BREAKING BAD
Knicks latest team to experience injury bug plaguing sports
MAYBE it was always like this. After all, Joe Namath once missed 30 out of 56 starts in a four-season stretch between 1970 and ’73. Frank Gifford was a glamorous, unscathed football prince one second, laid flat by Chuck Bednarik the next, sent out of football for a whole year.
Not just around here, either: All it took was one stray pitch from a California Angel named Jack Hamilton to immediately change the trajectory of young Red Sox star Tony Conigliaro’s career — and life — one awful summer night in 1967.
Injuries have always been the depressing flip side of sports.
It just seems now, in a time when football players hit harder, when basketball players soar higher, when fastballs regularly clock in at 99 mph, the shadow is everywhere, existent in every game, every moment. If injuries used to feel like an occasionally fluky reality, they seem like something else now: a constant, unwanted companion. “Guys are stronger now, and faster, and they do things that were mostly unheard of when I was playing, which wasn’t that long ago,” Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek said earlier this season. “But once in a while you learn the hard way that they also aren’t invincible.” Hornacek was talking a few days after Gordon Hayward of the Boston Celtics experienced one of the most frightful moments a professional athlete has ever endured, blowing out his ankle on opening night of this season, all of it perfectly captured in high-definition by a dozen television cameras. Hayward had executed that same play a thousand times. This time, he landed wrong, his ankle in tatters. It happens that quickly. Hornacek’s best player, Kristaps Porzingis, has become something of a case study in the way modern injuries occur and, more relevantly, how they are feared. Porzingis has had his share of physical issues this year — elbow, ankle, knee — and with each additional malady, there has come to be something of a silent — and sometimes not-so-silent — gasp that accompanies him each time he leaves his feet.
It’s involuntary, too. Fans don’t want to think about this stuff constantly, but it’s become impossible not to. It took one pitch to effectively end Noah Syndergaard’s 2017 season, for instance, a torn lat muscle suffered in Washington on April 30 that limited him to five starts. Yet it felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy: Every time Syndergaard uncorks 100-mph heaters, Mets fans wince, waiting for him to wince. It’s how sports fans are conditioned now.
It’s the same way with Odell Beckham Jr., capable of doing so many breathtaking things with his body — things that almost always feel like they could, even
should,
end badly. Because all it takes is one bad moment: For three years, he did some indescribable things.
Then, on Aug. 21, in a preseason game against Cleveland, Beckham looked like he might have suffered a catastrophic injury when the Browns’ Briean Boddy-Calhoun crashed into his knee making a tackle. That cost him the Giants’ first few games and seemed almost destined to set up what happened next: an awkward fall, jumping for a ball in traffic, during a Week 5 game with the Chargers that resulted in a broken ankle.
But it’s Porzingis who best displays how the specter of injury can toy with fans’ emotions. On Nov. 29, he was stepped on by Miami’s Justise Winslow, and his ankle bent so grotesquely the Garden audibly gasped on replay; it turned out to be just a sprain. Last week, in Brooklyn, he left the game shaking his head after “tweaking” his knee, and no amount of replays could show exactly how that happened. That,
too, was classified as “minor,” but he hasn’t played since.
Which proves they don’t even
need to leave their feet to scare the hell out of you. Fun times.
This is a sports epidemic, not a New York one. Isaiah Thomas also has spent much of the NBA season sidelined. The NFL is a who’s-who of stars (Aaron Rodgers, J.J. Watt, Antonio Brown) and ascendant stars (Deshaun Watson, Carson Wentz) and stalwarts (Julian Edelman, Joe Thomas, Jason Peters) who lost all or most of their seasons, most in an eyeblink, the half-second it takes between standing tall and writhing on the ground.
“You can’t protect them in bubble wrap, it doesn’t work that way,” Packers coach Mike McCarthy said after Rodgers’ collarbone snapped in October.
If anything, it makes the games’ contemporary iron men — Eli Manning leaping prominently to mind, of course — seem that much more indestructible. Though all it takes is one unfortunate eyeblink of a moment …