Rudy Gay was a cap casualty in Memphis but is making the best of his situation in Toronto. He’s arguably one of the more talented small forwards in the league, so we hope he gets a chance to win.
Earlier this off-season, Gay underwent eye surgery. Gay has never been confused with being a great shooter in his career (decent, but not great), so was this to blame?
One advantage he’ll have heading into next season: He recently had an operation to correct the vision in one of his eyes, an issue that was first reported back in March in the National Post. “I did have vision problems,” Gay confesses, sitting up on the trainer’s table after Gray finishes stretching out his muscles. “Actually, it was terrible. I could hardly get my license.” The National Post reported that he refused to wear the contact lenses he desperately needed, which was correct: “I have a stigma about that stuff—I can’t put anything up my nose and I can’t touch my eyes. I think that just comes from me growing up seeing people on drugs—I got over my stigma of needles, but I couldn’t do any of that other stuff. I couldn’t wear contacts. I wore glasses, sometimes.”
Gay finally had the operation to clear up his sight early this summer. “It wasn’t even a regular operation,” he explains. “It was some kind of crazy operation that took a lot more time to heal than I thought. It sucked. They had to patch it up [after], and I had to take eye drops, all stuff that I hated. But I had to do it. It’s crazy because as much work as I’m putting in working on my shot, if I come back shooting [a better] percent from the three-point line, everybody’s gonna say it’s ’cause of my vision, not the hard work I’m putting in.”
H/T: SLAM
