Top 10 Most Gruesome sports injuries: #2 Joe Theismann (plus BONUS injury!)

[Sportscolumn is running down the ten most gruesome sports injuries. Here’s #2]

If you haven’t seen the Joe Theismann injury by now, then you must have been living under a rock for the past 22 years. After all, it is the granddaddy of all of sports injuries and gets referenced after almost every major leg injury in sports to this day.

Who can forget seeing Lawrence Taylor snap Theismann’s leg during the Redskins/Giants Monday Night Football game back in 1985? It was a flea-flicker that went horribly wrong and ended with Taylor rolling up on Theismann and bending his leg backwards, not to mention his body, which resulted in a broken tibia and fibula. Theismann’s career was over before LT even got up and started frantically signaling for the paramedics.

The play doesn’t look all that devastating from the original angle, but once the reverse angle was feed to the national audience it became obvious that this was single handedly the worst professional sports injury ever witnessed. And no matter how many times you’ve seen the clip over the past two decades, it never gets any easier to stomach. Ironically, many people experience the same nauseating feelings when they think of his color commentary on ESPN.

Now, if Theismann grabbed our No. 2 spot on the list of gruesome injuries, then this guy has to be considered No. 2a. We don’t know who this guy is or when or where this happened, but the second we saw it, we knew it deserved some lofty recognition. So, here’s to you Mr. Mixed Martial Arts guy; this injury is truly one of the nastiest bone snappings we’ve ever been sickened by.

If you want to find some humor in the situation, just check out the guy’s opponent when he snaps his leg. The guy starts jumping up and down like he just delivered a knockout punch. Dude, you won because his leg cracked; you didn’t do jack!

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