Grant Hill reveals staph infection prolonged his comeback to the NBA's Orlando Magic

Jet, Dec 6, 2004

After successfully beginning the new NBA season, Grant Hill says he's finally comfortable discussing his setbacks and injuries.

The untold story of Hill's four ankle operations is the staph infection that came after his last surgery. It hospitalized him for a week and forced him to require intravenous antibiotics for six months. Now a year and a half later, Hill says it was a scary unplanned detour on his road to recovery.

"I didn't like to talk about it, and the team kept quiet about it," said Hill, whose ankle problems plagued his career with the Magic. But the ankle was only part of the problem after the infection set in.

Staph infections can kill, and Hill's condition was severe enough that it took six months of treatment with the strongest antibiotics available to rid his body of the bacteria.

"As time goes by, I'm more comfortable talking about it," Hill told the Associated Press. "But I look at it as a blessing because it forced me to slow down and really say 'Let's get this thing right.'"

Five days after Hill underwent a major surgical procedure in March 2003 (JET, April 7, 2003), in which doctors re-fractured his ankle and realigned it with his leg bone, he developed a 104.5-degree fever and convulsions.

His wife, R&B singer Tamia, rushed him to the hospital.

"When we both saw the reaction of the people at the hospital, we knew there was something wrong," Hill said.

Doctors removed the splint around his ankle and discovered the incision was infected.

Luckily; the infection hadn't spread to the bone.

Hill's slow recuperation, including getting hooked up to an IV machine three times a day, erased any ideas he had about returning during the 2003-04 season.

He now believes the extra downtime prevented him from attempting the same type of early comeback that derailed his recovery from three previous surgeries to repair the ankle he first injured late in the 1999-00 season.

"I've never been close to dying, and I don't know if I was close, but it was as close as I've ever been," Hill said. "It scared me, and I think it was a good thing in the sense that it forced me to slow down."

Hill now says he has absolutely no pain in his ankle-or in his incision-scarred left arm-as he makes a comeback that many thought would never happen.

Hill, whose career includes an Olympic gold medal and six All-Star appearances in his early years with Detroit, became a free agent in 2000 and went to the Magic in a sign-and-trade deal that netted him a $93 million contract.

He played only four games his first season in Orlando, 14 in 2000-01 and 27 the next year, each season ending with surgeries that have left him with a total of four 3-inch screws in his ankle.

Each time he tried to come back too soon, but last season was the exception in large part because of his staph infection.