Today, Chicago Bears safety Adrian Wilson came out with a juicy little tidbit about his injury history. Wilson spent the entire 2013 season on injured reserve with the New England Patriots due to an Achilles tendon tear. Or at least that’s what we thought. Then he dropped a big knowledge bomb on us today with this tweet:
I never tore my Achilles…. I had Haglunds Deformity. Do your research please
— Adrian Wilson (@adrian_wilson24) July 22, 2014
Turns out it wasn’t an Achilles injury after all. Not only that, but Wilson is getting pretty sassy about it, telling us to do our research (though he did say please, so that’s nice). So where did the media ever get the idea that Wilson had an Achilles injury? Wait for it…. from Adrian Wilson’s very same Twitter account. Here’s what he wrote back in December of 2013:
Second running session today @Fischer_PT since Achilles surgery. Pretty excited about that
— Adrian Wilson (@adrian_wilson24) December 20, 2013
The Patriots, tight-lipped as usual, never disclosed what Wilson’s injury was. Nobody ever said or wrote anything about Achilles until Wilson said Achilles, and then they were simply following his lead. You’d think that Adrian Wilson would be the most reliable source of information about Adrian Wilson’s injury, but it turns out that’s not the case. I’m not sure exactly what research Wilson expected the media to do in order to get a clearer picture of his injury, since he was the one leading them down that wrong path.
Yeah, this story is sort of funny and good for a quick chuckle. But I also wanted to put it out there to highlight how insanely difficult it can be to get accurate injury information, even when it’s coming straight from the player himself. It’s not like the media was using some vague anonymous source or reading between the lines. This was a case where they took Wilson’s words at face value, and then he has the balls to turn around and blast them for reprinting those words. I mean, if you want to get technical (and I usually do) you could argue that his original Tweet didn’t say specifically that he tore his Achilles. You could also point out that surgery to correct Haglund’s deformity could fall under the general category of, “Achilles surgery.” But come on, that’s too much hair-splitting, even for me. His original tweet could really only be interpreted one way, and that’s the way that everyone read it. I’d love to hear Wilson explain how we should’ve done our research, and why, during that research, we should’ve ignored his own words.
