It's not every offseason story that starts with a Super Bowl and ends with a gunshot wound, but that's the road Keion White has been on since February. Early on the morning of February 10, roughly 12 hours after Super Bowl LX wrapped at Levi's Stadium, White was shot in the ankle during a scuffle at a business on San Francisco's Mission Street. Police said a verbal altercation between two groups turned into gunfire, and White, by his own account, wasn't even the target.
After getting shot in the ankle in February, 49ers DE Keion White is good to go -- even though he says it was "touch-and-go" just before training camp. t.co/cXY8CyrBhu
White has been remarkably candid about how close the whole thing came to derailing his season entirely. He broke his talus and needed surgery, walking away with two screws now holding the bone together — 'symmetrical,' as he's joked, since he already had hardware in the other ankle. He's also said he didn't even clock that he'd been shot until about 5 minutes after it happened, which is either shock, adrenaline, or just a guy who's built different.
The recovery timeline was never a straight line. White has admitted the whole process was 'touch-and-go' right up until training camp opened, which is a notably honest thing for a player to say about his own availability heading into a contract year with a new team. San Francisco only landed White via trade from New England, a former second-round pick the Patriots moved off after he never quite found a fit in their scheme — the kind of swing-for-upside pickup that becomes a much bigger story if the guy can't take the field.
That's what makes the clearance news matter beyond just one player's health update. White already logged 17 defensive snaps in the preseason finale and made the 53-man roster, so this isn't a hope-so — it's a proof-of-concept that's already happened on a football field. San Francisco's defensive line has taken hits at multiple spots this year, and getting a rotational pass rusher back at full strength instead of on a pitch count is exactly the kind of margin that shows up in December.
White's own telling of the story — calm in the moment, blunt about how shaky the recovery actually was — is doing a lot of the lifting here, since there's no injury report line that captures 'shot in the ankle hours after the Super Bowl, cleared for the opener' with any nuance. For now, the 49ers get to file this under good news: a depth piece up front who was genuinely lucky to be walking around, let alone rushing the passer, is walking onto the field for Week 1.