BURSTEDMONTON — My favorite story about pain and hockey played out over 40 years ago in a Hartford hotel room. There an old defenceman named Lee Fogolin — a second generation NHL pain-tolerator — was having an issue with a tooth that was abscessing underneath a cap.
It was game day, and back in 1981, they didn’t rush dentists to the Ritz Carlton at the whim of some player with a toothache. Fogolin wanted to play that night against the Whalers, and he needed that cap removed — stat!
So he grabbed a curtain hook off the hotel drapes, sidled up to the bathroom mirror, opened wide, and used the sharp end of the metal hook to pry that cap off of his aching tooth. Look it up kids: a curtain hook.
They wouldn’t let you on a plane with one of those today.
Hockey’s culture of playing through pain has been passed down through the ages. And on the same Thursday night this week, we witnessed Ottawa’s Brady Tkachuk speak through a butchered upper lip about the OT winner he’d just scored — even though he couldn’t feel his own face —while in Edmonton Zach Hyman scored a goal with a freshly broken nose. Afterwards, teammates Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Mattias Ekholm sang Hyman’s praises from behind a freshly stitched upper lip and a few-days-old nose zipper, respectively.
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“Hockey players,” began Boston’s Brad Marchand, “they want to play through anything. You have to. I mean, you’re rarely healthy in a season of hockey.”
Every player in the game has an example of some incident through which their own pain tolerance was heightened through osmosis, because a teammate played through pain. The longer the playoff run, generally, the more grim the tale.
“I know when I came in, I saw guys like Rex (Mark Recchi) play through a kidney stone one day. Bergy (Patrice Bergeron) played with a punctured lung, and (after) he’d had surgery on his jaw,” Marchand said. “You break a bone, you get a cut, you pull a muscle — you don’t feel good sitting out for things like that. So you just don’t. You play through it.
“That’s always how it’s been here, and it just bleeds through the lineup.”
Get it? Bleeds through the lineup?
Hyman took a deflected Bouch Bomb off the beak on Monday, leaving halfway through the second period with his nose shifted noticeably to the right side of his face. He was back on the bench when the third period began wearing a face shield, with watery eyes and gauze the size of a two small mice jammed up each nostril.
“I was really fortunate, all things considered,” said Hyman, noting that he could have been struck in the cheek or eye, perhaps breaking a bone that really matters.
What was that third period like for Hyman?
“It wouldn’t stop bleeding,” he said. “We stuffed gauze up there, but the hardest part is you can’t breathe, and you’re dealing with blood. And if (the blood) can’t get out your nose, it’s going into your mouth.”
It was the “fifth or sixth” time Hyman has broken his prodigious proboscis, including an incident when he was jumping on his parents’ bed as a kid, and at a paintball facility during a birthday party.
On Tuesday, he went to the doctor to have his nose re-set — a more pleasant term for “re-broken.”
When the doctor grabbed Hyman’s nose and relocated it to its proper location, Hyman said, “It sounded like a bag of chips.”
This is the point where we are supposed to denigrate the other sports by comparison. Where we reference the baseball pitcher with a blister, or Joel Embiid missing at least a week with a “sinus fracture.”
But for me, what makes hockey unique is how the duty to play through pain has wormed its way into the sport’s culture. One player’s pain threshold has become a lever that raises many players’ devotion.
That busted nose becomes an opportunity for Hyman to provide added motivation to his team during a long, tedious season.
“It gives the team a big boost,” Marchand said. “When guys are playing through injuries like that, and are willing put their body on the line, those are big moments for a group. They bring you together, and it shows a lot of respect between teammates. You build off of that.
“But you know, that’s just always kind of been the way it is. Guys want to play through injuries for each other.”
Hey, what’s a busted nose between friends?
“It’s the lower body stuff that is difficult. Back injuries, hip injuries, knee injuries — that’s where it gets hard, because it affects your skating,” Marchand said. “Cuts, broken bones in the face, stuff like that, it doesn’t affect your skating. Which is where the game is played nowadays.”
We’ll close on another of my favourites, an old utility forward named Brent Gilchrist, who had a chronic abdominal-groin muscle issue. The Detroit Red Wings were on a Stanley Cup run in 1998, and Gilchrist was receiving pre-game injections prior to every game in the Final so he would be able to play.
When the needle went into Gilchrist’s gut back in the trainer’s room, legend has it that his teammates could hear his screams of pain in the dressing room. It became, a Red Wing once told me, a unifying force before each game.
As in, “Look what Gilly is willing to go through to win the Stanley Cup.”
It’s a hell of a tale, but personally, I have my doubts about that story.
I mean, who ever heard of a hockey player screaming in pain like that?
