Earlier this morning I tweeted y'all the heartbreaking story of Mark Richt's hip injury. It seems that he severely injured himself while trying to impress his wife with how high he could swing on a swing set. While most of us gave up this past-time in second, third, or fourth grade -- there was no greater elementary school playground move than the high swing coupled with the jump off to a stuck landing -- Richt kept it up into his thirties. (Richt claims that the injury happened in his twenties, but I'm siding with the wife here).
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that Richt's injury occurred thusly:
“I was swinging really high on a big heavy swing set with those big heavy chains. Sometimes if you go super high, on the way back you get a little bit of that lag. You’ve got those big S-hooks on top, and you’re swinging, and I swung enough to where the one on the left came out. So it comes out, but I didn’t know. I’m still on the swing. So when I come back down, the chain on [on the right] stayed taut and the other one just goes. I turned sideways and the first thing that hits the ground is my left hip. Just smashed it.
“It was traumatic. I mean, when I hit I was like, ‘I think I broke it.’ I couldn’t hardly breathe. Sometimes with an injury like that you get a full-body sweat and a little nauseous. But the pain kind of went away and I went about my business, until about a year and a half ago.”
Now that the story has gone viral, Richt took to the dry-erase board to draw a diagram of the swing -- alongside his offensive and defensive formations on the dry-erase board -- to better convey exactly how the great playground spill of his thirties occurred.
And it's pretty outstanding to watch.
Thanks to Jonathan Branch for posting the video and the picture on Twitter, and for Twitter follower @ulikabbq for passing this along to us. You can watch the video below. The sound improves as the video lengthens. But Richt's diligence on the swing picture is really quite impressive even minus the sound. Without this drawing it would have been virtually impossible for me to picture what a swingset might have looked like.
As I'm watching this video all I can think is, "Good lord, I've never felt better about a bet in my life. Georgia 15 is such a steal that Richt has given up gameplanning and is drawing swingset injuries."
Meanwhile Auburn has hired a security firm to make sure its players abide by a nightly curfew.
Are we sure that Chizik's players aren't just trying to flee campus?
Anyway, outstanding diagram by Richt.
