar, California, LibaFit studio by standing upside down on one hand, not help the guy?

Then there was the mysterious Dom Johnson, a private pitching coach who, though known among the game's lifers, had never been one to call attention to himself. Johnson coached some forty minor league pitchers in the backyard of his Poway, California, ranch house. Fifty of his pupils were playing Division I baseball, and an average of thirteen were selected in the Major League Baseball draft in recent years.

When Moyer first appeared in Johnson's backyard, he did so with his parents, Jim and Joan, in tow. As Jamie explained the nature of his quest, peppering his speech with a string of Harveyisms, Johnson flashed back on his own education in the game. Like Jamie, he'd learned at the knee of
his
father, former major league slugger Deron Johnson. Through his dad, Dom had access to the game's great pitching minds. That's how he met Gus Hoefling and Steve Carlton. Hoefling asked him, “Can elephants walk across lily pads?”

“No,” young Dom answered.

“That's why you'll never reach your potential,” Hoefling barked. “Remember: what the mind believes, the body achieves.”

Johnson took the question to Carlton: could elephants walk across lily pads? The All-Star pitcher smiled. “I haven't met that damn elephant yet, but he's out there.”

Now here was Moyer, in his backyard, talking about coming back from Tommy John surgery and pitching in the major leagues again at nearly fifty years old. Dom Johnson had found his elephant.

Over the years, Yousef Ghandour had sat many professional athletes down in his San Diego Physiotherapy Associates rehab center for the talk. Your workouts, he'd tell them, will be a couple of hours, but they won't be of the macho “no pain, no gain” variety. They'll likely be tedious. Ghandour, a native of Jordan in his late forties, had studied at the legendary Ola Grimsby Institute. With a passion for the biomechanics of the human body, he'd spent years developing a philosophy that centered on more repetition but less weight than traditional approaches.

“Our goal is to increase your tissue tolerance to withstand more abuse,” Ghandour told Moyer. “More repetition and less weight can be boring, but it's important.”

Music to my ears
, Moyer thought. During his time in Seattle, Moyer met Peter Shmock, a two-time Olympic shot-putter and the Seattle Mariners' former weight training coach, and became a devotee of the new science of recovery, which posits that the restful periods between workouts are actually the most important part of a fitness regimen.

Shmock had a holistic approach to training, incorporating t'ai chi ch'uan, yoga, and medicine balls into his workouts, and preached the importance of the mind-body relationship to athletes like Moyer and his catcher, Dan Wilson. Moyer learned to listen to his body, and he found that it seemed to grow stronger when he had the discipline to give it time to recover from Shmock's workouts.

Ghandour sounded a lot like Shmock. Both men were incrementalists and neither subscribed to the old-school attitude that “pain is just weakness leaving the body.” Ghandour's program began with an assessment of Moyer's range of motion and exercises to restore basic mobility. Next came the coordination phase, in which Ghandour would sleuth out which muscles were relying on which muscles to compensate for their own weaknesses.

Then came the endurance phase, where the focus is on building up the tolerance of the muscles in question. When under tension, muscles either lengthen, shorten, or remain the same. Moyer would be put through a series of low-weight exercises, such as ever so slowly lowering a three-pound dumbbell from the curl position twenty-five times in sets of three, which provides resistance while lengthening the muscle.

After a few weeks of building up Moyer's tissues and ligaments, only then would it be time for strength training. And that's when Moyer's regimen would shift to fewer reps with higher weight on Ghandour's pulley system. Ghandour was an evangelist when it came to working out with pulleys, which provide optimum resistance and help guard against tendonitis flare-ups compared to traditional weight training. He'd presented his pulley theories to the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society Baseball Medicine Conference, sharing billing with Dr. Lewis Yocum, and had started marketing specially designed pulleys for travel and at-home use. As soon as the strength training phase began, Moyer was sent home with one that he'd hook on a door to work his shoulder muscles on days he wasn't in Ghandour's gym.

In working with pitchers, Ghandour often found weak neck muscles. Knowing that the job called for quick neck movements—checking the runner at first, spinning to make a throw—Ghandour devised neck rotation exercises for the pulley. “Most people don't know how to strengthen the neck,” he says. “For Jamie to do this at forty-nine, we had to not only get his shoulder and arm built up, we had to get other areas, like the neck, strengthened too, so over the course of a season there'd be no compensation.”

Three mornings a week, Moyer would follow Ghandour's protocol faithfully. He'd do the exercises, get proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, or PNF, stretching—basically a stretch with manual resistance to help with flexibility, coordination, and timing—and receive some soft tissue massage. Most important, however, was Ghandour's calming presence. Just as Harvey Dorfman's voice in his head made him feel not so alone when on the mound years earlier, so too did Ghandour's as he tried to battle the comeback odds. “Yousef has a way of making you feel like you're his only client,” Moyer would say.

Liba Placek could tell Jamie Moyer was a pitcher just by looking at him. His left shoulder was lower than his right and his left foot rolled in—two telltale signs of someone who had spent the last four decades in the unnatural act of throwing a baseball. Moyer had thrown so many pitches that his hip flexors were misaligned and his left foot was, in her words, “angry,” which basically meant he had trained it to angle inward.

“This is all reversible,” Liba told Moyer after her initial evaluation of his posture. Placek has the soothing Czech accent of her homeland, which is juxtaposed against the hard-core nature of her workouts. She uses an amalgam of corrective exercises, borrowing principles from Pilates and yoga, to enhance body alignment, stressing balance. Workouts in her unassuming studio, with its mirrored walls and floor strewn with yoga mats, tend to break even the toughest of athletes, because she targets the weak spots of otherwise strong men. After each in-studio session, she leads her charges on “The Patch”—a nearby Navy SEALs–like obstacle course with giant running logs she leaps over, under, and around, before sprinting some 200 yards up what has come to be known as Puke Hill. The workout is what led Seau to call her the Beast. “Liba is such a stud,” Seau told
Sports Illustrated
in 2005. “I'd rather face a 350-pound lineman than face Liba and one of her workouts.”

Placek is a onetime volleyball player who subscribes to something called the Egoscue Method, which emphasizes a series of intense stretch and flexibility movements. Placek took photos of Moyer and showed him how the years of throwing had created an imbalance between his left- and right-side muscles. That corrodes the posture, which sets off a chain reaction of problems—the shoulder might rotate in response, or the hips might sway, or the ankle might turn in—all of which can lead to injury.

Three times a week, Moyer took Liba's regimen, often bringing sons Dillon and Hutton, or daughter Timoney, along. He even conquered Puke Hill without having the dry heaves. Within weeks, Liba had overcome her doubts about Moyer reaching his goal and had become a believer. She'd had clients who found excuses for their bodies; here was a client who had an excuse—recovering from what others might have considered a career-ending injury—but refused to use it. “Let's get to work,” Moyer would say upon arrival at LibaFit each morning.

“In no time, I started to see a truly great athlete,” Liba recalls.

Dom Johnson first considered the phenomenon of Jamie Moyer in 2008, the year Moyer led the Phillies to a World Series championship. Johnson had known of Moyer forever, of course; but he hadn't really
thought
of Moyer. Not until slugger David Justice talked about Moyer in a way Johnson had never entertained. One day, Justice visited Johnson's Poway, California, backyard to address “Dom's kids”—a group of highly touted high school, Division I, and minor league pitchers who all shared an ambition to one day make the major leagues and the wherewithal to find Johnson, a guy whose sole form of advertising was word of mouth. Justice's message was the baseball equivalent of a “Scared Straight” lecture.

“I can tell just by looking at you all that you're not tough,” he said. “Hitters know who's tentative, who's pitching scared, and, I gotta tell ya, most pitchers are ‘in for show and away for dough,'” he said. “That's what we hitters say about you. That you won't pitch inside, except for show. So I can train my eyes low and away 'cause none of you guys will throw inside.”

After a few more minutes of Justice's ranting, a young pitcher asked, well, who
does
pitch inside? “That Moyer guy,” said Justice.

Justice had a history of being flummoxed by Moyer: in 40 career at-bats, Justice had hit just .225 against the lefty, with a meager OPS (on-base plus slugging) of .673, more than 200 points below his career average. “I can't just sit there and look away, 'cause he keeps coming in on me. And it's not just that he comes in once to set up outside. He pounds away at your hands, and it messes you up, 'cause he's got no fear.”