Colts RB Vick Ballard: 'Sometimes, it feels like people just forgot about me'

The first time football was taken from him, Vick Ballard felt his knee give on the second play of the second practice of the second week of his second NFL season. It came on a cut he's been making since he was 6 years old.

The second time football was taken from him, he twisted his head around to look behind him. "Who kicked me?" he asked. He saw no one within 30 yards. He realized something was very, very wrong.

Just like that, 36 games of football were gone, robbed from the Indianapolis Colts running back during the routine of practice in a young career that once glistened with possibility. In September 2013, Ballard tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, in a non-contact drill, on the practice field. Missed 17 games. Worked all the way back. Ten months later, he shredded his left Achilles, in a non-contact drill, on the second day of training camp, 44 days before the first game of a season he'd never play in.

Two freak injuries. Two seasons lost in an instant. Two years without football.

This was the game at its most cruel. After the second injury, Ballard disappeared all over again, fading back into the daily slog of rehabilitation while the draft class he had been a central piece of — the 2012 group that includes Andrew Luck, T.Y. Hilton, Coby Fleener and Dwayne Allen — pulled the Colts to a second straight division title and within one game of the Super Bowl. Ballard was stuck watching.

"I was supposed to be a part of that," he says. "Sometimes, it feels like a lot of people just forgot about me."

They did. Last season Ballard would slip through the locker room, unnoticed, uninterrupted, heard from only when he'd mumble, "Excuse me," to the swarm of reporters who'd closed in on the lockers next to his – Luck to his left, Reggie Wayne to the right. Ballard might as well have been invisible.

In moments like this, it felt like 2012 never happened. With every passing week, Ballard's 814 rookie rushing yards faded further from memory, his game-winning corkscrew dive into the end zone in Tennessee becoming nothing but a relic from a career that had sadly stalled.

He became the forgotten man. The Colts turned elsewhere. Ahmad Bradshaw went down with injury, lost a season. Then lost another. Trent Richardson arrived, averaged 3 yards a carry, was cut. Boom Herron filled the void.

Ballard watched, waited, wondered. Would he ever make it back? Would there even be a spot for him?

Reliving his two-year nightmare on a recent afternoon at the Colts practice facility, Ballard weighs the cold reality that lies ahead: He's an injury-prone running back entering the final year of his contract. The Colts signed Frank Gore in March, used a sixth-round pick on a running back earlier this month and signed two more off the street. Competition at the position got more crowded.

This season — this summer, this coming training camp — could be Vick Ballard's last shot in the NFL.

"I was just telling my mom the other day," he says, eyes damp, voice soft, "this could be it for me."

***

What does a football player do when he can't play football? Vick Ballard bought remote control cars. Then he built model cars. Then he watched all 62 episodes of "Breaking Bad."

"Too much time, man," says Ballard, just 24. "I even tried filling my time with a lot of women, but that wasn't rewarding, either. That wasn't for me."

He was constantly in search of something to fill the void, and he was constantly failing. No diversion he found matched football, the sport he picked up as a 6-year-old in rural Mississippi and fell hard and fast for. It's why, despite curveballs littered at every turn for 18 years, he's never walked away from the game.

Nothing in Ballard's winding road, from Pascagoula to Perkinston to Starkville to Indianapolis, followed standard script. He had just one Division I scholarship coming out of high school — it was pulled after a coaching change. He showed up at his first junior college practice, eager to wow his coaches at running back — they put him at fullback. He ran for 1,728 yards and 22 touchdowns as a sophomore, figuring the big-time scholarship offers would roll in — he got one.

So he talked his way into a spot at Mississippi State. In 2011 he ran for more touchdowns in a season (19) than any player in MSU history. He hoped to impress scouts and teams at the NFL Scouting Combine — until he tripped on his first attempt in the 40-yard dash and plowed into the automatic timer.

Nothing ever went to plan for Vick Ballard. No matter. He endured.

The Colts, using the 2012 draft to assemble their offense of the future, scooped him up in the fifth round. And when a knee injury pulled incumbent starter Donald Brown off the field midseason, it became Ballard's backfield. He delivered a steady diet of rushing yards to pair with then-offensive coordinator Bruce Arians' Let-It-Fly offense. It worked. Ballard's 814 yards that season are the most by a Colts running back in any of the last five seasons.

If there was a signature play that fall that came to embody the too-young-to-care Colts, it was Ballard's Superman dive into the endzone in overtime on the road against the Titans in Week 8. He took a swing pass from Luck, darted down the sideline and leapt for glory at the 5. He'd fly 15 feet in all, spinning belly-up, reaching … reaching … reaching with every last inch of his 5-11 frame.

Cue the climactic music — you could've yanked the scene from a Disney football flick, it was that dramatic. Ballard's helmet crashed into the pylon, the football grazed the goal line and the Colts triumphed. A rookie fifth-round pick had just made the play of the year.

The Colts won 11 games that season and made the playoffs. The future was bright. The future included Ballard.

Three years later, a poster of Ballard's game-winning leap hangs in a hallway at team headquarters. He has taken just 13 handoffs since his rookie season.

"That's what is so frustrating," he says. "After that year, I was thinking, 'We got some ballers in this draft class. We're going to be the draft class that brings a Super Bowl back to Indy. We're going to grow up together.'"

Ballard ran for 63 yards in the 2013 season opener against Oakland; the following Thursday, on the second play of the week's second practice, he dug his right foot into the field and made a cut he's made a thousand times. Only this time his knee gave out.

The Colts' head trainer, Dave Hammer, pulled him to the side and had him run sprints. First in a straight line. Then a zigzag. Ballard felt his knee give again. Uh oh.

After the MRI, team doctor Tom Klootwyk came with the news.

"I'm sorry, Vick, but you tore your ACL," he told him.

Silence.

Ballard shook his head. To that point — 16 years in football — he'd never missed a game to injury in his life. Now his second NFL season was gone.

***

Ten months later, his ACL rebuilt, his confidence revived, Ballard was running routes with the running backs on the second day of training camp. Then he heard a noise. Then he felt a sharp pain tugging from his left heel.

"They say when you tear your Achilles, it's like someone just kicks you in the back of the heel," he says. "That's what it felt like. I turned around and was like, 'Who kicked me?' But no one was there.

"And my third season was gone. Just like that."

He stood on the sidelines for the Colts' preseason opener, the weight of another lost season hitting him in a way an angry linebacker never could. "I have to do this all again?" he remembers thinking. He did.

So it was back to to injured reserve. Back to irrelevance. Back to watching road games on the couch and home games from the sideline.

Ballard refused to leave Indianapolis, instead choosing to come to work every day, hoping the productive environment would nurture his recovery. He rehabbed while the team practiced, slipping through the locker room afterward unnoticed. He caught road games on television, sometimes grabbing a fellow hobbled teammate to go watch at The Colts Grille.

And he was there for every home game, a smile masking his despair while his teammates soared and the wins piled up and he was stranded on the sideline, helpless, envious. The emptiness stung him worse than anything ever had.

"Don't get me wrong, I was pumped for the guys," Ballard says. "But I couldn't feel the same level of excitement because I was limping around on the sidelines. My situation was affecting my happiness."

The game drifted further and further away. There was a hole in the Colts' backfield, same as there was a hole in Vick Ballard's life. It wasn't one he could fill with model cars, not with television binges, not with women. If he suits up Week 1, he'll go 20 months without playing in a football game.

"I'm not too proud to say, there were a lot of sleepless nights in there," he says. "A lot of tears on my pillow."

***

Faith dragged him through the darkness. Remember: Nothing's ever gone to plan for Vick Ballard. No matter. He endures.

He wouldn't give up on football after his lone Division I scholarship was pulled. Not after his junior college coach put him at the wrong position. Not after he couldn't get any major programs to give him a shot. Not after he stumbled into the timer at the combine. Not then. Not now.

Ballard turned his depression into his drive, devoting himself into the routine of recovery. "Go home!" teammates have been shouting at him the past few weeks as they exit the practice facility. Ballard smiles and shrugs. Not yet, he'll tell them. He says he knows the janitors by name.

He has spent two years rebuilding his lower body. He says he hasn't felt this good since college. And yes, he knows the only thing that matters is getting back on the field — and staying on the field.

"I think everybody's curious to see how my body reacts," says Ballard, who's switching from No. 33 to No. 26 this season. "I'm curious, too. I feel like this whole offseason I've been working on nothing but my legs, making sure everything from my hips down to my toes feel good."

The Colts have made contingency plans. Gore was brought in to be the primary back. Herron has earned himself a role. Josh Robinson, the sixth-round pick, offers promise. Where Ballard fits in is anyone's guess. It's the NFL. There are no guarantees.

"Two years is a long time not to play football, there's no doubt about it," says Colts general manager Ryan Grigson. "The only thing he needs to do is get a devil-may-care mindset. Because if you think about getting hurt, or you're concerned about getting hurt again, then you probably will."

If Ballard survives OTAs, then training camp, then four preseason games, then final roster cuts, his number on Sept. 13 — the day the Colts open the season in Buffalo — will be 735. That's how many days will have passed since he last played in an NFL game.

What if he doesn't make it? What if this is the end for Vick Ballard?

"I think about it every day," he says. "It's only natural. There's a fresh new set of players coming in every year trying to take your spot. But like I said, I'm here, every day, speaking to the cleaning crews on my way out. If this is it, if it's over, they're going to have to tell me it's over."

He says he lies in bed at night, the uncertainty of his future weighing heavy on him. Football was taken from him twice. His career won't survive a third time.

He's intent on doing what he's always done — endure. He goes back to last July, to one of the worst moments of his life, to that practice field at training camp when he realized a second season had been snatched from him. Later that night, he posted a photo of himself being carted off the field.

"Gonna have a great story to tell one day…" he wrote.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.