Before Colts Rigoberto Sanchez could punt again, he and his daughter had to learn to walk
INDIANAPOLIS - Rigoberto Sanchez jogs from the Colts sideline out to a space in the green turf at Lucas Oil Stadium where he can be alone.
The Colts punter is 15 yards behind the line of scrimmage and nearly 10 yards back from any other teammate. He transfers weight, left to right and back again on the Achilles tendon he ruptured last year.
It's the quietest moment in a Colts home game after the moment of silence, but he’s bouncing in these moments. He can't see his wife, Cynthia, or his 2-year-old daughter, Bali, but he knows they're here. He feels it in the blood shifting between his feet.
His punts are some of the best in the NFL, growing in length with each week’s distance from that Achilles tear. He is a master of deception, and the same way he hid those tears and fragile emotions, he’ll hide the secrets of aerodynamics and spin rates to create six seconds where a ball flies through the air.
"It’s truly an art to watch," said safety Nick Cross, one of his protectors.
The six seconds of a punt's life are the time he can feel most alive again. It's when his wife and daughter start screaming and all those memories flow of what it took to get back after those days when he couldn't even walk.
The most innocuous play in football has a lot more going on than you know.
A slip on grass
Cynthia almost didn’t make it to training camp the day her husband slipped on the grass and stayed down. She had sent a 9-month-old Bali to the nanny and had some errands to do, and it was one of the final practices at Grand Park for August 2022. But something told her to go that day.
She watched her husband's every movement from the family suite, but when she made it down to the family meeting area, a ball boy told her Rigoberto had slipped during the team sprint.
They feared initially that it was a calf issue, and a punter who'd never had a real injury before was only left to guess. They drove him to the Colts facility, and Cynthia followed along. When she made it indoors, she found him on the trainer’s table and felt a chill.
“I just remember seeing his face of just like, ‘What is happening?’ Almost like he had blacked out,” Cynthia said. “I had never seen him so vulnerable, just out of control. In this league, it’s already so uncontrollable. But that moment for sure was not in our grasp.”
He'd torn his Achilles. His season was over before it could even begin.
With a year and a half left on his contract, his time with the Colts could be as well.
The tear was in the leg he punted with, the brush of the artist. It was the tool he bet on back when he first met Cynthia as soccer players at Butte College in California and told her his plan was to punt in the NFL and was surprised she didn’t laugh. That leg took them to Hawaii for college football and then to Indianapolis in 2017, where he took training camp by storm, made the team, landed a top-10 punter contract, bought a home, built a family and allowed them to chase this life they talked about on the beach in Hawaii.
Now, that golden leg couldn’t even make the gas pedal move.
“It was definitely devastating for me,” Rigoberto said. “I never expected to go through something like that. I worked so hard in the offseason to have a great year.
“And then that happened.”
Soon, he strapped that leg in a walking boot and would barely see it for several months. He’d need a scooter to move around and a ride anywhere he needed to go.
Rigoberto had been through adversity before. He once contracted a cancerous tumor, after all. But it'd never come in this arena, with that leg, which he'd trained to do something few other humans can.
When the tears stopped that day in the trainer's room, he made a declaration:
Things don't happen to you. They happen for you.
Somehow, some way, this moment would need to bring this family together.
After all, he wasn't the only one who needed to learn how to walk.
A loss of power
The cancer scare that entered Rigoberto's life in Nov. 2020 was a jolt, and though they caught it early with the benefit of a pro football team’s access to medicine, a few anxieties formed. Rigoberto and Cynthia had been trying to have kids, and a tumor tied to his family history with the disease brought fears of whether that was possible or even fair.
“It definitely opened my eyes in different ways,” Rigoberto said. “You never think something like that is going to happen, whether it’s an injury or it’s something like that. These are things that happen around the whole world. People face these kinds of challenges every single day. I’m just grateful I was able to catch it in time and that I’m still here.”
Rigoberto had the tumor removed within days of discovery, and soon the cancer presence was gone. It took a couple months, but the fears about whether to bring a child into the world started to fade away, too.
Bali arrived nearly one year to the day of the cancer diagnosis. Named for the Indonesia city with a heavy monsoon season, she represents the unpredictable turns in life as well as the beauty that can come after a storm recedes.
She made it to her first game against the Raiders in January 2022, with Cynthia holding her in a suite.
They were three weeks from the first regular season game in the 2022 season when the Achilles popped.
Instead of punting, Rigoberto was riding around on a scooter on the first floor of their suburban Indianapolis home. In a way, it helped that a newborn didn’t need an explanation for why anything was the way it was.
He spent his afternoons after rehab on a couch, holding Bali, feeling her grow in his arms by the day. When she began to talk, she learned to call him Papi.
The days at rehab were where the stress kicked in. Working with trainer Erin Barill, whom the Colts declined to make available for this story, Rigoberto spent two hours reaching for the smallest bits of a range of motion in the right leg. He’d wiggle his toes and clench a towel. For weeks on end, he couldn’t even do a single calf raise on air.
“It was a battle every day,” Rigoberto said. “The mental side is the hardest part, just not being able to do something when you know you can but your body doesn’t allow you to.”
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The circle for a specialist is always small, and Rigoberto maintained a strong bond with snapper Luke Rhodes. But with only one punter on the active roster at a time, Matt Haack took the isolated, neurotic job that for five straight seasons had belonged to Sanchez.
“He had to deal with seeing (Haack) and seeing him in his position,” Cynthia said. “And that was I think the hardest struggle because Matt genuinely is a good guy…
“But when you don't play... you almost feel like people start to let go of you.”
Rigoberto couldn’t drive with the boot on, so he’d wait at the curb of the players’ parking lot for Cynthia to pull up in their black Porsche Panamera.
But those 13-minute drives home became more than a necessary physical arrangement. They became his therapy. Rigoberto would hoist his leg into the car and proceed to fall apart some days. It was heavy becoming the hobbled ghost of the life he still kind of lived.
The conversations found a way to ping from darkness into light, because that’s what Cynthia has been in his life, and that’s what they created together in that crib at home. They laughed some days and cried on others. He lashed out about the loss of teammates and a sense of purpose, and the two traded words until they found slivers of that purpose in each other again.
“We fell in love during that time,” Cynthia said.
Rigoberto calls them the deepest conversations he’s ever had with his wife.
He realized in them how he was at times too mobile before the injury, moving them from California to Hawaii to Indianapolis and then always taking off for practices, meeting, treatment, film sessions and road trips.
"Our relationship was always good," Rigoberto said, "but I was always away."
In the pursuit of perfecting ball placement and spin rates, he’d lost his grip on what he was really aiming for.
Rehab was about getting that part of his life back, too.
First steps together
The injury created a natural pause, and in the hang time, two first-time parents got to look down on the life that was unfolding so fast. A baby was getting ready to walk.
Bali was there for the in-home rehab sessions. They’d eventually turn them into a race, with her on a walker and him on a scooter, zipping down the hardwood floors. They shared laughs, which also made her upset when he couldn't make it up the stairs to read her a bedtime story.
By early spring, Rigoberto put cleats back on for the first time since the injury.
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The 29-year-old made it back to full-go by training camp, one year removed from the slip in the grass. He learned in the process that he was lucky to avoid injuring the plant leg, which holds all of the body weight on that Achilles. In order to let it heal, he needed to keep his foot extended and the calf raised, which happens to be the motion for a punt.
The battle, he felt, was almost all mental. His style isn't about power but precision. What he needed back in that leg more than anything was courage.
“He can put it where he wants it and disguise it in different ways,” Rhodes said. “He hits balls that some punters are afraid to hit.”
The season started slowly as a result of so many moving parts. In addition to Rigoberto’s return, the Colts had a new special teams coordinator in Brian Mason after Bubba Ventrone had worked with him for every season prior. All-Pro gunner Ashton Dulin was lost for the season to an ACL tear. Through the first three weeks, Rigoberto averaged 44.3 yards per punt and 37.1 net yards per punt, both career lows.
On Sept. 28, he was home after practice on a Thursday and practicing walking with Bali for another day. Her parents let go of her arms and she started to move, one step at a time, but finally on her own.
Her father was trying to find his footing, too. He spent weeks struggling to match the loft of his kicks with his new gunners, and opponents averaged more than 30 yards in returns through the first nine games.
But Mason noticed a shift in Rigoberto on the trip to Germany. Playing for a European crowd in a soccer stadium, Sanchez became a key force in a 10-6 victory over the Patriots in which he booted the ball five times and did not allow a single return.
Ever since then, he's been on a run. He's averaged 46 net punting yards since Week 10, a mark that would lead the NFL if it was for the full season. It's turned his season averages into career highs with 47.9 yards per punt and a net of 42.8.
His first season back from an Achilles tear has become his best yet.
“It’s life, man,” Rigoberto said. “Things are going to happen. You have to just keep chopping away. Luckily I’m back and I’m booming them.
"Things definitely happen for a reason."
Whether he's speaking about the cancer or the Achilles can be hard to tell sometimes.
A year after the Colts went 4-12-1 without him, they are now 9-7 with him, needing a win over the Texans on Saturday night at Lucas Oil Stadium to reach the playoffs. It's the type of matchup a punter can swing by flipping the field against soon-to-be AFC Offensive Rookie of the Year C.J. Stroud.
Rigoberto’s recovery has imbedded him in the fabric of this Colts season. After all, many of his teammates were running sprints with him the day he went down. And they’ve all been looking for a way back from what happened to them in 2022.
“It makes it a lot easier to protect for him and make sure he gets all of his punts off," Cross said.
Ever since he tore his Achilles entering the the final year of his contract, Rigoberto and his family decided to give up their suite for home games, as it was a cost that Cynthia compares to buying a Toyota Corolla.
From the stands, Cynthia will say a prayer to ask that Rigoberto can walk off the field safe.
Bali will squirm in her No. 8 shirt as the roar of the crowd and the shaking of the seats washes over her.
“Excuse my language,” Cynthia said, “but she (expletive) loves football.”
The daughter who arrived in his life between a cancer scare and an Achilles tear just turned 2 years old. She can walk now, and so can he.
"Go Papi!" she'll scream. "Papi punt! Papi kick!"
And he'll jog out onto the field again, out to that green space behind the punt team, where he looks to be alone but isn't.
Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: Rigoberto Sanchez had to learn how to walk with his daughter
