Nearly 10 months after knee injury, Javonte Williams is ready to roll

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — It’s something of a medical miracle that Javonte Williams is ready for training camp. And even though his workload won’t be 100 percent, the fact that he isn’t on the physically-unable-to-perform list despite a complex, multi-ligament knee injury is the the first big break of the 2023 season for both the third-year running back and the team as a whole.

By Wednesday, he felt confident on the knee. And that could be the most prominent hurdle.

“I feel like the biggest part of all this right now is just mental,” he said. “Just getting out there, seeing the holes again, running through the O-line, D-line, things like that, is a huge confidence boost.”

Even though it was just the first day of training camp, Williams looked like himself.

“When I got out there and started running, it was just like, you forget about everything,” he said. “You’re just back on the field again.”

It wasn’t the culmination of his work. That will come when he plays in the regular season, when he plans to show the same violent burst that defined his rookie campaign of 2021.

But even his camp work represents a milestone, a far cry from the first two months after he suffered the injury.

“I couldn’t really move my knee at all,” Williams said. “I had to learn how to bend it again, learn how to walk. Things like that. Having people do everything for me, because I’m really independent; I like doing everything on my own. My parents had to come out here and stay with me for like, two months.

“I couldn’t do nothing. They had to do everything for me. I think that was the hardest part.”

But soon, he took to rehab work. Helping him were three teammates — Damarea Crockett, Tim Patrick and Aaron Patrick. The Broncos waived Crockett, but the Patricks remain. And like Williams, both are cleared for practice.

“All four of us was out here every day, grinding,” Williams said. “When everybody else got to go home, we had to stay here. We didn’t really get a break. We had weekends off, and that was it. We became really good friends.”

And they pushed each other. Which led to moments like the one Williams had “a few months ago,” when he realized he could be ahead of schedule.

“I feel like when I really started hitting my speeds on the GPS and just seeing how fast I was running, I was like, ‘I might be a little bit earlier,'” he said.

“And then just getting back in the weight room, hitting my maxes, things like that, I was like, ‘It’s stronger than I think it is.'”

Tim Patrick suffered his ACL injury two months before Williams. That put the veteran wide receiver ahead of schedule — but also offered Williams a preview of what awaited him in the rehab process.

“I feel like Tim gave me a lot of confidence, just seeing him,” Williams said. “I was a couple of weeks behind him, so, he was already ahead of me, jumping and stuff like that. Just seeing him trust his knee, jumping and doing things with the brace and without the brace, I feel like it just made me think, ‘You can do the same thing.’”

And Wednesday and Thursday, both worked. Williams looked decisive and fast — as much as he did before the injury.

“It’s right there. Same numbers. It’s in the same ballpark,” he said.

Which is why, on a sunny day in July, he had ample cause to smile. He crossed another item off his checklist on his path to a return that is now tantalizingly close.

“I was down on myself a lot,” he said. “But I’m seeing the brighter side, though.”

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