The medical self-described miracle that helped save Broncos safety P.J. Locke’s career didn’t exist a few years ago.
Even three states away, at the Cedars-Sanai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Dr. Neel Anand knows Locke and his case. He knows Locke’s surgeon, Dr. Chad Prusmack, who has long served as a neurological consultant for the Denver Broncos. The spinal community is plenty small across the country. And Anand knows Locke, who came into Prusmack’s office Jan. 13 for an MRI after a season of quiet pain, “absolutely needed” spinal-fusion surgery.
When Locke suddenly dropped a YouTube video at the start of July that tracked his last few months rehabbing from that spinal surgery, his own channel expressed some doubt at his potential return. There were “no guarantees that PJ would return to play football ever again,” the video’s description reads. And the term “spinal fusion” naturally sounds a blaring alarm at any athlete’s chances of recapturing full previous mobility.
Take it from the Detroit Lions’ Levi Onwuzurike, who laid out his return from a spinal-fusion procedure in a first-person essay a couple of years ago.
“There are not a lot of guys who get this surgery and are able to come back to football,” Onwuzurike wrote. “I had coaches tell me they had friends get this exact surgery and not be able to return to the game.”
As Denver’s training camp has kicked off this week, though, Locke was back and backpedaling through team periods without any sign of a slip. Roughly six months since Prusmack had repaired his spine. That’s in large part a credit to how Locke’s attacked rehab, Anand affirmed. He’s a grinder who’s grown from an undrafted free agent with barren pockets to a crucial part of Denver’s secondary.
But Locke’s recovery is also the result of a medical advancement that Anand wants to show the public: That spinal fusion does not require as brutal a rehabilitation as previously thought.
“He’s really done very well during that process, and … it’s a taboo that’s out there that you can’t come back from spinal fusion,” said Anand, the director of the Spine Center at Cedars-Sinai. “I disagree.”
Across the last 20 years, surgeons have become more conscious of how to conserve spinal angulation and natural motion, as California neurosurgeon Dr. Jason Liauw said. Today, Anand explained, all spinal surgery is done with minimal invasiveness. Previously, surgeons would have to strip a patient’s surrounding muscles to correct any herniation or fracture in the spine.
That would’ve been a “game-changer” for Locke, Anand said. Instead, in modern times, the Broncos safety was able to begin sequential rehab just a few weeks after the procedure.
“Elite athletes are completely different beasts than compared to the regular, the normal person getting a spinal fusion,” Liauw said. “Athletes have a lot of muscular support and ligamentous support … a lot of times, they can actually recover because they have so much, like, supportive structure around their spine.”
Locke is now “healthy,” as Broncos head coach Sean Payton put it simply this week. And after evolving from a practice-squad dangler to special-teams safety to an irreplaceable piece of Denver’s secondary in 2024, the Broncos need Locke to contribute again this season. Free-agent signee Talanoa Hufanga, who will likely take Locke’s starting spot, has played a total of 17 games the past two seasons and is injury-prone by sheer definition. And there’s little proven depth in the room behind Locke.
The only real concern in recovery, Liauw said, was to keep a strong core to not put as much stress on individual levels of the spine. But the risk of injury, Anand said, won’t be any different for Locke than it is for anyone else in a Broncos uniform.
“Is this unexpected?” Anand said of Locke’s recovery. “No, no, no … I expect him to play.
“And I expect him to do well.”
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