The story behind Vikings RB Cam Akers' emotional return from a second torn Achilles

Some smiles are more significant than others, and this one fit the bill.

Pull up the Week 11 game between the Vikings and Titans. Fast-forward to a Minnesota touchdown pass late in the third quarter. Follow the ball from quarterback Sam Darnold’s fingertips to running back Cam Akers’ hands in the corner of the end zone, then get ready to press pause.

Akers with his first receiving TD of the season!

📺: #MINvsTEN on CBS/Paramount+
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— NFL (@NFL) November 17, 2024

Akers will toss the ball into the sky. He’ll lower his head to find and celebrate with his teammates. That’s when you’ll see it. His teeth shimmering. His eyes squinting. Positive energy pouring from his face.

Akers wouldn’t talk about it. About 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 statistics say Akers should not be here — not in an NFL end zone, not even on an NFL field. He has overcome an injury that tends to be a death knell for running backs … and he’s done it twice. Akers’ recovery arc is as much about himself as it is about others. How you play the hand you’ve been dealt, and how those around you shape your perspective.

Last November, Akers’ mother, Angela Neal, zig-zagged the concourse inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, searching for the elevators.

Her mind was racing. She had just watched her son, a running back for the Vikings, crumble to the turf while trying to sidestep a tackler. The trainers ushered Akers into the locker room. Angela’s instinct: Find and comfort him.

While darting through the tunnel on the ground floor, her phone buzzed. It was Akers.

“Mom,” he said.

She could tell he had been crying.

“Where are you?” Akers asked.

She, too, struggled to speak. “I’m … 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’d worked late the night before and dozed off during the game. When he awoke to his son’s call, while still seeing the Vikings and Falcons hashing it out on television in front of him, he was dazed. He thought his mind got stuck amid a bad dream.

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

“We knew we were headed for a journey immediately,” Conni said.

The recent history of running backs who had torn their Achilles caused concern. In 2010, the injury ended LenDale White’s career. The same happened to Chris “Beanie” Wells in 2013, Vick Ballard in 2014 and Arian Foster in 2015. Few besides D’Onta Foreman had ever returned to play a meaningful role.

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

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

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

“I would just sit in the room, watching her breathe,” Akers said years ago. “She would be asleep, and I would just watch her chest go up and down, make sure she was all right.”

Angela lost weight. Her skin darkened. Chemotherapy resulted in the loss of her hair. As she navigated her recovery, eventually beating the cancer, Akers fell in love with football.

It happened fast. 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 eighth grade.

Just as Boswell arrived at the field, Akers took a carry 95 yards for a touchdown — but it was called back due to a holding penalty. Akers followed the play up with another long touchdown run that was called back for another holding penalty. On the next play, he again emerged from a jumble of defenders for another long house call.

“They were probably holding on the third play,” Boswell said, “but the officials were too damn tired to do it over again.”

In his four years on 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 strength to the legendary Marcus Dupree. Once, as part of a recruiting pitch, half of 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 usher him to and from the bus.

Recruiting services ranked him among the best prospects in the nation. Angela’s 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 running backs 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 get people’s eyes and faces to glow. (But this case) wasn’t about the football player. It was about the young man.”

Akers ran for 1,000 yards as a freshman at Florida State and went on to approach former Seminoles stars like 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.

The Achilles tear threw the first wrench into that idea.

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

A couple of days after Dr. Neal ElAttrache executed a newer technique called “internal bracing,” which added extra support atop the tendon repair, Akers wheeled a scooter around his house.

“Chill out,” Conni hollered, but Akers wouldn’t.

The Rams built a training apparatus in his house, including an anti-gravity treadmill. He walked. Then he ran. In the middle of the season, McVay suggested Akers might return that year. It seemed unlikely — until February when Akers suited up in Super Bowl LVI against the Bengals.

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

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The excitement accompanying Akers’ comeback did not continue into the fall of 2022. The Rams lost in Week 1, and McVay said he wanted to see an “increased level of urgency and accountability snap in and snap out” from Akers, who had only carried the ball three times in that game. The Rams later held Akers out of practice for what McVay termed an “internal” matter.

Akers ultimately returned and rushed for 786 yards and seven touchdowns. Another benching 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 U.S. Bank Stadium and his Vikings teammates.

“Everywhere has their superstars,” Angela said. “Every team has their guys that you know: These are the guys. 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 guys in Minnesota.”

Knowing the headspace her son had been in added to the emotion when she finally found him in the locker room in Atlanta. Akers slouched. His head hung. The Vikings training staff’s concerned faces foreshadowed what they would soon learn. Two years after rupturing his right Achilles, he’d ruptured his left one.

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

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

He’d been thinking about his son’s perseverance and how he’d been box jumping comfortably with an eye on playing this fall. Even before Akers officially returned, Conni felt his son’s commitment warranted the call.

“And Mom knows I don’t (usually) talk to him like this,” Conni said recently, “but I said, ‘Man, I got to tell you. I really admire you. Because as a man, you’ve dealt with a lot of adversity.”

Dealt with it — and overcome it. Impressive preseason outings with the Houston Texans earned him a roster spot, and his early season production spurred the Vikings to trade for him for the second straight season. Akers is the primary backup running back, providing Aaron Jones breathers, catching touchdowns in the flat and smiling.

“That smile we saw from him?” Angela said recently. “That was a smile of relief. A smile of, ‘I’m home.’”