(Photo by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images)
It was used as yet another example of why hockey players are supposedly the toughest human beings on the face of the Earth.
Brent Gilchrist, a forward for the Red Wings with suspect talent but not suspect determination, made his teammates sick, literally, in the 1998 postseason.
Not that we knew anything about it at the time.
Playoff hockey is filled with mind games and secret intelligence that would make the CIA proud.
Never is this more evident than when it comes to player injuries.
Coaches smirk, players wink. General managers divert attention.
It’s a very well-orchestrated operation.
The NHL doesn’t require teams to divulge details of player injuries, an option that is taken advantage of, whole-heartedly.
Guys who are out of the lineup have “upper body injuries.”
Smirk. Wink.
Guys who are playing but who clearly don’t look like themselves are merely struggling. There’s nothing the matter with them.
Smirk. Wink.
It’s not until that team’s playoff run is over with, that we’re told the truth.
Gilchrist, we were told once the intelligence officers for the Red Wings deemed it OK, had played the entire post-season with a torn groin.
Try getting out of bed with one of those without sinking back onto the mattress, sobbing in pain.
Yet Gilchrist, not wanting to miss out on what he believed to be an excellent chance to win his first Stanley Cup, not only got out of bed, he dragged his butt to the hockey rink and proceeded to make even the most hardened of his teammates look away in disgust.
Gilchrist, it was disclosed, would have the training staff inject his groin with syringes the size of knitting needles, so that he could be administered the proper amount of cortisone, and in the precise spot, so the pain could be dulled enough for him to play.
Sometimes the cortisone would wear off, and Gilchrist would undergo the procedure during games—whether between periods or between shifts.
Other Red Wings players reported becoming almost sick to their stomachs, having accidentally catching a glimpse of what Brent Gilchrist was enduring, just so he could play some hockey.
The Red Wings played 22 playoff games that spring, which culminated in their second straight Stanley Cup. Gilchrist, with his mangled groin with the track marks, participated in 15 of them.
The extent of his injury was so severe that Gilchrist only managed to play in five games for the Red Wings the following season. It was acknowledged that his decision not to have surgery when he should have—choosing instead to play in the playoffs—cost him basically the whole next season due to belated surgery and recovery.
But he had himself his Stanley Cup—the only one of his career.
That’s a hockey player for you, eh?
Baseball players are wimps!
They sit down if they have a hangnail!
Can’t even play when it’s raining!
I have two words for you and your myths:
Brandon, and Inge.
Inge, the Tigers’ marvelous third baseman, is, under full disclosure, authoring one of the gutsiest feats by any athlete we’ve seen in Detroit—Gilchrist included.
Inge is playing on one leg for the Tigers right now—and he’s still one of the best third basemen in the game, defensively.
Correction: Inge is playing on, at best, two-thirds of one leg.
Rod Allen, the astute analyst for Fox Sports Detroit, put it right.
“There’s a difference between playing in pain, and playing injured,” Allen said Friday night as the Tigers were embroiled in yet another tight ballgame, in Oakland.
“And Brandon Inge is injured.”
No kidding.
This isn’t the NHL, so we’re all able to marvel at what Inge is putting himself through, just so he can do whatever he can to help shove the Tigers across the finish line before the White Sox or the Twins.
His knees are killing him—the left one being the worst of the two.
“Excruciating” has been used to describe the pain.
“Unbelievable” is what I’d use to describe his being on the field, and not in the hospital, his leg propped up and recovering from the surgeon’s knife.
Inge has what doctors say is about a 75 percent tear in the middle portion of the patella tendon in his left knee.
Yeah. That’s right.
The right knee hurts him, too.
But, as Allen said, the right knee is just pain. The left knee is injured.
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