How Tyreek Hills Wife Inspired His Gritty Comeback
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It didn’t look good.
With three minutes left in the first quarter of the Miami Dolphins-Tennessee Titans game last week, Dolphins superstar Tyreek Hill writhed in pain. He’d been tackled out of bounds, and the Miami crowd grew quiet when they saw the receiver go down, that awful moment when it seems as if the promise of an entire season could become nothing but unrealized potential. One woman held her hands in prayer.
He held his ankle. He left the game. Trainers poked and prodded.
“Man,” Hill thought. “My ankle is gone.”
As I said—it didn’t look good.
What happened next is the type of story that sounds too good to be true, like it’s pulled straight from the pages a Dan Jenkins novel. At halftime, Hill headed to the locker room to receive treatment. “I sat for a while, and it got stiff,” Hill said later. “I was going through a lot of pain.” Per NFL rules, players can communicate with family members about injuries during games, so Hill pulled out his phone and texted his wife, Keeta Vaccaro.
“This s--- hurt,” he wrote.
And then, he wrote a message that was a little more light-hearted. “I need an ankle massage tonight.”
Hill waited for a reply, and then there it was—not a message of support or of love but a good old-fashioned kick in the butt. “You better get your ass back in that game, dawg,” Vaccaro had written.
“I was like, ‘All right,’” Hill said.
Hill returned to the game in the third quarter. “I just made up my mind that it's going to hurt,” Hill said. “It's going to suck. Tonight and tomorrow morning…It was like, ‘No, f--- this. I've got to get out there and bring some energy and be that spark.’”
He was hobbled, but he kept playing, nearly willing the team to victory. "I know it would take a lot to keep him out," head coach Mike McDaniel said of Hill, who finished the game with 61 receiving yards.
Little did he know.
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