INDIANAPOLIS — There have been moments when the darkness seemed overwhelming, when the smallest slivers of hope felt impossible to find, when even Shaquille Leonard himself started to doubt whether he’d ever play like Shaquille Leonard again.
He couldn’t do a calf raise for a year.
He’s still not doing much running.
Advertisement
After losses last season, which he split between “cheerleading and coaching,” he’d sit and steam in the locker room, awash not only in guilt but also embarrassment. He couldn’t play, couldn’t help save a sinking season, and it wrecked him.
As for the brief stretch he did see the field — just 74 snaps in October and November — he wasn’t right, wasn’t even close to his old self. “In practice, I look slow,” Leonard acknowledged. “In a game, I look slow.”
At his lowest point, he didn’t even want to be around the team.
“There’s been so many times where I’m thinking, ‘Will I ever be back to 53?'” the Colts linebacker said Wednesday, looking back on a lost season and the two back surgeries that have left him at a pivotal point in his career. “Will I ever be back to ‘The Maniac’?”
At this juncture, it seems, no one can definitively know.
Leonard believes he will, but with the stops and starts of the past year fresh in his mind, he still sounds cautious five months after undergoing a second operation to alleviate the pain in his left leg that’s lingered for the better part of four seasons. There have been times over the 12 months, which Leonard described as “the hardest of my life,” when he’s had to flip on the film from his first few seasons in the league just for a reminder of how good he’d been, a private reassurance of what was possible when he was healthy.
The player who oozed confidence and self-belief, who thrived on the doubts he not only collected but also came to relish, had been rattled to his core. Football was at the essence of who he was — it was his heartbeat, his outlet, his calling — and without it, he felt lost and empty and probably even a little scared.
He’s spent the better part of two years looking for the answer.
The 27-year-old four-time All-Pro was candid Wednesday, offering a window into some of the most trying moments of his five-year career, plus the foggy future that hovers like a dark cloud around him. He’s on his way back, he vowed, working smartly, slowly, to return to the dynamic, game-changing force he built his name on.
Advertisement
“I see the things where they say I won’t be back to myself,” Leonard said. “You know, (that) I sat out for nothing, stuff like that. So now it’s back to day one, of proving who I am. I don’t think I shy away from it, I don’t think I throw it on the back burner, I continue to use it as a reason why I wake up at 4:30 in the morning is to prove everybody wrong. For myself, I know who I am.”
This is who Shaq Leonard was for the first four years of his career: 16 forced fumbles, seven fumble recoveries, 11 interceptions and 15 sacks. He piled up 23 takeaways in the first 57 games, a ridiculous rate of one every 2.4 starts. He was flat-out one of the best players in football.
“The takeaway king,” teammate DeForest Buckner came to call him.
“Defensive player of the year all day,” T.Y. Hilton once said.
But Leonard wasn’t right during the 2021 season, hampered by an ankle that required around-the-clock rehab, and after the first day of offseason workouts the next spring, Leonard said he couldn’t feel a thing in his left leg. He had back surgery in June after the revelation that a nerve could be the root of the pain in his ankle and calf.
The hope was he’d be right at some point during the 2022 season.
That never happened.
During Leonard’s first game back, a Week 4 loss to Tennessee, he collided with teammate Zaire Franklin on a play, fracturing his nose and leaving him concussed. After surgery, he missed three more starts before returning on Halloween, but was hardly himself in two losses — save one vintage Leonard interception. But that was one of the reasons, former head coach Frank Reich acknowledged last year, the team held Leonard back for so long before finally letting him play: They could tell he wasn’t moving like his old self.
He didn’t have the same explosion. He was, simply put, slower.
In early November, after Jeff Saturday was named the team’s interim coach, he noticed Leonard laboring during his first practice. Saturday had dealt with a nerve injury in his hand during his own career and knew the effects and the frustrations that came with it.
Advertisement
“Bro, shut it down,” Saturday told him. “I want you to get it checked out.”
Leonard did. A second surgery followed. His season was over.
So much has changed since: Shane Steichen’s been hired as head coach, the offensive coaching staff has been overhauled, and the Colts are (most likely) a week away from drafting their quarterback of the future. Leonard’s status remains one of the biggest questions heading into next season.
GO DEEPER
Colts NFL Draft 2023 guide: Picks, predictions and key needs
For starters, when will he be back on the field? And secondly, when he is, will he be the same player again?
There’s no rush. The Colts will lean on patience, as they have in the past in situations like this, and all Leonard’s missing at this point are install meetings and offseason conditioning work. He hates missing anything, no doubt, but with the investment the team’s made in him — that five-year, $99 million contract he signed in 2021 — the Colts are willing to do what it takes to get him right again. And hopefully, for good.
But Leonard dropped a few sobering nuggets Wednesday, revealing that he’s not exactly all that close to returning to on-field work.
“I’m not gonna say I’m all the way clear because I’m not doing too much running right now,” he said.
Still, there was some reason for optimism.
“Feeling a whole lot better than I did at any point of the year last year,” he noted. “Moving around a whole lot better … coming in, feeling way more confident, way more power, way more explosive (than) even when I walked out (of the building in January).”
Words aren’t what matters at this point. The only way Leonard can silence the doubts about his future — the doubts he keeps hearing, saving for the fuel he’s always embraced — is to return to the field and play like he once did, the game-wrecking force in the middle of the defense who can swing any game in an instant.
Will he look like 53 again?
Will he ever be “The Maniac” again?
Those are the questions everyone keeps asking, and they’re the answers no one has, not even Leonard himself.
(Top photo: Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
