‘I saw pain on his face.’ Brother of Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott on ankle injury
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott wants no part of this conversation.
He has no interest in reliving the memory that ran on loop in his head for months.
But it is a moment in time that he, his teammates and others close to him will never forget.
Not just because of what he went through, but how he endured it and how he overcameit to get to a point where he’s better now than he was before.
Two surgeries, and countless hours of rehab later, Prescott has picked up where he left off. Sunday’s game against the New York Giants is 364 days removed from the date of the ankle injury. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the Week 5 opponent and location of the game is as it was a year ago.
For the team, perhaps the biggest difference is that Prescott’s Cowboys are 3-1 and sit atop the NFC East with an offense that is averaging a hefty 31.5 points per game and a ball-hawking defense that is ready to welcome the 1-3 Giants back to AT&T Stadium.
But Sunday will be about much more than the game. It is a milestone marker, and one that at least one person is kind of done addressing.
“Why talk about it,” Prescott initially queried. “I’m not going to be naive and say I’m not going to think about it, but I think just more than anything it’ll just be gratitude and just thinking about how much of a blessing the last 364 days have been of going through that and overcoming that and becoming, as I continue to say, a better person and a better player.”
The sight of Prescott not getting up from the turf after a seemingly routine run and tackle remains a nightmare that no one wants to relive. His leg was turned one way and his foot was turned the other. He tried to put it back in place and banged it on the ground. A memory that makes him laugh now.
“I don’t know what I was doing trying to bang my leg,” Prescott said. “I know I was trying to just get it right, make it look normal so I could try to get off the field. When I look back, I don’t know if it was shock. Obviously, not feeling it all and me trying to bang it straight.”
And I remember [receiver Amari] Cooper asking me, ‘Are you all right?’ or something. I was just like, ‘No! No!’ I just went in [my] head, just saying, ‘Thank you God’ just over and over and over, just trying to find any bit of comfort right there.”
It’s a play no one wants to see again, but the Cowboys have had to live through it in film review sessions to prepare for Sunday’s game.
“Sometimes you skip past the very, very end of that run,” said offensive coordinator Kellen Moore. “Certainly, I’ve seen it a few times, and that’s all I probably need to see.”
Prescott tries not to think about it, but he couldn’t help it this week as he prepped for Sunday.
“I definitely fast-forward through that play,” Prescott said. “I’ve watched that play a couple of times ... I watch the beginning of it, but not the end of the run.”
It’s the end of the run that had everyone at AT&T Stadium gasping for their collective breaths. Shock, awe and disbelief soon turned to sympathy and empathy over a lost season and the uncertainty of what lay ahead.
Coach Mike McCarthy prayed and then watched the fans cheer in support of a teary-eyed Prescott as he was carted off the field with his fist in the air.
“I pray,” McCarthy said about what he does in the moments after a player is injured. “I’m not much help out there. It’s a medical situation. So, I’m just out there to make sure, just checking on him. It’s hard to see those guys in that spot.”
It was even harder for Prescott’s family to watch.
Family support
Prescott’s dad, Nathaniel was watching the game from home because he was staying away from the stadium as COVID-19 cases were on the rise and there were no vaccines.
“My first reaction was ‘Oh, my God,’ as I saw him tap his leg on the surface twice,” he said. “I was up and moving and ready to go to the stadium. I got on the phone to call Tad [Dak’s brother]. My thoughts were to get to him, and I cried with him all the way to the hospital.”
Tad was at the game in a luxury suite and initially didn’t think much of the situation
He saw the play and thought it was something routine. He certainly didn’t see the severity of it.
“It was disbelief and shock for me,” Tad said. “I am pretty good about making myself believe what I want to believe in the moment. Routine run. I look at my phone to check something on fantasy. My wife grabs my leg and says he hasn’t gotten up yet.
“From his initial reaction, I am thinking he’s fine,” he said. “Then the head of security shows up and says, ‘We need to get you out of here because they are taking him to the hospital’ because he had to have immediate surgery.”
No one knew the devastation of that moment more than his older brother Tad, considering all that Prescott had endured in the months prior. There was his bout with depression, the loss of their middle brother Jace to suicide and the unpredictability about his future due to the prolonged contract saga.
Tad had actually advised him to sit out the first part of the season on the franchise tag. So his mind was going crazy with regrets.
“It’s a business,” Tad said. “That is where my mind frame first went. It was about his future in Dallas being in jeopardy. Everything for me was about what if. I had told him to sit out. He looked at me and said ‘I don’t do this for money and that is a $30 million raise that I am playing for.’ He said he couldn’t do that to the other men in the locker room. His last words to me were, ‘Besides, it’s not like I’m going to get hurt’.”
Prescott, who joined the Cowboys as a fourth-round pick and became an immediate surprise starter as a rookie, had played every game of the previous four years of his career in Dallas.
At 6-foot-2, 228 pounds, he was built like a tank. Getting injured was the farthest thing from his mind.
Fast forward back to the afternoon of the injury, tears streaming down Prescott’s face.
“Those were tears of pain and tears of disappointment,” Tad said. “I never thought his career was over, but his future with the Cowboys? He was born a Cowboys fan. That was his team growing up. He got to live out his dream. I was thinking maybe they were going to take his dream away from him and make it a business decision because he got hurt.”
And that doesn’t include the depression and anguish of still mourning the death of his brother. And now football was being taken away.
“For him, it was tough. Football was his outlet,” Tad said. “To see that being taken away from him as he is dealing with depression, as he is dealing with the fact he had just lost his brother. That was the toughest part. Watching him having to watch the game on TV. That was the first time I saw pain on his face. And there was nothing he could do about it. That was the first time I saw true pain.”
The brothers grew closer in the following months and became more intentional about being vulnerable with each other.
Prescott showed his true faith and purpose by channeling the bad into inspiration and doing something good with it, just as he had after losing his mother to cancer when he was in college at Mississippi State.
“Most people would have sunk even lower but he just said there has to be a reason for this and what can we make of this,” Tad said. “You got the work with the homeless that came out of it. The work with suicide prevention that came out of it.”
And then came the contract extension in March just as Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had promised in the locker room immediately after the injury.
“That is where faith came [in],” Nathaniel said. “It was going to come out the way God intended. It was devastating what he went through and had taken away from him. But God had a plan we didn’t see. He is a man that I tell him I pray every day that I become. That is my child. He is a helluva man and he is my son.”
That Prescott not only returned healthy for the 2021 season but is playing better than he ever has is no surprise to his brother and father.
Tad said his brother is doing everything he told his mother he would do as a child.
“It’s not better than ever because you haven’t seen the year after this year,” Tad said. “It’s the best it’s been so far. I don’t know how you could have doubted him. All he has ever done is work.”
All Prescott has done is work. All he has done is overcome odds and expectations.
Nathaniel said they learned a long time ago never to doubt his youngest son, who taught himself to swim by just jumping in the pool as a child.
So Sunday is just another game but this season Prescott is looking for something special. “Dak was the kid that was like, Don’t challenge me, don’t tell me what I can’t do,’” Nathaniel said.
“I’m looking for Comeback Player of the Year, As well as MVP. And MVP of the Super Bowl, if God sees it. Why not?”
Why not indeed.
