Athletes Who Came Back After a Hip Replacement — And Why the List Is Shorter Than You Think

Search for athletes who came back after a hip replacement and you'll get the same names every time: Bo Jackson, Andy Murray, Floyd Landis.

Two of those three did not have a hip replacement.

I'm not being pedantic. If you're a patient trying to work out what's possible for you, this is the single most misleading thing on the internet about this subject, and it took me a while to understand why the lists all look so encouraging.

Resurfacing is not replacement

Hip resurfacing caps the femoral head with metal. The head of your femur stays. It's bone-preserving, it's biomechanically closer to the joint you were born with, and it is generally offered to younger, more active patients for exactly that reason.

Total hip replacement removes the femoral head entirely and replaces it with a stem set into the shaft of the femur, and a new socket.

They are different operations with different constraints, and the comeback stories are not interchangeable.

Andy Murray had resurfacing in January 2019, and won the European Open singles title later that year. Genuinely remarkable — and not a replacement.

Floyd Landis had resurfacing and returned to professional cycling. Also not a replacement.

So when someone facing a total hip replacement reads those stories and takes heart, they're taking heart from a different operation than the one they're scheduled for. I don't think anybody's being dishonest. The words just get used loosely, and the patient is the one who ends up with the wrong picture.

Who actually came back after a total replacement

The list gets very short.

Bo Jackson is the real one. He dislocated his hip in an NFL playoff game in January 1991, had a total hip replacement in April 1992, and returned to Major League Baseball — he played over a hundred games for the White Sox and hit 16 home runs before retiring in 1994.

That's a genuine total hip replacement and a genuine return to professional sport. It's also worth being precise about what he came back as: he returned as a designated hitter. He was one of the most extraordinary athletes of the twentieth century, and after the replacement he hit, and did not play the field.

That isn't a knock on him. It's the honest shape of the story, and the honest shape is more useful to you than the flattering one.

Where I come into it

I had a total hip replacement on 25 July 2005, at nineteen. I then pitched seven seasons of professional baseball — the first minor-league pitcher to take the mound after a total hip replacement.

Pitching is not hitting. A pitch is a violent rotational movement that drives force from the ground through the back hip, and does it seventy, ninety, a hundred times in a night. Of all the things you could ask a replaced hip to do in professional sport, it's near the top of the list.

44–25. 526 strikeouts in 548 innings. Four championships in seven years, the first no-hitter in Windy City ThunderBolts history, and I'm still pitching at 41. The record is on Baseball-Reference and I'd rather you check it than believe me.

What I want you to take from a short list

There's a version of this post that ends with "so anything is possible." I don't think that's true and I don't think it helps.

Here's what I think the short list actually means.

It means the ceiling is real but nobody knows where it is. Very few people have taken a total hip replacement into elite sport, which means the data on what's achievable is thin — and thin data gets reported as a limit when it's actually just an absence of evidence. Nobody had done what I did, which is not the same as it being impossible.

It means you should be suspicious of encouraging lists, including this one. Check whether the person had your operation. Check what they came back as. The details are where the useful information is.

And it means your comparison isn't Bo Jackson. It's you, six months ago, in pain. That's the honest benchmark, and it's the one that actually improves.

I'm not a doctor, a surgeon, or a physical therapist. I had one of these and I've spent twenty-one years finding out what it can do. If you're trying to work out what yours can do, that's the conversation I have with people.