Bridgewater's Surgeon In Awe Of Comeback

Dan Cooper knows Teddy Bridgewater's heart like few people do, because Cooper cut open the quarterback's leg on Sept. 8, 2016, when pro football's most stunning comeback began inside a Dallas clinic.

Amputation was no longer a feared possibility, and yet what the surgeon faced that day was something one might see on the set of a sci-fi film.

"It was just a horribly grotesque injury," Cooper said.

The good doctor was talking about the quarterback's left knee, which had exploded without warning nine days earlier while Bridgewater was dropping back to pass, untouched, in a Minnesota Vikings practice.

"It's mangled," Cooper said. "You make the skin incision, and there's nothing there. It's almost like a war wound. Everything is blown."

"This surgery was an absolute gut test, a test of what you're made of, and I've seen it break people down," Cooper said. "I never saw it break Teddy down. ... Most people have no idea the volume of the workload this kid had to put in. He had a toothpick of a leg he had to rebuild."

Bridgewater gave his doctor permission to talk to ESPN.com about the surgeries -- there were two -- that granted him access to a second NFL life. Cooper, the Cowboys' team physician, remembered the first surgery lasting about four and a half hours, and the second one -- eight weeks later to treat stiffness around the knee -- lasting about an hour. Both were performed in the Carrell Clinic in Dallas.

Just being on the football field is enough to make Teddy Bridgewater smile. Elsa/Getty Images

Bridgewater had been referred to the surgeon by former Cowboys coach Bill Parcells, who had become something of a father confessor to the quarterback. Parcells told the doctor that Bridgewater was one of the greatest kids he'd ever met.

Cooper performed a reconstruction of Bridgewater's anterior cruciate ligament. "And then everything on the lateral side of his knee was reconstructed, about five ligaments over there," the surgeon said. "We repaired them, then took one of his own hamstring tendons and transplanted it to the lateral side of his knee."

The experience was incredibly stressful for a doctor fully invested in his patients. And yet over and over, Cooper maintained that his repair work in such cases is effectively complete on day one, and that the athlete is left with overwhelming emotional and physical burdens that he or she has to manage every day for a year or more. In the immediate wake of his injury, Bridgewater said in a statement, "I come from amazing DNA, I watched my mom fight and win against breast cancer. We will, as a team, attack my rehab with the same vigor and energy."

Cooper was on a plane when Bridgewater made his preseason debut for the Jets against Atlanta, so he had a Dallas video staffer tape the game for him. When the surgeon sat down to watch, he was profoundly touched by the images of Bridgewater completing 7 of 8 passes for 85 yards and a touchdown. The Jets won 17-0, and nobody dared tell Cooper that this preseason result was meaningless.

"I've always said Super Bowls for surgeons don't happen in February," he said. "It was an incredibly gratifying thing for me to see a player overcome that. ... That's exactly why I do what I do, to see Teddy play like he did."