On Wednesday night, during the annual ESPYs telecast from Los Angeles, Jim Kelly will accept the Jimmy V. Award for Perseverance and offer a short speech, the only kind possible when your face and jaw form a virtual cauldron of unrelenting pain.
The audience inside the Microsoft Theater, thick with star athletes and A-list celebs, will include a contingent of NFL defenders who’ve rearranged a quarterback’s face, but none of them could dream of what doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City have done with Jim Kelly’s.
“He had part of his fibula taken out and they re-created his jaw, and then they took the tissue from his calf muscle and re-created the roof of his mouth,” Dan Kelly, younger brother of the Hall-of-Fame passer, was saying this past week.