MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Athlete’s fight for life broadcast live
I focused in the blog on some of the wider implications of Ware’s injury but not so much on the impact of seeing the injury.
I haven’t looked it up on YouTube and don’t have any intention of doing so, but it seems to have put one question in particular in the foreground: is it the worst sports injury to be seen on television?
If you’re of an age — like me — to remember the popularity of the American Football broadcasts of the early ’80s, then you probably recall the gold standard when it comes to dreadful televised injuries: Joe Theismann’s terrible leg break in 1985 when playing for the Washington Redskins in the NFL, dubbed ‘The Hit That No One Who Saw It Can Ever Forget’ by The Washington Post.
There have been bad injuries since: 11 years after Theismann’s career-ending injury, David Busst of Coventry suffered a horrific leg break against Manchester United.
There are apocryphal stories of players getting sick when they saw what had occurred, and Busst’s career ended, effectively, as a result.
(I say effectively because doctors blamed the MRSA infections he suffered after the break for his retirement, rather than the mind-boggling 26 operations he endured to repair the damage.)
In the last few years there have been some pretty eye-popping rugby injuries, though many have been of the ‘is-that-what-I-think-it-is’ type: consider Geordan Murphy’s leg break against Scotland before the 2003 World Cup, or the similar injury suffered by Tomás O’Leary in Musgrave Park just ahead of the 2009 Lions tour.
In both cases the challenges looked pretty innocuous, until the slow-motion cameras showed just what had happened to the bones in question...
However, by common consent there is only one winner when it comes to TV injuries.
In 1989 Clint Malarchuk, the net-minder for the Buffalo Sabres of the NHL, had his jugular vein accidentally slashed by an opponent’s skate in a game, and almost bled to death.
The television station covering the game didn’t show the player bleeding, switching to a commercial break, but those in the stadium had a close-up view of the blood spouting from Malarchuk’s neck. Eleven spectators fainted and two people had heart attacks. Three of the players on the ice vomited there and then.
Malarchuk thought he was going to die — he begged his team-mates to get him off the ice so that his mother wouldn’t see her son die on television — and he probably would have, had it not been for one stroke of luck.
His team’s medic had seen combat with the army in Vietnam and kept his cool, slipping his fingers into Malarchuk’s neck to pinch the end of the vein closed. He kept the goalkeeper alive until doctors arrived.
They repaired the damage. It only took them 300 stitches.
At the moment, your columnist is trying to track down a writer in the States for a chat.
No great hassle — the man’s just on the road for a few days — but the search coincided with a pal asking last week about my strangest experience in this job.
Well, one of them occurred a few years ago when Samuel L Jackson, he of Pulp Fiction, Snakes On A Plane, etc, was coming to Ireland to play in JP McManus’s celebrity pro-am. Jackson, a big sports fan, was available for interview ahead of his arrival, so yours truly was deputed to ring him. The night in question, however, the small girl who rules my house with a tiny iron fist wasn’t in the best of humour, so I traipsed out to the car to make the call. In fairness, Jackson answered on the first ring and away we went.
It was teatime, and one of the nice old ladies who lives down the hill was strolling over to the shop for a bottle of milk as the interview rolled on.
When she came back from the shop she gave me a pleasant nod as I sat in the car, and I nodded back even as Samuel L. Jackson was saying he didn’t mind at all that people come up and ask him to say, “Royale with cheese, you know what I’m saying?”
Strange. And strangely enjoyable.
Declan Kidney left the Irish job this week. You know that, of course. It was interesting to see Ronan O’Gara refer to the nature of the business following Kidney’s departure. “Ruthless” was the word he used, which is accurate enough.
The consensus had built up a few weeks ago that Kidney wouldn’t be long more in the hot seat, and there’s a fair argument to be made that after three years, say, a coach should move on anyway — that he’s said all he has to say and that the players aren’t listening any more.
Something this observer took away from this year’s Six Nations, though, is the ongoing reluctance to apportion blame to those players for playing poorly. Kidney and his coaching team took the flak for some underwhelming performances, but were the helpings of flak (ahem) disproportionate? Certainly coaches must take responsibility: they get the plaudits when the team wins, so criticism legitimately comes their way when the team doesn’t perform. This columnist doesn’t subscribe to the old ‘once they get over the whitewash you can’t help them any more’, but if you do, where does that leave evaluation of the players? There’s a nervousness when it comes to criticising international rugby players for the simple reason that like elephants, they never forget, and like those large mammals, there are comparatively few of them surviving in the wild (please retire this metaphor — ed.)
You can get away with pointing out the poverty of a GAA player’s displays because there are 32 counties, providing several hundred alternatives, if he takes it personally and gets the hump. Also, even the biggest names lose their relevance when they exit the championship; you don’t have to worry about someone’s feelings if they’ve “gone back to the club” in early June.
You can slate a Republic of Ireland soccer international because by and large they don’t even live in the country, much less take cognisance of what’s said about them here.
Though that didn’t save a pal who worked for another newspaper having his morning coffee spoiled a few years ago. Said journo had covered a Premier League game the previous Saturday when his phone rang in the office midweek: on the line was a player he had described as “hapless” in his report. To this day said pal says it was either conclusive proof that footballers have far too much time on their hands altogether, or the greatest wind-up of all time.
But there are only a few rugby players, and the vast majority of them live here. If you criticise someone’s performance against France or England, they’ll remember it when you meet them on provincial duty.
Hence the safety in proclaiming the end of Kidney’s reign for the last couple of weeks. And the lack of interest in criticising those who were playing for him.
It was difficult picking the last fruit for the top of the cake yesterday in terms of baking the column (please, Delia, enough — ed).
I was going to talk about the decline in Gaelic football skills until Cillian O’Connor hit two sideline kicks to win the league game in Páirc Uí Chaoimh; first one from the left wing which he curled over with his instep, then an outside-of-the-boot special from the right wing.
That was the last score, and it was as if a switch in every player’s head clicked into place with the thought: don’t spoil that as a take-home memory for the diehards freezing in the stand.
Something I can’t let pass, however, was the plethora of tweets I saw when I got home focusing on Munster’s outstanding win over Harlequins in the Heineken Cup.
Not the nitty-gritty of how victory was fashioned but the faux-modest confessions that “oh I backed O’Connell at 5,000 to 1 to captain the Lions, they all called me a fool then but hey, I believed with all my heart...” (Is that 140 characters? Because it seems a little long to me — ed). That’s your problem, boss. You don’t have the soul of a baker.
