After 2 years, nerve damage, being told to end his career Ben Burr-Kirven rejoins Seahawks
To the other 80 or so players, this was yet another stretching session. More warm-up lines. Another day of training camp.
For Ben Burr-Kirven, this routine round of calisthenics and stretching was the most important moment of his football life.
“Surreal,” he said.
The start of practice Thursday at the Seahawks’ second day of training camp at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center was the first time Burr-Kirven had been on a field to practice in two years.
He was wearing a new number, 48 instead of his previous 55. And he has a new, supreme appreciation for his job.
Thursday, he signed back with Seattle, the team that drafted the former University of Washington middle linebacker four years ago.
It was his first time back with any team, first time back in football, since doctors told him he’d never play the sport again.
His teammates knew this wasn’t just another training-camp practice for him.
“It was dope,” Pro Bowl safety and captain Quandre Diggs said. “Just knowing the road he’s been through the last two years and being able to stay in touch with him over all this time, it’s been cool. I’m excited for him.”
Diggs pointed to younger Seahawks trying to make this year’s roster on special teams. They don’t know and have never played with Burr-Kirven. Diggs told them during the practice: “This guy is a menace on special teams.”
“So some of these younger guys and younger linebackers that think ‘Oh I’ve arrived,’ Diggs said after practice, “well, BBK is back.
“So be alert for him going out there and taking people’s reps.”
Burr-Kirven’s injuries
In a span of about 12 months ending last summer, Burr-Kirven had three surgeries. The first was to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his knee he got Aug. 21, 2021.
The third was one never done before on a professional athlete, a nerve transfer to restore feeling in his foot and leg.
Two seasons into his NFL career as a special-teams mainstay and backup to Bobby Wagner at middle linebacker, the Seahawks’ fifth-round pick in the 2019 draft was running down the field on the opening kickoff of a preseason game two summers ago against the Denver Broncos. As the kick bounded into the Lumen Field end zone for a touchback, Burr-Kirven got shoved. The push caused him to lose his balance and step too far across his left leg. That pushed his entire knee “out the back door,” as he now describes it, through the central, back portion of his left leg.
His football life was shattered on a throwaway play of an exhibition game.
Torn ACLs are bad enough. They usually take a full year of seemingly endless rehabilitation. ACL tears cast doubt over whether the leg — and player, or everyday person — will ever walk or run the same way again.
Burr-Kirven had that, plus serious nerve damage in his leg. The nerve damage was so extensive multiple doctors told him to begin his life after football.
He was 24 years old.
“That’s what I was trying to really suss out: ‘Am I done?’ he said Thursday.
The nerve damage caused in Burr-Kirven what’s known as drop foot. That’s a condition in which one can’t lift the toes or front of the foot.
The most well-known instance in football of drop foot from a torn ACL was Jaylon Smith, a standout middle linebacker at Notre Dame. He was seriously injured in Jan. 1, 2016, playing in the Fiesta Bowl. The Dallas Cowboys drafted Smith during his year-long recovery. Smith played in 16 games for Dallas his rookie season of 2017. He played five more seasons, the last one with the New York Giants. He is currently an unsigned free agent.
Burr-Kirven’s damage was roughly twice as bad as Smith’s. It took him twice as long to return to where he was Thursday.
After he couldn’t lift his foot in 2021 and into the summer of 2022, Burr-Kirven asked every doctor he and friends knew about his nerve damage. He searched the internet.
He finally found the man he believed could help him continue his dream — through an Instagram story.
Burr-Kirven found online a patient had documented his recovery from nerve damage in his leg with videos on Instagram.
The patient had seen Dr. Mitch Seruya. He is an expert in peripheral nerve surgery at the Los Angeles Nerve Institute. He practices at the city’s renowned Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Seruya told Burr-Kirven of what the linebacker Thursday termed “kind of an experimental nerve surgery,” a nerve-transfer replacement procedure. Seruya consulted with the Seahawks’ athletic training and medical staff.
Then he operated on Burr-Kirven’s essentially lifeless left leg last summer. The surgery gave the leg — and, as Thursday proved, Burr-Kirven — new life.
Burr-Kirven said it was the first such surgery anyone knows to have been done on a professional athlete. Yet the player the Seahawks call BBK trusted Seruya because the specialist had performed the procedure on high-school athletes plus on non-athletes seeking to walk normally again.
“The further we got into it, the more I started to believe it was possible,” Burr-Kirven said. “Then, (it was) getting the right people around me who had the same belief.”
“He ended being an incredible surgeon,” Burr-Kirven said. “Very, very lucky we found him.”
BBK’s long road back
His journey these last two years has been anything but a straight line.
There were days, many, along his long road that weren’t good. Burr-Kirven thought he’d never make it back — and that he should quit trying.
“There were some dark days,” he said.
Particularly in the fall and winter of 2021. Those are the grayest of Seattle times for healthy people, let alone those who have been told their careers are over before they are 25.
“No,” his trainers, family and friends told him, multiple times on those painful days the last two years, “this is good. We are still fine.”
One of those people was CJ Neumann.
From pretty much the first day of his rehabilitation from ACL surgery while still trying to figure out the nerve damage in 2021, the assistant athletic trainer for the Seahawks told Burr-Kirven: “Look, I will take this as far as you want this to go.”
“I can’t thank him enough,” Burr-Kirven said Thursday.
In the spring into summer last year, up to 11 months following his injuries, Burr-Kirven and Neumann thought he was on his way back. Burr-Kirven and Neumann pushed, hard, to have the linebacker ready for the start of the Seahawks’ 2022 training camp.
“And then, just...the knee just wasn’t ready,” Burr-Kirven said.
“That kind of shut us down.”
He failed the pre-camp physical examination last summer. The Seahawks, who had carried him on their injured reserve list for the 2021 season, played him on the reserve/physically-unable-to-perform list for 2022.
Then, with his four-year rookie contract expired, Seattle released him this March.
But he wasn’t quitting.
“I just love football, man. I’ve been playing football since I was 10 years old,” he said. “You know, you never want it to stop.
“To have it taken away, so early it seemed like — and for a while I was like, ‘I’m not going to be able to do this again’ — you miss it. All of a sudden I saw what it was like when football ends, kind of, for two years not being able to suit up.
“The hunger just never went away. As long as I was waking up wanting to still do this, it was easy to make the decision to keep coming up and showing up.”
When the Seahawks released him four months ago, still before he had full functioning in his left foot again from the nerve transfer, Burr-Kirven told his coaches and personnel staffers: “Look, I’m going to keep working. And we’re going to give you a call when we are ready.
“If you want to bring me in then, great. If you don’t, no hard feelings.”
He wasn’t in the team facility anymore. But he kept his Seahawks contacts, the people that believed in him.
He kept Neumann.
“I never stopped,” Burr-Kirven said.
Burr-Kirven had inspirations
Burr-Kirven crisscrossed the country like Rand McNally.
“We talked to, I mean, people from all over the country. Everyone we could think of,” he said. “People from neurologists, orthos (orthopedic surgeons), everything. We just collected opinions.
“There were enough people that it was like, this was possible.
“And there were examples. Jaylon Smith was the obvious one. But Alex Smith (formerly of the 49ers, Chiefs and Washington in the NFL), obviously playing quarterback, he had a horrific injury with nerve damage, and he came back and played.”
Burr-Kirven also cited Sean Spence, a linebacker for the Steelers, Titans and Colts from 2014 and ‘17. Spence returned to play from tearing his ACL, LCL and dislocating his kneecap in a 2012 preseason game for Pittsburgh. Those injuries damaged nerves that help control movement in his lower leg. His recovery, like Burr-Kirven’s, took two years.
Maxx Williams, a tight end for the Arizona Cardinals, tore his ACL and had nerve damage that led to drop foot in a game week 5 of the 2021 season. He returned to play for Arizona in week 10 of the 2022 season. He wore a special brace that essentially lifted his foot for him.
Burr-Kirven has talked to Williams often during his own recovery.
“It was like, ‘All right, there are people who are doing this,’” Burr-Kirven said.
“So if they can do it, why not me?”
But Spence, the Smiths and Williams didn’t have the surgery Burr-Kirven did. No other pro player has.
After his rare nerve surgery in Los Angeles last summer, Burr-Kirven said it was “10 or 11 months,” well into this spring, before he starting getting the results he was hoping for: full feeling and use in his foot.
In that time, he headed to Chicago. That’s where Nick Bellore sent him.
The Seahawks’ 34-year-old linebacker and special-teams ace lined up his now-former teammate with Bellore’s personal trainer in Chicago, Bobby DeThomasis. For the last eight months leading to his moment of re-signing with Seattle on Thursday, DeThomasis, a master strength coach and owner of Performance Training Systems in Illinois, worked more wonders for Burr-Kirven.
Usually when players come to the team’s facility to try out to possibly sign with the Seahawks, a couple coaches and maybe a scout who found him come to watch the workout.
Wednesday, while most others’ attention was on the first day of training camp outside, Seahawks players, coaches and staffers from every floor of the team’s three-story facility came downstairs to the indoor practice field. They lined up on the field’s edge to watch Burr-Kirven’s tryout to prove he was ready for his return to the team.
He did.
He absolutely is.
“It’s incredible,” Burr-Kirven said. “There were definitely nights where I was thinking, ‘Will I ever get to do this again?’
“Even when I came in the building (for the tryout to sign) Wednesday), that felt like a win. But now, I’ve got to go practice today. That will be the first challenge. Then it will be stacking days, and trying to get back to where I was before I got hurt.”
“It can kind of get a little endless. It will be two years next month. It was taking it one day at a time, and finding the right people who were willing to work with me, willing to do this day in and day out. ...
“I’m just glad that we stuck with it. And we are here now.”
This story was originally published July 27, 2023 at 6:20 PM.
