INDIANAPOLIS — A chance to win a national championship, a love for Ohio State and a handful of ibuprofen: That's what it took for Malik Hooker to suit up for the Buckeyes in the Fiesta Bowl against Clemson.
The unanimous All-American safety tore the labrum muscle in his hip and suffered sports hernia injuries on both sides of his groin in Ohio State's 30-27 double overtime victory against Michigan on Nov. 26. Hooker picked off a Wilton Speight pass and returned it for a touchdown to put his team's first points on the board that afternoon. It helped punch Ohio State's ticket to the College Football Playoff.
“for me to just automatically say 'I'm not playing because I'm a top-10 pick' or whatever the scenario may be, I feel like it's not fair to Ohio State and the guys that I worked out with.”– Malik Hooker
But the performance left him unable to move much.
“After the game, I couldn't walk really, I was limping. I practiced that week, I was not able to run as well,” Hooker said on Sunday at the NFL Combine. “I kept playing through it, I played the Clemson game with the injury as well.”
In a bowl season where some players skipped out on postseason play so as to not risk injury and wreck their NFL futures, Hooker could have easily found his name among that crowd. But he didn't think twice about it. He just popped some painkillers and suited up.
“I put too much work in with those guys and I would have felt I was letting them down,” Hooker said about his teammates. “We went through the offseason, the grind. I feel like everything I worked for in the offseason and that we worked for as a team would have been thrown away if I didn't go out there and compete with those guys.”
Ohio State lost 31-0 to Clemson to end its 2016 campaign, though Hooker did everything in his power to prevent it. He got on the field early with the physical trainers to loosen his hip up and decided he could go. All he did a few hours later was pick off Heisman Trophy runner-up and Tiger quarterback Deshaun Watson after covering a ridiculous amount of green.
“It definitely hurt,” Hooker said. “As the game went on, it was something I wasn't paying attention to. I was just going out there and competing for my team.”
Hooker added that he got multiple opinions from doctors in the week following the Fiesta Bowl and all came back indicating that he should have surgery. He did on Jan. 16 and says he is "way ahead of schedule" in his rehab.
“My first thought was, 'wow.' I didn't think it was that bad. I played through the Clemson game with it,” Hooker said. “So when you hear tear, like an ACL tear or something like that, guys can't tend to run. My first thought was, 'it was that bad and I was out there playing like that?'”
He played like that all season, his first as a starter on the back end of Ohio State's defense. The same with cornerback Marshon Lattimore, who along with Hooker is considered a top-10 pick in the 2017 NFL Draft.
The injury obviously will prevent Hooker from running the 40-yard dash or working out both at the NFL Combine on Monday or at Ohio State's Pro Day on March 23. The safety said he plans to be at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center that day and wants to be jogging by then.
Hopefully without the aid of ibuprofen. And, knowing in his head he felt he did the right thing — to play through the injury despite knowing he was turning pro and millions of dollars hung in the balance.
“There's just so much you put into a program like that so for me to just automatically say 'I'm not playing because I'm a top-10 pick' or whatever the scenario may be, I feel like it's not fair to Ohio State and the guys that I worked out with,” Hooker said. “I was there in the offseason working hard with them, I was there in the rough part of the program so I feel like it's what I had to do. I owed that to them guys. I definitely don't like sitting out. We're working for a national championship, big game against one of the competitive teams in college football, so I feel like it was a no-brainer that I was playing.”
