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The story behind Vikings RB Cam Akers’ emotional comeback from a second torn Achilles

Online Niel November 27, 2024

Some smiles are more meaningful than others, and this one fits the bill.

Drag the Week 11 game between Vikings and titanium. Fast forward to a Minnesota touchdown pass late in the third quarter. Track the ball from the defender Sam Darnoldhis fingertips to running back Cam Akers’ hands in the corner of the end zone, then get ready to press the break.

Akers with his first receiving TD of the season!

: #MINvsTEN on CBS/Paramount+
: pic.twitter.com/P2Gx05VJJC

— NFL (@NFL) November 17, 2024

Akers will throw the ball into the sky. He will put his head down to find and celebrate with his teammates. Then you will see it. His teeth gleaming. His eyes squint. Positive energy pours from his face.

Akers wouldn’t talk about it. How much this moment – and every moment right now – means.

But his parents will. They noticed the smile and cherished it.

“Hell, we were smiling, too,” said Akers’ father, Conni.

The stats say Akers shouldn’t be here – not in one NFL end zone, not even on an NFL field. He overcame an injury that tends to be a bane for runners… and he did it twice. Akers’ arc of recovery is as much about himself as it is about others. How you play the hand you’re dealt and how those around you shape your perspective.

Last November, Akers’ mother, Angela Neal, zigzagged down the concourse inside Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, looking for the elevators.

Her mind was racing. She had just watched her son, a running back for the Vikings, collapse to the turf while trying to get around a tackler. The coaches ushered Akers into the locker room. Angela’s Instinct: Find it and pet it.

As she walks through the tunnel downstairs, her phone buzzes. It was Akers.

“Mom,” he said.

He could tell she had been crying.

“Where are you?” Akers asked.

And she struggled to speak. “I’m… trying to get to you as fast as I can.”

Akers then called Conni, who had been watching the game at home in Clinton, Miss. Conni is a supervisor with the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. He had worked late the night before and dozed off during the game. When he woke up to his son’s call, while he still saw the Vikings and hawks throwing it at the television in front of him, he was stunned. He thought his mind was stuck in the middle of a bad dream.

It had been two years since Conni had feared the worst. In 2021, before Akers’ second NFL season with Los Angeles Ramshe called his parents to say he had been doing box jump training when his leg suddenly felt lifeless. Tests indicated he ruptured his right Achilles tendon.

“I knew we were on a journey right away,” Conni said.

The recent history of runners tearing their Achilles has caused concern. In 2010, injury ended the career of LenDale White. The same thing happened to Chris “Beanie” Wells in 2013, Vick Ballard in 2014 and Arian Foster in 2015. Other than that, few D’Onta Foreman had ever returned to play a significant role.

Akers knew the numbers, but he didn’t care. He knew his mother would have approached her the same way.

Cam Akers missed almost the entire 2021 regular season after tearing his Achilles, but returned and played in the Rams’ Super Bowl LVI victory. (Gary A. Vasquez/USA Today)

At age 9, Akers sat in his mother’s bedroom watching her. She had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and there were days when she couldn’t lift her head off the pillow.

“I would just sit in the room, watching him breathe,” Akers said years ago. “She would fall asleep and I would watch her chest rise and fall to make sure she was okay.”

Angela lost weight. His skin darkened. Chemotherapy caused her hair to fall out. While navigating his recovery, eventually beating cancer, Akers fell in love with football.

It happened quickly. Those who watched him – even in middle school – talk about him almost mythologically. Judd Boswell, who coached Akers at Clinton High School, said he first saw Akers when he entered the eighth grade.

Just as Boswell arrived on the field, Akers took a 95-yard carry for a touchdown — but it was called back because of a holding penalty. Akers followed the play with another long touchdown run for which it was called back another serving the sentence. In the next piece, he again he got out of a scrambling of defenders for another long call.

“They were probably holding the third play,” Boswell said, “but the officials were too tired to replay it.”

In his four years on the varsity, Akers played quarterback and threw for over 8,000 yards. He ran for over 5,000 more. He threw for 78 touchdowns and ran for 71 more.

Local coaches and sportswriters compared his vision, elusiveness and power to the legendary Marcus Dupree. Once, as part of a recruiting pitch, half the Ole Miss football team showed up to one of his games. Another time, Akers was swarmed by autograph seekers to the point that Clinton resorted to hiring a security guard to escort him on and off the bus.

Recruiting services ranked him among the top prospects in the nation. Angela and Conni’s phones were lit up with so many media requests and messages from college coaches that they had to block certain numbers.

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Eventually, Akers developed a relationship with then-Florida State quarterbacks coach Jay Graham. The first time Graham visited Clinton, he ate at a local catfish restaurant and asked the staff about Akers.

“They talked about him and Mrs. Angie,” Graham said. “Usually with a young man, you don’t make people’s eyes and faces light up. (But this case) was not about the footballer. It was about the young man.”

Akers ran for 1,000 yards as a freshman at Florida State and continued to catch up with former Seminoles stars as Dalvin Cook and Warrick Dunn in most statistical categories. The Rams drafted him in the second round with the idea that he could succeed Todd Gurley as the next bell cow in Sean McVay’s system.

Achilles’ tear threw the first wrench into this idea.

The 5 1/2 months after Akers’ first surgery blur together.

A few days after Dr. Neal ElAttrache performed a newer technique called “internal bracing,” which added extra support to the tendon repair, Akers rode a scooter around his home.

“Relax,” Conni called, but Akers wouldn’t.

The Rams built an exercise machine into his home, including an anti-gravity treadmill. It went. Then he ran away. In the middle of the season, McVay suggested that Akers might return that year. It seemed unlikely — until February, when Akers lined up in Super Bowl LVI against him Bengalis.

“Let me be the first to say: It was God first, and then Dr. ElAttrache,” Conni said recently.

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The excitement that accompanied Akers’ return didn’t carry over into the fall of 2022. The Rams lost in Week 1, and McVay said he wants to see an “increased level of urgency and responsibility” from Akers, who only carried the ball three times in that game. The Rams later pulled Akers from practice for what McVay called an “internal” matter.

Akers eventually returned and rushed for 786 yards and seven touchdowns. Another escape for undisclosed reasons in 2023 preceded an eventual trade to the Vikings, who were coached by Kevin O’Connell, who had maintained a relationship with Akers from their time together in Los Angeles. It didn’t take long for Akers to call home to share how much he enjoyed Minnesota, the environment at US Bank Stadium and his Vikings teammates.

“Everywhere has their superstars,” Angela said. “Every team has its guys you know: These are the boys. In most places, those guys are treated a certain way. You don’t have to be one of those guys to be treated like one of those Minnesota guys.”

Knowing the headspace her son was in added excitement when she finally found him in the Atlanta locker room. Akers crouched down. His head was hanging. The worried faces of the Vikings training staff foreshadowed what they would soon learn. Two years after tearing his right Achilles, he tore his left.

In six games for the Vikings this season, Akers has 161 all-purpose yards and one touchdown. (Steve Roberts/Imagn Images)

Driving home from work one evening this summer, Conni called Akers.

He had thought about his son’s perseverance and the way he had made comfortable jumpers with his eyes on the game this fall. Even before Akers officially returned, Conni felt her son’s commitment warranted the call.

“And mom knows I don’t (usually) talk to him like that,” Conni said recently, “but I said, ‘Man, I have to tell you. I really admire you. Because as a man you have faced many adversities.”

You’ve solved it – and overcome it. Impressive pre-season outings with Houston Texans earned him a roster spot, and his early-season production spurred the Vikings on trade for him for the second season in a row. Akers is the main spare roller, offering Aaron Jones breathing, catching flat landings and smiling.

“That smile I saw from him?” Angela said recently. “It was a smile of relief. An “I’m home” smile.