Paul James sat quietly on the edge of a trainer’s table last fall absorbing the latest blow of his running back career at Rutgers. This one started with a cornerback’s helmet smashing into his knee, but it didn’t really sting until he saw the MRI results. He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath before picking up the phone. He couldn’t let his mother know he had been crying.
The leg had betrayed him before, but not quite to this extent. The MRI confirmed James’ ACL was torn and needed surgery. His second-to-last year of college football was over. It was late September, four games into another promising season for the all-conference back, and James had to start over again. He set about the familiar routine of informing his teammates and family.
“My mom definitely cried,” he said. “She’s the emotional one. It took them more time to get used to it than it took me.”
Seven months later, James is sitting on a park bench outside the Rutgers locker room. It’s lunch time, and he’s already been through team meetings, a session in the weight room and one round of rehab. He’ll be back later in the afternoon for a few more hours of work on the treadmill and drills designed to strengthen the network of muscles around his knee.
His sunny disposition matches the unseasonably warm spring day in northern New Jersey. He laughs his way through a series of questions about the most recent addition to his string of bad luck. There’s nothing to be gained by getting angry about it, he reasons. Rutgers coach Kyle Flood says James has had the same outlook since the day after it happened.
“He’s got a great attitude,” Flood said. “He really does, and I think that helps. I think he has a great support system at home from his mom. I think his mom is a strong woman. I think a lot of his strength comes from that.”
As a single mother with four sons (and one poor daughter), Kristina James is no stranger to helping her boys mend their wounds.
She was a regular at the Kennedy University Hospital emergency room in Washington Township. When she runs through her family’s medical history, she sounds like Marisa Tomei listing car parts form the witness stand in My Cousin Vinny. Her record was four trips in one week -- a bee allergy incident followed by two sets of stiches and a broken ankle stemming from separate ill-conceived leaps on a trampoline, into a pool and off of a washing machine.
“That was typical for us when they were growing up,” she said. “I just went with the flow because they always told me, ‘Mom, come on, this is what boys do.’”
The football injuries for James started with a broken hip in youth football. He recovered and, like the rest of his brothers starred early in his career at Glassboro High School. A few Conference USA schools offered scholarships after he ran for 1,700 yards as a junior, and bigger programs like Syracuse and Penn State started asking questions about him.
He was at the end of a long run in Glassboro’s season opener his senior year when a helmet to the ankle provided his first major setback. The resulting high ankle sprain troubled him throughout the year. The big colleges moved on and most of his scholarship offers dried up. He had to plead for a walk-on spot at Rutgers.
Three years later, he climbed to the top of the Scarlet Knights’ depth chart and was in the midst of a breakout year as the nation’s surprise leading rusher with 493 yards after three games. The following Saturday he broke his fibula against Arkansas and missed the next month. He finished the year with 881 rushing yards despite spraining his knee in November. In the spring, it was a shoulder injury. Then, after seven touchdowns in less than four games last fall, came the ACL tear.
He is Sisyphus in shoulder pads. Each time he gets close to the top of the mountain, the boulder reverses course and takes another bone or tendon with it.
“He’s just snakebitten,” said Greg Maccarone, an assistant who coached all the James brothers at Glassboro. “You just keep thinking things eventually have to work out for him.”
James is down to his last chance to show what he’s capable of at full strength. He said he’s closer to recovery than expected because of the extra hours he spends with trainers. Flood said the first rep in practice this fall will belong to James as long as he’s healthy, but there’s a new crop of competitors he’ll have to stave off while avoiding injuries next season.
Four other running backs, all of whom started games for Rutgers last season, are back in 2015. All of them proved worthy of a chance to compete for carries in James’ absence. And all of them have far less rust than the redshirt senior will have to shake off in August. James is looking forward to the competition in training camp, but every once in a while, he can’t help but think about what type of questions he might be answering about himself without the injury.
“It slips into my mind here and there,” James said. “If I didn’t get hurt, what could have happened? Where could we have gone with the season?”
He chokes down those bilious thoughts as quickly as he can, because he says they’ll do him no good.
“I guess maybe my mom showed me that,” he said. “She really kind of prepped me to always be positive.”
Kristina James tells a story -- she told then-head coach Greg Schiano the same one when she was trying to convince Rutgers to give her son a shot on a recruiting visit -- about how she started to toughen her son.
When the boys were young, she used to shoo them off to a park across the street from their house so she could clean on her day off from work. Paul was 5 or 6 and the mama’s boy of the family. The brothers would play football, and Paul would come running home in tears after each big tackle. One day she got tired of the interruptions and told him if he wanted to keep playing football, he had two options.
“You can run so fast that none of the other boys can catch you,” she told him. “Or you have to learn how to take a hit and get back up without crying about it.”
Schiano loved it, and so far at Rutgers, James has done a lot of both.