As football fans continue to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on the men who are playing the game right now (especially when it’s time to draft those fantasy teams), it’s very easy to forget about once-familiar names who have slipped from view.

One of those names is Reggie Williams, a former Bengals linebacker who played in two Super Bowls and whose name was floated for the Commissioner’s position a couple of years ago.

Williams recently underwent a knee replacement, due undoubtedly to the damage to the joint that was done during his playing career. 

According to the New York Times, Williams had a frightening post-surgical complication — blood was squirting freely out of his knee, four or five inches high.

“A fountain!” Williams said.

It happened 10 days ago, on May 2.  “I can’t believe I am going to go out like this,” Williams thought to himself at the time.  “You’re waiting for the cavalry to come through the door.”

Doctors and nurses got the “arterial psuedoaneurysm” under control, but once the leg heals he’ll need another new right knee.  It will be his third one in all; the first one had to be changed out due to a lingering bone infection.

Through it all, Williams says that having the ability to play football was worth the trouble he’s facing now. 

But the players who currently are in the game need to consider Williams’ situation in deciding when it’s time to walk away.  Plenty of the men who have the physical gifts to play the game at its highest level don’t love it as much as others like Williams, and thus might prefer to get out before they find themselves mired in years of poking and prodding and bleeding and cutting and limping and pain.