Last month, Russell Wilson's finger got fucked up. Today, he's been cleared to return to play. An injury that was expected to keep a player out for four to eight weeks kept him out for five weeks. That's good! Wilson is a cool player, and I'm glad he's healthy and back, but this is not Lazarus rising from the dead. Unfortunately Wilson does not know how to do seemingly anything without being a big old cheeseball about it.
We should have known something was brewing when Wilson broke out the rhyming dictionary last week:
Pingy in your fingy? Record's gonna be stinky. Bone bruise? Time to lose. Hand feeling fine? Might go 8-9.
That would have been ignorable, if today's news that Wilson is fully cleared had not been accompanied by the quarterback tweeting out a Succession-themed video of his diagnosis and rehab. Relax, man. It's a finger. Alex Smith was never this dramatic, and his leg looked like the Capitol Records Building.
I sort of get it. For most people, who have loved ones and hobbies, the Seahawks being mediocre is not something to spend much time thinking about, whether Wilson is healthy or if Geno Smith is filling in. But this is Wilson's life, and given his remarkably durable career, being on the shelf for any length of time probably ate him alive. He's proud of his recovery, and Seahawks fans, who think they're on the team, are proud of him too. They eat this shit up.
But then there's a statement like this from Dr. Steven Shin, director of hand surgery at Cedars-Sinai, where Wilson underwent his surgery. The last thing Dr. Steve's patient needs is his hustlegrind mindset validated!
I'm not sure I was aware that there were doctors who evaluate their patients using superlatives. (I also wonder what the many, many other athletes who have gone under Shin's knife, Drew Brees and Evan Longoria among them, think about him basically calling them slackers by comparison.) There you have it from the good doctor: Nobody has ever been this injured, folks—big strong quarterbacks, they come up to me with tears in their eyes, they tell me Oh, Dr. Shin, I've never seen anybody do their rehab exercises like Russell Wilson, and—you know—some people think Russell Wilson could be a better football player than he was before—and he was pretty good before—so we'll be looking into that, very strongly.
I am asking for just one piece of news regarding Russell Wilson, over what I hope is his long and injury-free career, that doesn't make me roll my eyes.
