Thursday, April 24, 2008

The Silent Honor of the Hockey Player

In some circles (mostly those that rhyme with "concussion gourds"), the Capitals were -- are, for that matter -- a "soft" team. That adjective is especially derogatory to a player in a sport where an ability to play with a physical edge is among the sport's paramount virtues.

Well...in addition to Chris Clark (groin), Michael Nylander (shoulder), and Brian Pothier (career-threatening concussion) having missed considerable time this year, we learned this in this morning's report on the Capitals in the Washington Post...

"[Bruce] Boudreau said [Shaone] Morrisonn played the final two weeks of the season with a broken jaw and that [Boyd] Gordon played with a torn hamstring in the playoffs. [Alex] Ovechkin also was nursing an injury for the final month of the season..."


And Jeff Schultz -- who seems to have been designated the poster boy for whatever perceived lack of physical play the Caps possess -- also missed the last several games with an "upper body" injury, and Mike Green had a hip pointer.

Ask yourself...if you had a torn hamstring, a broken jaw, or an injury that even the club still won't disclose, and your job involved a desk and a chair, would you still have been showing up every day without missing time? These guys came to work and performed admirably when their very job was directly related to and impacted by the injuries they had. And there was not a peep about it from the players, even after the fact. Hockey players don't indulge in such things.

So, if you do nothing else this summer, dear Caps fans -- well, some of you (you know who you are) -- make a resolution...

"I hereby swear that from this moment forward, I will just shut the *&$# up about players being 'soft.'"

4 comments:

Hooks Orpik said...

That is always an astonishing moment when a recently eliminated team announces some of the injuries that their boys have been playing through.

I wasn't surprised to learn Morrisonn was still hurting, but a broken jaw (and a torn up shoulder too)? That's pretty amazing.

By the way, if you didn't see, some clown wrote a Caps Eulogy on the new Yahoo sportsblog.

The Peerless said...

Some folks try to be funny in an edgy sort of way...then there is that sort of thing.

Anonymous said...

C'mon Peerless, it wasn't *that* bad. Though for the life of me I can't imagine why the Pens needed to be mentioned in a eulogy for the Caps season.

Whatever. Still like reading your posts, hooks (here and elsewhere). For a Pens fan, you're fairly level-headed.

Anonymous said...

I didn't see any injury excuse offered in the papers for Viktor "Snuggle Bear" Kozlov.