As May began, Jayson Tatum — one of the most talented superstars in all of basketball — had only one focus: winning a second consecutive NBA title with the Boston Celtics.
By the month’s end, the 27-year-old had temporarily moved back in with his mother.
This wasn’t how he had envisioned his spring unfolding. But when Tatum went to move May 12 in a second-round series in New York and his right foot did not, his Achilles tendon and his team’s championship expectations ruptured in the same moment.
Tatum underwent surgery the next day, and for nine days afterward, he still had not accepted what had happened to him as he processed the whiplash of his situation, he said. His recovery plan forbade him from climbing stairs for 10 weeks. That posed a problem because his home did not have a first-floor bedroom.
His mother’s home, however, did.
One day after he’d moved in, over lunch in her kitchen, Tatum confided that the initial shock from the injury, one that can often cost an athlete an entire season, had not worn off.
“I might be done with basketball,” Tatum recalled telling his mother, in his first extensive comments to NBC News on Tuesday about the injury.
Tatum said his mother listened to him describe his doubts about returning to a game he had once dominated.
“My mom empathized with me, what I was going through, and she understood how I felt was real. But, you know, she was always upbeat and uplifting, ” he said.
“It was almost like I felt betrayed,” Tatum said of the injury. “I was one of those guys that I never wanted to sit out. I always wanted to play the most minutes, you know. Since I’ve been drafted, I was easily best five in minutes played and games played, and you know, I feel like I took care of my body. I didn’t cheat the game. When it was time to rest, I rested. When it was time to work out or lift or get treatment or whatever it was, I felt like I always stayed on best of my routine.
“So for this to happen, it was just like, man, this was not supposed to happen to me. And for a while, I was kind of like — it may sound dramatic, but I remember telling my mom, like ‘Mom, I might be done. I don’t know if I’ll be able to overcome this or if I’m up for this challenge.’ You know, I just felt defeated. And there was a time I was like, I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.”
Slowly, in the 19 weeks since the injury, Tatum has rediscovered the spark that led him to fall in love with basketball as a child in St. Louis.
The player who once measured progress by enormous feats — highlight dunks, long winning streaks, deep playoff runs — today is preoccupied by what he calls stacking “good days” together. One of the most challenging adjustments he has navigated, he said, was “the mental aspects of being so independent.” When strangers stopped him this summer to ask about his progress, he answered, “day by day.”
“Which might sound like you’re blowing them off, but it’s the reality,” Tatum said. “Like, that’s how I’ve approached this process, is like, man, the most important thing is making a full recovery. I’m not saying that I’m not playing this season.
“I’m not taking that off the table, because, you know, for me as a competitor, every day I go into the weight room and do rehab, I’m working towards something, obviously, coming back 100%, whenever that is.”
With small milestones, he has snatched back pieces of the game, and his passion for it. Two weeks after his surgery, the stitches were removed and his right foot was placed in a protective boot that he wore for the next 10 weeks. One month after his surgery, he began weight-bearing movements for the first time, a painful process he said was helped by Journavx, a non-opioid pain medication. (Tatum is also a partner with the drug’s maker.)
Brad Stevens, the Celtics’ best basketball executive, said in June that the team’s best priority was ensuring that Tatum would not return until he was “fully healthy.”
Tatum was one of three high-profile NBA stars who suffered an Achilles tear during the most recent playoffs, including point guard Damian Lillard, while with the Milwaukee Bucks, and Indiana Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton, in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in June that he did not see a link between the increase in injuries and the postseason’s compressed schedule, with games played often every other day. Sports medicine specialists told NBC News in June that basketball, because of its explosive movements that aggressively “load” the tendon, could increase the risk of such injuries.
Recovery from an Achilles’ tendon injury typically takes between nine months and a year, though faster cases are known among athletes. Tatum is keenly aware that such an injury kept Kobe Bryant, the late Lakers superstar after whom Tatum modeled his playing style, off the court for only 240 days in 2013. But “everyone’s body reacts differently,” Tatum said.
“As cliché as it sounds, what has helped me mentally is just like, man … I want to feel better than I did yesterday? I want to feel stronger than I did yesterday. I want to feel more confident than I did yesterday. So not necessarily like, ‘Man, in six months, you know, I’m gonna be back playing.’ For me, that’s just too far to look ahead. It’s just like tomorrow, how can I feel better than I did today?”
Professional athletes hold some of the country’s most public jobs, and build their lives around the routine of training, recovery and performing. Literally overnight May 12, Tatum had lost all of those usual bearings. When the Celtics played a game two days later, Tatum felt “left behind” watching from the couch in his New York hotel as the basketball world moved on without him.
It has been difficult mentally, he said, going from performing in front of sold-out arenas to living life largely out of the public view, feeling as though basketball was “snatched away from you, for whatever reason.”
Going from being extremely independent to needing help with every small part of his life he had once taken for granted had become as taxing mentally as his physical recovery, he said. Taking a shower and getting dressed could take as long as 50 minutes, and leave him scared that he might fall in a wet shower.
“It’s been extremely emotional, I’ve never cried as much at random moments in my life,” Tatum said. “… I would be so tired after taking a shower in the morning and at night, like it felt like a workout. And there were just many days I was sitting there and like, man, I cannot believe, you know, this is my life. So just things like that, that people don’t know that haven’t been that journey or that process, that it’s some long, dark days for sure.”
When the Celtics begin practice in one week without Tatum, it will be a “tough pill to swallow,” he said. But he is hopeful his first basketball workout Monday will allow him to add more in the coming weeks, and build back the routine he had lost in an instant in May.
“Something I’ve really been looking forward to is just like to feel like myself again and to get on court,” Tatum said. “And, you know, play the game that I love.”
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