ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 24, 1997 TAG: 9703250054
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BEN BEAGLE
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
I hope President Clinton hasn't been crying a lot and trying to be brave during the physical therapy for his knee operation.
I had physical therapy after my rotator-cuff surgery, and I'll be frank and say it almost killed me.
You should have been in that place. One day everybody in there, with the exception of the heart patients riding those big stationary bikes, was moaning. You could tell the heart people felt sorry for the orthopedic people.
"We're having a bad shoulder day," my therapist said as she moved my arm in a circle and I heard all these crickety-crick kind of sounds. A woman was saying her prayers.
Even so, I tell the president that without my therapist I would not be the glowing picture of health that I am today - except that my feet hurt a lot, which is not her fault.
I tell the president also that I had knee surgery after injuring what I was told was my meniscus. Although I had spent some time on the playing fields of Radford, I ruined that part of me while scrubbing the kitchen floor.
The president likewise was not injured as he was tackled in the end zone with the winning touchdown. He missed a bottom step or something. I may be in the minority, but the president looks like tight-end material to me.
You're asking for it, pal
This injury reminds you that if you get elected president of the United States, you don't want to hurt yourself or get sick.
When that happens, people in the news media immediately get their artists to draw diagrams of the body parts in question.
It wasn't so bad in Clinton's case. I guess there's nothing degrading about having the inside of your knee in the papers. Other presidents have had their gastrointestinal tracts ruthlessly diagrammed; as well as their thoracic regions.
Perhaps driven temporarily out of his mind by such behavior, Lyndon Baines Johnson once pulled up his shirt in public to show his gall-bladder scar. Johnson also liked to pick up his beagle dogs by their ears in public.
We should all hope that we never have a president with gum disease.
All of the above aside, I'm truly troubled by the president's comments on his injury.
He said he had been lucky. That in all his years on the planet, he had not been injured before. That's what you call asking for it, pal.
Don't come crying to me
Return with me now to the year 1972. I'm in the back yard with my youngest daughter - showing her how to do a snap roll.
(Every Bobcat who was worth his or her salt knew how to do a snap roll. At one time, Radford was the snap roll capital of the world.)
I don't do it right and get a shoulder separation. I tell the X-ray man that I'm 45 years old and have never broken anything until now. God must have heard that and thought I was bragging.
Not long after they put this very long Phillips screw in my shoulder, I am playing touch football, as a good father should, and fall into a chuck hole. This breaks my ankle and I clump around in a cast for weeks.
To sum this up, Mr. President, since 1972, everything on the left side of my body has been broken and I've got pains in my left thumb you wouldn't believe. Plus a pulverized finger that took five stitches just last September.
So don't go around sounding like you're bragging about having been injury-free all these years.
Put another way, Mr. President, don't come crying to me when you break your ankle on the steps of your local Hardee's some morning.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB