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Mon, Oct 5th 2009, 12:06
Summer of sweat gives Jermaine O’Neal new lease on life
The pain is gone.
Also vanished is the portable ice machine. It was a device Jermaine O’Neal carried with him everywhere the past three years for times when his long-troublesome knees would swell up to the size of a grapefruit.
And stashed away, too, is the fiberglass knee brace, one that has been as much a part of his work attire as the jerseys, shorts and headbands.
O’Neal, the Miami Heat’s starting center, survived the first week of training camp without any of that baggage that used to weigh him down.
Having emerged from an offseason in which O’Neal sought to regain all of the elements that made him one of the most dominant post players in the league, the 14-year veteran would much rather measure his progress by those things he no longer requires.
The pain. That portable ice machine. Those pesky and restrictive braces.
“I pray to God to help me deliver that message of what I took my body through this summer to finally get right,” O’Neal said of what he considers the Armageddon offseason of his career. “It’s all or nothing. If I took myself through the things I did this summer and I break down this season, then I have a beautiful 9-year-old daughter, a wonderful 3-year-old son and a great wife I will happily go be with if I can’t do it.”
That’s the level of peace O’Neal has reached.
He trusts the grueling preparation he has pushed himself through over a 15-week stretch designed to bring his body back from basketball death.
He believes he has turned back the clock on his career to 2006, a time when he was an All-Star caliber player in his prime with the Indiana Pacers, a time before he was introduced to the deteriorating knee injuries that would derail his play for much of the next three seasons.
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