Don't be alarmed in the coming months, and years, if you see Greg Oden walking with a limp.
"I'm used to having a little limp in my walk,'' Oden said.
The reason is because Oden's right leg is slightly shorter than his left leg, probably as a result of having hip surgery when he was in 6th grade. During the surgery, a pin was placed in his right hip.
"That was a surprise,'' Oden remembers. "I limped for months, and my friends would always tell me to 'suck it up Greg', but one day I finally went to the doctor to check it out. My mom had to work that day, so I got an X-ray and took the bus home. When I got off the bus, I saw my mom driving around. She had gotten the results of the X-rays and picked me up and took me back to the hospital. We had the surgery that day.''
As Oden describes it, the bone that attaches his leg to his hip "was hanging on for dear life".
"That's why I had to have the surgery that day, because nobody knew how much longer it was going to hold on,'' Oden said.
Blazers athletic trainer Jay Jensen recently experimented with different orthopedic pads to put in Oden's right shoe. He found that a 9/16th pad caused Oden's surgically-repaired right knee to ache. So they have settled on a 5/8th pad, which allows Oden to walk with his now-normal gait, which has the appearance of a limp.
"That's just the way he walks now out of habit,'' Jensen said.
Meanwhile, the team has hired a nutritionist and a cook for Oden to set the groundwork for a healthy diet.
And when all the fuss surfaced this weekend about Oden's weight being up to 282 pounds - nearly all of it muscle - Oden argued that it had nothing to do with his weight training.
"I don't think it's the lifting that is making me gain all the weight,'' Oden said. "It's the eating. I'm eating five meals a day. I can't do anything about it, because even if I lift once or twice a week, I'm going to put on weight because I haven't been running at all. I can't run at all.''
Some fans have suggested to me that it seems abnormal for Oden to gain as much muscle weight as he has since the team drafted him in June. But I asked Jensen, and he said it is not out of the ordinary.
"He's gone from not doing anything to all of the sudden being given the green light to lift, and he does it everyday,'' Jensen said. "It's is job. So gaining all that muscle in six months? No, it's not abnormal. He's eating healthy, and has a good diet.''
--Quick