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- Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott suffered a season-ending ankle injury in Week 5 of last year.
- Prescott was seen grabbing his ankle and hitting it against the ground after the injury.
- He said he tried to reset so he could get up and walk off the field.
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Dak Prescott suffered a season-ending ankle injury last season but wasn't afraid to try and pop it back into place so he could get up.
The Dallas Cowboys quarterback said he tried to "reset" his ankle himself after falling on it awkwardly during a Week-5 game against the New York Giants. The comments came during an interview on ESPN's "Up Close with Sage Steele."
-Sage Steele (@sagesteele) June 30, 2021
Prescott was seen grabbing his ankle and hitting it against the ground after the injury to get up off the field under his own power.
"I was trying to get off the field, and I knew it wasn't straight,'' Prescott said. "So I wanted to do that so I could get up, and when I couldn't, that's when I just waved and said 'I can't do this myself.' They came over, they put it back in place, and that was a relief, right?
"You can imagine the pain it was in, and then it gets reset. I just remember over and over just saying, 'Thank God.'"
For Prescott, the impulse to try to fix his ankle stemmed from a message his late mother gave him as a child.
"My mom always told me 'get off the field no matter how bad you're hurt,' and at that moment, I just wanted to get off the field so bad, and I couldn't," Prescott said. "I thought it was just rolled, and as I grabbed it and did that, I was just like 'I need to get off the field,' so I was trying to set it back myself. I was trying to hit it into the ground."
Doctors diagnosed Prescott with a compound fracture and dislocation to his right ankle. He had to undergo season-ending surgery to repair the initial damage in October and a second surgery to ensure it was structurally sound in December, according to Tom Pelissero of NFL Network.
"The only time I can say that I was like, man, was when I had to get a second surgery," Prescott said. "And that was just because I had gotten my foot back on the ground for about a week or so, and I didn't necessarily know after my leg was facing another way how it was supposed to feel, but it didn't feel great the first couple of days walking."
The injury didn't stop the Cowboys from signing Prescott to a four-year, $160 million contract in March, as he is slated to be one of the NFL's highest-paid players in 2021.
Prescott is expected to have made a full recovery and participate in the Cowboys training camp when it opens on July 21.