Nearly a decade before he set the record for career games played with the Cleveland Cavaliers, Zydrunas Ilgauskas was down to his last chance. The time had come for drastic, nearly unprecedented measures that saved his career, ended his nightmare foot problems and made the 7-3 center an embodiment of the optimism held by the Rockets that 7-6 Yao Ming can make it all the way back from similar surgery. "Never in my mind would I think I would get to this point, obviously," Ilgauskas said before Wednesday's 95-85 Cleveland loss at Toyota Center. "I don't know much about Yao's medical case. I talked to him over the summer a couple of times, just offering encouragement and some advice. Hopefully, that was helpful. You never want to see anybody go through this, especially Yao, because he's a really good guy and a damn good player.
Reason for optimism
"My surgery, I don't want to say (it was) revolutionary, but there wasn't a lot of cases of what I had to deal with. What they did to me was kind of new at that time. That was nine years ago. I'm sure Yao got the best care that he could. I don't see why (the Rockets shouldn't be) optimistic."
Like Ilgauskas, Yao had his left foot reshaped, changing the arch to alleviate stress on the fractured bone. He visited a variety of surgeons before choosing that procedure.
"It's very encouraging," Rockets general manager Daryl Morey said of Ilgauskas' post-operative success. "Obviously, they not only fixed the issue but made it stronger going forward. I think at the time, you could have gotten 100-to-1 odds that he'd come back and set the record for games played with the Cavs."
Ilgauskas played just five games in the 1998-99 campaign and none the next season. He came back in time to play 24 games in 2000-01 and played 62 games the next season, never having a recurrence of the injury.
"I was basically running out of options," he said. "Everything else had not worked. We had to do something drastic to change the shape of my foot, to offer some more protection. I just felt like if we did again the same kind of procedure, I would end up getting hurt again. I wanted to give it one more shot.
?It's tough'
"It's tough being injured. When the same injury occurs time after time, it's draining. It's tough physically. It's tough mentally. It's tough on your family. You can't be with your teammates. It can deflate you. ? I got Yao's number and told him I wanted to offer encouragement and some advice."
In his first two seasons back, Ilgauskas was limited to 20 minutes per game and could not play in back-to-backs. But 641 games since the surgery, no one could offer more hope for another NBA giant just starting the process.
jonathan.feigen@chron.com
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