Ex-Bengal Reggie Williams fighting to save his leg

Paul Daugherty | USA TODAY Sports

ORLANDO, Fla. — He greets me at the elevator in the early afternoon. He is on crutches, which he uses like dual canes. One in front of the other, step by step. He has spent the morning the way he spends every morning: Perpetually stretching and gently twisting and patiently aligning his body, so his body will allow him to walk. He has eased the length of his 6-foot-1 frame across an adjustable bed, a sectional leather sofa and a wooden chaise from Bali.

With great effort, he has donned a pair of sneakers he designed for himself. The right sneaker's sole is bolstered with 2 5/8 inches of extra padding. That's because, after the 24 surgeries and the multiple knee infections, and the osteomyelitis he says "ate my femur like termites," his right leg is precisely 2 5/8 inches shorter than his left.

On this day in early July in sunny central Florida, already he has pulled that leg beyond 90 degrees, to the point where the knee touches his nose with the leg fully extended. He has hung on tiptoes from the wrought-iron railing of the spiral staircase that leads to the loft. Without bending his knees, he has touched the Persian rug atop the hardwood floor. He owns a ballet dancer's flexibility, even at age 58.

"If it weren't for my flexibility, I'd be so much worse off," he says, before pausing to digest the meaning of what he'd just said. He chuckles. "I guess I don't know what 'so much worse off' is," he says.

His life is a continuous series of small, deliberate movements, a search for comfort and healing, an odyssey of maintenance and pain management. He does these things without complaint or assistance, because he understands that if he doesn't, his right leg will require amputation, and everything he has worked for his entire life will lose its meaning.

His apartment is between 85 and 90 degrees, because that's the temperature out the window, and air conditioning aggravates his condition. He eats no meals at home, because eating at home requires shopping for food, preparing it and cooking it, then cleaning up, and all that standing would do no good for his damaged knee.

He hasn't had a meal at home in more than two years. A former girlfriend made Thanksgiving dinner. His refrigerator contains a jug of water. A visitor asks for a drink. He directs the visitor to a cupboard above the spotless, unused cooktop. I pull out a plastic tumbler with a sip lid. I can't open it. I twist it, then try to pop the top.

Then I see the seal. The tumbler has never been used.

"How long have you had these glasses?" I ask.

"Since I moved in. 2002," he says.

Before us stands Reggie Williams, "Invictus" made flesh. Victim of cruel circumstance, most likely caused by a cruel game. Here stands Reggie Williams, for two decades bent by a knee so ravaged, it belongs in a jar or a textbook, anywhere but on a man who must walk.

Here he stands, rising from a couch with an effort that could break lesser men. For close to a decade, his life has been ruled by what the rest of us take for granted. Walking is not a gift for us. It's an assumption.

"It can take me five minutes to get to the door," he says.

Here he stands, on crutches in his living room, reciting "Invictus," a poem he learned while a freshman at Dartmouth:

"In the fell clutch of circumstance



I have not winced nor cried aloud.



Under the bludgeonings of chance



My head is bloody, but unbowed."

You might remember Reggie Williams. He hopes you do, but he's cynical about such things. "The forgotten linebacker," he calls himself. He played 14 years and 206 games, 1976 through 1989, all for the Bengals. That's more games than any Bengal but Ken Riley, who appeared in 207.

Reggie has more career tackles than any Bengals linebacker, more sacks, more interceptions, more fumbles forced and recovered. He'd like you to know this, and is somewhere between bemused and irritated that you don't.

"I went to Paul Brown Stadium once," he says. "Not even a picture of me."

He started both Bengals Super Bowls, in 1982 and 1989. He is haunted by each. The outcomes left him incomplete. The second defeat caused him to leave town, so he wouldn't have to explain why he lost. Reggie took it personally; he told Bengals fans he'd win. It was an integrity thing.

Reggie would also like you to know that he was a good citizen, one of the best, a city councilman, an enthusiastic volunteer, a football player who lived in town and became a prominent stitch in the local fabric.

He was never meant to be ordinary. Not as a hearing impaired youth growing tough in Flint, Mich., not as an African-American Ivy Leaguer at pale-white Dartmouth, not as arguably the most proficient linebacker in the 45-year history of the local NFL franchise. Not as a vice president at Disney, who created the most extensive youth sports complex in the world. And certainly not now.

He stands before us, lesser in some ways than when we knew him. Also far greater, for what has befallen him since he left Cincinnati after the 1989 season. Reggie Williams is a man fighting for a life he wants to keep living on his terms. He's fighting for his right leg, literally.

He's doing it solo, without insurance, and he's doing it without a posse of lawyers, filing suits on his behalf. While Reggie is part of a class-action lawsuit brought by more than 4,500 players (and counting) seeking justice for head injuries, the fight for his knee, his leg and his legacy is his alone.

It's lifelong, it's insistent, it defines him. As much as it ennobles Williams, it also trips him up. He limps. He needs crutches.

"God doesn't give us what we can't handle," Reggie says. "He also expects our crusade-like efforts. Moses didn't go up to the top of Mount Sinai to drop the tablets on the way down. I'm on the way down. My knee is my tablet. I'm trying not to break it."

"You see ugly. I see a beautiful miracle."

We should talk about the knee.

It is a special knee. It is so ugly, it's beautiful. It's so hideous, homeless men have seen it, and given Reggie money. TSA inspectors have stopped him in the airport security line, and asked him what he was hiding. No one could have a knee like that, and not be hiding something.

What does it look like, you ask.

It doesn't look like a knee. It has no cap. It has no defining, oval-like shape. It has hills and valleys, and scars like train tracks. It's a package of dinner rolls. It's at least twice the size of a normal knee. It bulges on the sides.

In 2008, when doctors operated on Reggie's knee eight times in five months, he took photos of the knee, splayed open and ungodly horrid, with his cell phone. He must have 50 of them.

Picture a sweet potato, fresh baked and split down the center, awaiting butter and brown sugar. That's what the open wound looked like. The skin on each side parted from the canyon, its dark brown-ness a ready accent to the exposed orange flesh. "I can say I know the torture of having your skin ripped off," Reggie says.

There were patches of green in the pictures, too. "Necrotic tissue," Reggie explains. "Dead leg."

Even now, the knee has tiny pimples. Reggie says if he opened them, bits of stitching would appear, from his first surgery, in 1979. The knee comes with its own irony, too: Turf-burn scars from his playing days are still apparent. They survived all the incisions.

Imagine a piece of steak and cut it straight down the middle. Sew up the incision. Cut again, in the same place. Do that 20 times. Cut and sew, cut and sew.

"I can learn a lot about a person by how they respond to my knee,'' says Reggie. He sees it as a kind of litmus test of character and intent. He compares it to the ugly perceptions that have fueled bigotry. "It wasn't the black skin that was the problem. It was how people responded to the black skin. It's not the knee. It's how people respond to the knee.''

Children are inquisitive and rarely frightened. The homeless who hang around Lake Eola near his apartment are occasionally inspired and often curious. "I have never had an indigent individual, once they've seen my leg, continue to beg," Reggie says.

He is past the public reaction, though, if indeed it ever affected him. There has been too much work to do. There remains too much still to be done. When Reggie looks at his knee, he sees a mirror into the purity of his determination and his grace: "It's a Picasso to me."

"Because after all I've gone through, I can walk. I can walk better now than I could when I had (the surgeries) done. I have traversed an unbelievable abyss of medicine and technology and human endurance, and I know it."

How did he get here? This dreamy, blue-perfect day in the Florida summer, its possibilities both teasing and delighting him: How? Reggie Williams is lying on the leather sectional, preparing to explain 24 surgeries. What they were, how they went and all they've meant to who he has become. He likes the explaining, you can tell. It's a validation of a larger purpose: Saving a leg, sure. But saving a life as well.

"I'm pulling my leg out of hell, and it didn't quite make it.''

Reggie Williams Former Cincinnati Bengals player Reggie Williams battles pain from injuries caused by years of physical play.

Before purgatory, there were surgeries. It's best to take them in order, lest we miss one or lose its place: `

December 1979: Total, right-knee cartilage removal.

Early 1987: What doctors were calling an "abrasion" then. It's micro-fracture surgery now, to repair cartilage.

Early 1989: Arthroscopic surgery on the left knee.

1993: Before taking his job at Disney, as director of sports development, Reggie underwent exploratory arthroscopic surgery on both knees. "I wanted them to know what kind of damaged goods they were inheriting," he said.

2005: Both knees replaced for the first time. Surgery on the left knee was needed simply so the left leg would be fully compatible with the right. Reggie was born bow-legged. After doctors replaced his real right knee with a fake one for the first time, they had to straighten his left leg, and give it a fake knee, too, "You can't have a crooked leg and a straight prosthesis," Reggie explains. After those surgeries, legs straightened, he gained an inch in height.

February 2006: The right knee had become infected. The prosthesis was pulled out, and the knee was cleaned and, doctors believed, the infection cured. The surgical wound wouldn't close, so they grafted skin onto the knee, taken from the back of his calf. Then, another operation, to implant the second prosthesis.

April 2008: The second prosthesis had to be removed. The infection had not been cured. That spring, Reggie made six trips from Orlando to New York, where doctors would open up the knee and scrape the bone, trying to get enough infected tissue to grow in a laboratory and identify. Finally, they discovered the osteomyelitis, which Reggie describes as "a continual gnawing, bordering on itching and pain.''

Also at that time, doctors performed six "debridements" to clean out dead tissue, before implanting the third prosthetic, which they did in August of 2008.

Since 2008, Reggie has had both feet operated on, the result of trying to walk with one leg.

Reggie went 12 years between the '93 surgery on both knees to having each replaced, because he believed he could manage the pain. "I was willing to eat pain like Wheaties," he says. His job often occupied seven days a week, 12 hours a day, walking lots of acres of planned ball diamonds and football fields, and sitting in endless meetings in cold, air-conditioned conference rooms. Reggie worked out diligently. He ignored the pain, an ignorance encouraged by the exhilaration of what he was doing: Creating the world's pre-eminent sports complex for kids.

For the next 18 months, Reggie lived in the hell he describes.

He'd attend meetings at Disney with an ice bag on his knee. He'd spend hours in the weight room at Wide World of Sports, trying to work his way past the pain that should have subsided. He was in the training room as much as the trainers.

Still, something wasn't right. Something hadn't been right seemingly since he quit football. Reggie would see doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist. His personal physician resigned from his case, saying it was simply beyond his expertise. "I had gone to rehab," Reggie recounts. "They were looking at the scars, what wasn't healing. They were looking at the discharge, coming from the holes. No one was saying, 'You need to get back in the hospital.' All they were saying was, 'You need more rehab.' "

"The knee just wouldn't heal," Reggie says.

No one had identified the osteomyelitis.

He attended a workmen's compensation hearing in California in October 2007, hoping to prove he qualified as an employee in the state, and thus was entitled to help with his medical bills, because he played 20 games in the state during his NFL career.

California was among the first states to tax visiting entertainers, be they actors or musicians or athletes. Williams felt that if he were paying taxes in California, he had a right to reap some of the benefits. That case has yet to be resolved. While out there, one of the Bengals lawyers suggested to Reggie that he might have osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone or bone marrow. It wasn't diagnosed officially until April 9, 2008.

Five months earlier, in November 2007, Reggie retired from Disney, to devote himself to rehabbing his knee and saving his leg. Eighteen months after that, Disney stopped insuring him. That was mid-2009. Reggie bought his own health insurance. It does not cover pre-exisiting conditions. His rehab is at his own expense.

Reggie has a theory about how his knee became the cesspool that crippled him. He believes – and says doctors have agreed – that the infection started after a root canal he had in 1989, while still a member of the Bengals. His surgically repaired mouth became infected. The infection spread to "the weakest part of my body" which, Reggie says, would have been his right knee, which had been repaired for the second time in '86.

Dr. Jason Spector, who would be Reggie's plastic surgeon, said the theory is possible, but unproven. "Dental (surgery) is thought to cause infections in prostheses. The problem with that is, the bacteria in the knee should match (the bacteria) in the mouth. I don't know that they ever made that match."

From strictly a suffering standpoint, it made no difference where the infection originated. Only that it remained.

Reggie called Steve O'Brien. The two were acquaintances and fellow Ivy League football players. O'Brien had become an orthopedic surgeon in New York. Dr. O'Brien wanted to admit Reggie to a Manhattan hospital, but wouldn't until an infectious disease doctor could isolate the bacteria in the knee, and show he could destroy it.

Reggie flew six times to New York, so a doctor could stick a needle in his knee and go on a fishing expedition for enough usable bacteria to put on a slide and grow a culture. The fifth try worked; the sixth was to make sure. The osteomyelitis finally was diagnosed. Reggie went under the knife again.

The pain during that time was bad, but it was leavened, finally, by the firm hope that things would be fixed. "You asked me when it got bad," Reggie says. "I don't know. It was always bad.

"I toughed it out one or two years. It's not just the pain."

It was the medication to fight the pain, the antibiotics to fight any return of infection. "Three in the morning, three at night," he says. That goes on for a year, then two, then five. "A thousand pills, OK?" he says. "That stuff starts affecting you in other places," he says. "Your kidneys, your liver."

He'd cramp up. He couldn't keep dinner down. A few times a month, he'd pull off the highway on his way to work, and throw up.

After the third prosthesis was installed, in August 2008, Reggie's knee looked to have taken a direct hit from a cleaver. That's when he took the pictures, and when Dr. Spector entered the arena. The plastic surgeon grafted skin and muscle from the back of Reggie's calf onto his knee. The clinical term for the muscle is the gastrocnemius.

The gastroc is one of just two muscles in the calf. So while Dr. Spector was strengthening one area, he was weakening another. You can't walk without a knee; you can't walk without a calf, either. In some, ironic way, this is the central theme of Reggie's restricted life.

One step up and two steps back.

"When an artificial joint gets infected, the infection is hard to eradicate," says Dr. Spector. "He had a horrendous, nasty infection."

I asked Reggie how he did it. The pain, the surgeries, the delayed diagnosis. The wreckage of spirit, over and over. A loss of what seems an inalienable right to locomotion.

The granite realities of a failing knee, against the mushy yearnings of an optimistic heart: Did the heart stand a chance? How?

What keeps you standing?

It wasn't an easy answer. A lot of it had to do with belief in himself and in his purpose. A lot had to do with validating his struggle. A lot was about the beauty all around him, a loveliness for which he had developed a fine appreciation over the decades of pain:

His art, his music, the loyalty of his trusted friends. "I look at pain and pleasure as scales," he says. "The more pain you have, the more pleasure you need to balance it out."

Some had to do with his work at Wide World of Sports. It was his passion. It will be his legacy, a grass and arena monument to all he wanted to achieve after his playing career ended. "I don't think there's a better place for kids in the world," Reggie says.

"You want to facilitate dreams."

***

We're up and out early on Day 2. Reggie wants me to see Wide World of Sports, a mega-field of dreams at the end of a road he named himself: Victory Way.

One of Reggie's former employees, Rich Gilrane, is waiting for us. He's driving an oversized golf cart. Reggie approved Gilrane's hiring when both arrived at Disney in 1993. Gilrane is now the director of operations at Wide World.

Reggie crutches his way from his car to the cart. We begin a tour that takes us deep into the heart of Reggie's vision.

Disney chairman Michael Eisner hired him in '93. Reggie arrived with the lofty goal that "Central Florida would become the hottest place for athletes in the country." After four years of planning and millions of dollars, Wide World opened in '97. For the next decade, until his leg forced him to retire, Reggie lorded over an enterprise that grew exponentially, in tandem with his vision and America's exploding obsession with sports. By the time he left, Wide World was hosting 250,000 kids a year, from all over the world, competing in more than 30 sports; had become the spring home of the Atlanta Braves, and, for six years, the site of Tampa Bay Bucs training camp; had become the headquarters for AAU and had hosted every Pop Warner Super Bowl since 1996.

We cruise past one of a dozen baseball fields, where a team from Puerto Rico is playing a team from Maryland. Past a track facility where a meet is taking place. Into a huge fieldhouse, where a girls AAU basketball tournament is being held. Back onto another field, where an old acquaintance is running a speed and agility camp, for NFL free agent hopefuls.

Reggie hops from the golf cart, not a simple task, and walks without crutches, to the group of players gathered in the sweltering grass. "I have a miracle leg, guys," he tells them. He pulls up his pant leg. They gasp. "Makes you feel good about walking on healthy legs, right?"

"Yes, sir."

We move along.

Reggie says his original intent was to make Wide World such a special place to compete, even losers would leave happy. "What I learned from losing was real empathy for every competitor. I wanted everyone who came here to feel special. Because 99 percent of them are going to lose. The destination has got to resonate."

He recalled his first NFL game, a preseason scrum at Lambeau Field. He wanted the kids coming to Wide World to have the same feeling.

Reggie is in his element here. "Man, is this not a happy place, if you love sports?" he asks.

Former co-workers greet him warmly. They remember his successes, and offer praise. This fills him. It validates who he was for a decade, until the knee made it impossible for him to continue. By the time he left Wide World in December 2007, Reggie had become vice president of Walt Disney World Sports. His duties had expanded, to include overseeing DisneyWorld's golf courses and two water parks.

He says if the Bengals had won either of their two Super Bowls, he would not have moved from Cincinnati. "If we'd won in Cincinnati, I'd be telling a champion's story. We didn't win," Reggie explains. "We win here, for kids, every day. We tell that story."

Strange, then, that this is only his second visit to Wide World since he left. He says he quit in '07 mostly because the effort required to save his leg demanded it: "I needed to be maniacal about walking again."

But there was something else. The Disney culture prefers perfection, even if it's manufactured. Reggie was far from perfect. "You're trying to look the brand," he says. He felt like he couldn't "walk the talk anymore."

So he retired, and withdrew. Reggie Williams is an outgoing, trusting, social man, perfect for a place like Disney, where happiness is enforced. One of the worst parts about his disability is the solitude he has imposed on his life.

The day at Wide World lifts him because he is with people he loves, and who love him back. The beautiful quiet of his apartment doesn't live here. I ask him why he hasn't been back more. "This makes you happy," I say. "These people have made your day."

Reggie says he'd be in their way. They don't want a broken-down retiree around – "a crumpled former athlete," he says – to gum up the works. "You gotta let it go," says Reggie. "For all this passion and love, there has to be a happy ending."

He didn't want his cast members to be more concerned with their leader's health than the health of Wide World of Sports. Perfection has no room for imperfection. The show must go on. Disney taught him well. The irony is perfect, and cruel.

If this notion affects Reggie at all, he doesn't let on. He has had a marvelous day.

"We built something out of nothing here. If this is my legacy, I'm proud of my legacy. This will outlive me." He declares he is "proud of what I saw out there." On crutches, he ambles to his car.

"I'm going to pay for all this walking tomorrow," he says.

"I'm looking for some humanity.''

***

He says he overdid it. He says this while stretching on the Bali lounge chair. He switches positions every few minutes: Back to belly, belly to side. "I've gotten a lot better," Reggie declares. "I'm in my third year of this."

His back and hips pop and crackle. Every few minutes, when the pain stabs more ferociously, Reggie emits an "oh, boy."

"I do a one-to-two-hour session in the morning, aligning myself. That adjustment is critical just to put on my shoes." Still, he believes he's a better athlete now than when he played. "I'm balancing (walking) with a three-inch difference in height. That's circus stuff on a football field."

He does his rehab alone, by necessity. No pain doctors, no nutritionists, no one charging him a couple hundred dollars an hour, to stretch him out. No meds. "I've made progress," he says. "I could have made a lot more."

He blames the Bengals. He says the club owes him something, even if he isn't sure what that is. Empathy? Recognition? Money? He lumps it all under the notion of "justice." The Bengals haven't done right by Reggie Williams, he feels. They haven't done anything at all.

It gnaws at him mentally, every bit as much as the osteomyelitis bit him physically. Reggie can control his daily physical and spiritual state. He can leaven his mood with music and art and the apartment he calls his "healing place." What he can't do is force the justice he feels he has been denied.

I ask him, "In Perfect World, what would you like the Bengals to do?"

This is a can-of-worms question, given that the entire NFL is dealing with the lawsuits of thousands of its former players, who want financial redress for what they believe playing in the league did to their brains. Reggie doesn't see it that way, exactly. "This is not a monetary dialog," he says. "It's a trust between player, fan and owner."

I ask him what that means.

"I'm not here asking for anything. If I have to define in a sound bite what justice is, then we have a real issue with the character and responsibility of an NFL owner. I have taken responsibility for my own actions. If I left the Bengals and became indigent, if I was begging outside Paul Brown Stadium? Do I ask for something different then?"

I ask him the question again: What do you want from the Bengals?

The question angers him.

"That's like putting the onus on the victim," he says. "I'm totally screwed here. I need help. You want me to define exactly the kind of help I need, today? That's different from the kind of help I need tomorrow. Different from the kind of help I need a year from now. It's different from the kind of help I'm going to need if I have to cut my f------ leg off.

"I have nothing from them. Fourteen years, 206 games, 12,000 plays, 60 percent on Astroturf, half of that at Riverfront Stadium, some of the worst turf ever.

"The Bengals can do more than nothing. I mean, I was a pallbearer at Paul Brown's funeral. They can do more than offer gratuitous plaudits like, 'Reggie was one of our favorite players.' They can do more to aggressively address the aging of their retired players. Recognize the consequences of surgery after surgery. Not just for the past" players. "But the future."

The Bengals response is essentially:

We feel your pain.

We're not paying for it.

"We did step up here and do the things we were required to do by law," Mike Brown says.

Legally, the Bengals are free and clear.

The team paid him a little less than $2 million, total, over his 14-year career. His first three years, 1976-78, Reggie made a total of $160,000, including a $40,000 signing bonus. Currently, his league pension pays him $4,300 a month.

In 2008, he applied to take part in the league's joint replacement program. The league approved it, two years later. Its financial contribution? $5,000.

"The NFL can please donate that to the Marvin Lewis Community Fund" was Reggie's response.

Mike Brown sums up the team's position: "From the corporation's point of view, we were never going to be his lifetime health insurer."

Brown is more sympathetic than his tone suggests. But he will never let sympathy threaten the family business. The Browns can't do for Reggie, without doing for other former players. As Brown says, "Where do you draw the line? How do you do something for one and not the other?"

Reggie wants something less obvious and more lasting than money. He isn't able to articulate it, exactly. Mike Brown doesn't understand when Reggie says, "I'm not sitting around waiting for Mike Brown to be a human being."

Says Brown, "He's hurting, he's frustrated, he doesn't have a good answer to his predicament. I understand why he would sound off. It saddens me. I don't know for sure how he came to be so injured. It appears from our perspective that it's a result of the infection after the operations. It doesn't mean I don't recognize his plight."

Reggie doesn't want it to become adversarial. "Litigation is contrary to the healing spirit," he says. "The last thing I want is Mike Brown an adversary. I want positive vibes."

Meantime, the league deals with 242 lawsuits involving the head injuries of 4,500 of its former players, including 203 who at some point in their careers played for the Bengals. Some were prominent players: James Brooks, Bill Bergey, Louis Breeden, Bob Trumpy, Rudi Johnson, Ickey Woods. And Reggie Williams. "I was urged to join that lawsuit, on behalf of guys I played with and against," Reggie says. "I have filed no other lawsuits, against anyone."

The NFL's younger players have better medical care. They will be better taken care of after they retire, thanks to a new collective bargaining agreement and a more enlightened NFL. It's older players who joust and suffer and wonder what has happened. Reggie seeks justice. It's not defined by dollars. Dollars cheapen justice. They smell like a payoff.

He'd like the Bengals to note his contributions, beyond mouthing their appreciation. How they do that is up to them. He'll be the judge of their effort. For now, he rehabs his leg, by himself. Unlike most rehabs, his is endless. "Getting better" means "not getting worse."

"If justice is not received, I'm going to continue to fight. They can help or they can't help," Reggie says. "I'm at peace with all the pain I've accumulated. I don't have confidence in doing this without professional assistance."

One day is good. The next day isn't. The leg is still there, and it is still functioning. For today, that is enough.

"It is disgusting. I know it. It not only doesn't look good, it doesn't work good, and it's the wrong size. But it's all I got. I'm gonna lug that sucker all the way down that mountain."

***

How, then, do we see this 58-year-old retired professional athlete and executive? He is a fighter and he is disabled. He has walked a road of success, yet needs 90 minutes to get out of bed every day. Reggie Williams wants justice, but can't easily define it. Without a solid definition, justice is a butterfly.

He is at peace with his condition, even as he wages war against it every day.

Reggie is inspirational, yet seemingly isolated, walking solo down the hill, step by painful, considered and hard-won step. Eternally intense and occasionally evangelical, he is a powerful speaker, who wonders if anyone is listening.

How to regard this deeply thoughtful man, and the knee he calls his Picasso?

Perhaps to see his knee as he sees it.

His apartment is a tribute to the things he loves. Reggie Williams has filled his sixth-floor aerie with beautiful things, because beauty is part of his healing. "When you're in pain, you're either going to focus on that pain, or find an alternative. Memory, music, travel, art. It's everywhere I look in here."

Close to 300 pieces of art, from 40 different countries, hang on its walls and from its ceilings. Sculptures share space with thousands of CDs. Music always plays in Reggie's place. Gospel, blues, jazz, Motown.

Reggie says what most of us grasp, even if without his suffering: We can't know pleasure without also knowing pain. "Pain allows me to have my art. Pain allows me to have my music turned up loud," he says.

"If you're not in pain, you're not getting full pleasure of all the things around you in your life. The nature, the beauty, the hard work of other people, the dreams of little kids. All those things are right here. The pleasures of life. I have all that. It balances the pain."

He was friends with the late Ernie Barnes, a former pro football player himself and an artist of some renown. You might not know Barnes, but you likely know his art: Portraits of tall, loose-limbed, African-American athletes, mostly. He also painted an album cover for Marvin Gaye.

Reggie has eight Barnes originals, including one that Barnes allowed him to name: Exhausted, beat-up football players walking to their unseen locker room after a game. Reggie titled it "And These Guys Won."

Reggie has two LeRoy Neiman originals. He has sculpture from Mexico. He has a few of his own contributions, most notably a photograph he took while in Israel in 1976. A baleful boy, 6 or 7 years old, sits in a dusty doorway, alone but for a small dog. The photo is piercing and wonderful.

Some of his art mimics the stretching poses he holds daily. Life imitates art, imitates life.

And he has his knee. His most beautiful piece, one he has spent what seems like a lifetime creating. It's an evolving piece. It embodies lots of what its creator stands for and hopes to be remembered by. "There is artistry simply in its ability to function," Reggie says.

He doesn't want to lose it.

A month ago, a doctor at Dartmouth told him what he has heard many times before, what seems to be the majority opinion: Without some dramatic new innovation, his right leg will have to be removed. The only question is when. Or as Reggie puts it, "the option that has by far the most universal agreement is amputation of the leg. If anything in my current (rehab) fails, we're going to have to cut it off.

"The solution is some radical procedure that has not been identified yet," he says. Reggie hopes that further advances in procedures to help veterans who have lost limbs also will benefit him.

It's a long shot. It's also the only shot.

I ask Reggie why. Why he persists. Prostheses are better now than they were a decade ago. He could be free of pain. With a little training, he could move more freely. It wouldn't be him, though. It would arrive freshly minted, without character or a hard-won dignity. It wouldn't know pain, so how could it possibly bring pleasure? An artificial leg might be a miracle of technology. It wouldn't be Reggie's miracle. It wouldn't be his art.

And it's not as if he hasn't gone the prosthesis route before.

"Sometimes," he says, "art is a quest for an answer."

Opting for a prosthesis, "is a very practical question. It's not part of the map of the equation I'm trying to solve. I'm only trying to solve the equation of keeping my leg.

"If the art is no longer on the wall, it ceases to be art. If this (knee) is not art, then it's the antithesis of art."

I ask him about the striving. Isn't part of his success in the struggle itself? Art for art's sake, the finished product open to interpretation?

"Losing the leg isn't part of this story," he says. "If I wanted to tell that story, I'd have enlisted in the armed forces, or law enforcement. I put my heart into a (Super Bowl) ring. So much dreamology. If it costs me my leg, was it worth it to play in the NFL? No.

"When the best answer you can get is, 'Cut it off,' it's such a far fall from the inspiration to keep going. Having my leg means whatever I'm going through is worth going through.

"Man, what a failure I'll be if I lose my leg."

Dr. Jason Spector, Reggie's plastic surgeon, understands his reluctance. Patients like Reggie "say 'Why stop now?' They get very attached to the time and investment they've made.

"Sometimes, it prevents them from actually getting better. The recovery time (from amputation) is less." Dr. Spector also says, "It's a minor miracle he has some function in that leg.

"I wouldn't want to go back into that leg under any circumstances. His future is hard to predict. The fact that the infection hasn't returned is a good thing. Whatever he's doing to maintain is fine."

One other option would be to fuse the knee. Operations involving bone grafts would cause the femur and tibia to fuse together. That might eliminate Reggie's pain. It would also render the knee useless. "The leg would be a pole," Dr. Spector explains.

That would go against who Reggie is. "Invictus": "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." And so he stretches on the Bali couch and touches his toes and spends his days re-aligning, his purpose as clear as his future is not. All he can do is all he can do.

The music plays. It's the soundtrack of his life. Now, it's Billie Holliday. She knew some about pain. After three days, I make my way to the door. Reggie rises and stands. He waves goodbye: One crutch lifted to the sky.

Paul Daugherty writes for the Cincinnati Enquirer, a Gannett property.