For a 12-time Pro Bowl guard, hands are everything. For Arizona State legend Randall McDaniel, they are now a shocking reminder of the game’s true cost. After a 17-year career that includes three years at Arizona State University and 14 years in the NFL, the 19th overall pick in the 1988 draft showed the set of awry fingers football left him. 

An Instagram user shared a photo of McDaniel’s hands, with the caption, “My pards today, Randall McDaniel. After 14 years in the NFL playing offensive guard, this is what your fingers look like. Amazing, he could grip the club. Prob nicest man I’ve ever met in my life.”

The picture showed the kind of damage Randall McDaniel’s hands sustained to sustain his greatness at the top of his position. Every finger except his right thumb appears broken, a sign of a different time in the NFL when “trench warfare” was the norm. Several look permanently bent at extreme, unnatural angles.

As lore has it, rather than undergo treatment for his injuries, McDaniel would just tape up his broken fingers. For the former Arizona State player, ‘buddy-taping’ the fingers was the solution to keep playing. And when you see that he started 202 consecutive games, you can imagine the kind of beating the fingers would have taken. It’s no wonder they’re shaped the way they are.

McDaniel spent his first 12 years with the Minnesota Vikings and the last two with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was not only selected for the All-decade Team of the 1990s, but he also made the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2009 and achieved 12 straight Pro Bowls between 1989 and 2000, missing only his first and last seasons in the NFL. According to his former teammates and coaches, he was the best player at his position. 

“He was the best offensive guard I ever saw in my 25 years in pro football. And he was one of the nicest, classiest guys I was ever associated with in football,” Jerry Burns, former NFL coach, said.

The secret behind the 61-year-old’s insane level of consistency was perhaps his approach to injuries. He seemed to find positives in negative situations and made up his mind to keep making progress, notwithstanding the challenge.

Randall McDaniel transformed an injury into a signature stance

In 1990, after teammate Todd Kalis rolled up his right leg, McDaniel had to play with a knee brace for the next two games. He had some difficulty using the knee brace, but devised a way out regardless. It was this relentless ingenuity that led to his signature stance, which significantly paid off.

“So I go in with that brace on,” McDaniel said. “And it’s stiff. It wasn’t comfortable, and he was off. The only way I could get down in a stance was to turn my other leg out. So I started doing that. During the game, a defensive lineman made a comment like, ‘I have no clue what you’re doing.

“I can’t tell if you’re pulling, passing [or] coming at me.’ And I thought, ‘That wasn’t very smart to say.’ And I kept the stance. I thought, ‘If you can’t read it, then that gives me an advantage right there. That’s where it all came from: One little brace, one little accident along the way.”

One would wonder where Arizona’s McDaniel developed this mindset from. But from his post-retirement comments about his career, it was clear that football was the game he loved to play.

“I’m just a big kid out there playing this kid’s game-we all are grown men playing a kid’s game. It is funny. But it gives you a lot: the contact, the competition, the people you meet, the travel… I love traveling. I’ve been places I never could have seen without football. I just love the game.”

Sports often give a bittersweet effect. Entertaining, yet involving so much hard work and discipline. Rewarding, yet so demanding and exacting. To all successful athletes, like McDaniel, greatness is worthy of all its demands, even a scary-looking set of fingers.