For the third time in 12 months, Penn men's basketball guard Duane King will be forced off the basketball court due to injury.
King underwent surgery for a stress fracture in his left foot on Friday, as doctors placed a screw in his fifth metatarsal bone.
He is expected to be sidelined for six weeks. Penn's first game, at Georgia Tech on Nov. 19, is in eight weeks.
"I didn't want it to get too bad," King said. "Last year, the stress fracture in my foot eventually broke and I didn't want that to happen again, so I took the go-ahead and got the surgery done."
The injury King suffered a year ago, a broken fifth metatarsal in his right foot, happened after he played for a month in pain on a stress fracture.
The junior guard had thought that fracture, which was suffered in an early-semester pickup game, was originally just an ankle sprain.
King's stress fracture this year occurred approximately three weeks ago while he was trying to make a cut along the baseline in a pickup game.
"I waited for a while, but something told me something's wrong," King said. "It wasn't getting better, and it happened last year, so I decided to get it checked out."
Today, five days after his surgery, King will be fitted with a boot cast. Last year, it took the Quakers guard nearly three weeks to get to that point.
"Already I'm ahead of schedule," King said. "I have no pain."
King, who averaged 3.3 points in 12 games in 2000-01, missed several more weeks of last year's season with a sprained MCL in his right knee.
"It's an unfortunate thing that it's happened to me," King said. "I don't know why. I keep my body in good shape."
King spent the summer in Philadelphia, playing four days a week with pros and college players at La Salle. He wanted to play two summers ago, but wasn't accepted until last summer.
"It was just real competitive there," King said. "And you need the competition to see where you stand -- especially since it's the best competition."
The 6'5" King, who won't be allowed to practice at full strength until around Nov. 1, will spend the next few weeks locked into a regiment of lifting, biking, jump roping and possibly jogging.
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