Bob Brooks(EDITOR'S NOTE: Sportscaster Bob Brooks had surgery March 13 due to complications from a hiatal hernia. He spent one week in the hospital and is recovering at his home in Cedar Rapids).

I'm trying to get back in the ballgame!

I'm looking forward to rehabbing and getting back to the sports desk at K-Memory. I'm anxious to do that, but not over-anxious.

The situation is that the rehab is being done at home. It's going, but it's going to take some time and I thus have seen the world of sports in a very, very different light by following on television instead of in person. And as we've been talking here at my home, you think of the things that have happened in sports in the last few days.The world has been turned upside-down by developments with the Peyton Manning story, the Tim Tebow story and the National Football League's cleansing of itself. And along with the Madness of March and the basketball tournament coming down to the title game, it is an amazing thing to see sometimes.

Even though you wouldn't want to go through what I went through, the amazing thing is that you've got to stick with it every, every day and keep moving forward. With the baseball season coming up and with all of the personalities that have been brought forward in recent days, I never could have dreamed about the things that are being tossed around.

It all goes back to one thing in my view, and that is selling the public on that particular sport. I've seen through television how passionate these people get about their Hollywood-type sports heroes. It's really unbelievable.

By being forced to watch and rather immobile, it gives you a very, very different perspective. But that is about the only plus, I can figure, out of my operation.

In talking about my stay at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and talking about overviews of things ... Over at Kinnick Stadium, you can see a great organization doing great things in football. You can see the improvement that has been made, remember the games that have been played and remember what is coming up for the future, which looks very, very bright.

By the same token, with all of the people who helped me through this situation - and there was hero after hero at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics - everybody became All-Americans in my book.

(Bob Brooks is sports director at KMRY and has been one of the leading voices of college and prep sports in Eastern Iowa for more than 65 years. He is a 10-time winner of the Iowa Sportscaster of the Year Award, and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana in 2004. His sports reports can be heard weekday afternoons at 4:30 and 5:30, and Saturdays at 6:40 for the Hawkeye football wrap-up.)