Healthy Hedgecock back to form

Madison Hedgecock, who had surgery to repair a torn labrum in his shoulder during the offseason, was asked how the joint felt after the first preseason game.

"Fine," he said, and then paused. "I wouldn't tell you if it wasn't."

That's true. Because last year when it wasn't fine, he didn't tell anybody. On the sixth snap of the preseason opener against the Carolina Panthers, Hedgecock came through the line on a BOB block - back on backer - and hit safety Chris Harris. Pop.

"That was the play that did it," he said. "I thought it would get better. And it didn't."

Hedgecock was such an integral part of the Giants' league-leading rushing attack in 2008, when they had two 1,000-yard backs. He was the bulldozer clearing a path for Brandon Jacobs and Derrick Ward. But without power in his shoulder for all of 2009, he tried to compensate. He developed bad habits. He was not the player he was the previous year.

Of course hardly anyone involved in the Giants' running game was. Jacobs played the whole season with a knee injury and the offensive line was dealing with its own series of dings and dents. The result was a miserable season in which the once-vaunted running game was diminished to an afterthought.

While Jacobs and the line took their share of the heat for the lack of production, they had injuries to point to. Hedgecock suffered his pain - and his sagging performance - in near silence. Fullbacks often toil in obscurity; injured fullbacks become virtually invisible.

"You show up with a bandage on your head and everybody says 'Oh, what happened to you?'" Hedgecock said. "You have an internal shoulder injury, the only thing that results is you can't hurt somebody on the field. And it's like 'What's up with this guy?' You couldn't see what was wrong with me."

You could see it on the stat sheet. And in the film room, where the coaching staff knew Hedgecock was banged up.

"I don't think there's any question that he was playing hurt," Tom Coughlin said. "We were still hitting the targets pretty good, but we didn't get as many people moved out of the hole as we were accustomed to."

It was like going hunting, Hedgecock said, and not having any bullets. He could see the prey, put linebackers in his crosshairs, but there was nothing but a disappointing click when he tried to pull the trigger.

Now Hedgecock is fully loaded. He is hurt no longer (but, like he said, he wouldn't tell us if he was). He had surgery to fix the shoulder two days after the season ended and worked hard to rehab and get strength back into it. He's also worked to shed the bad habits that formed from compensating for the injury last year.

"I thought he played a lot better," Coughlin said of the improvement from the first to the second preseason game. "He listened to what he needed to improve upon and let's hope he does it again."

If the Giants' running game is to come back as a dominating force in 2010 the way Coughlin and others want it to, then they'll need a healthy Jacobs and Ahmad Bradshaw. They'll need a healthy offensive line. And, although it may not be obvious to onlookers, they'll need Hedgecock.

"I feel like I have something to prove like the rest of the people with us, as a team, getting back to the way we were a couple of years ago," Hedgecock said. "That's something only time will tell."