Grin and bear it: losing teeth part of life in NHL
When Brent Burns packs his bags for road trips, the San Jose Sharks defenceman often leaves something behind: his cosmetic teeth.
“I don’t wear them often,” he said. “I usually find them in a drawer a couple months down the road and put them somewhere safe, forget where that is and find them a couple months later.”
Burns said he is missing three of his real teeth and a fourth is “hanging on by a thread.”
He is holding out hope it won’t join his other missing Chiclets.
“I need that one for corn on the cob,” Burns said with a gap-filled smile.
Missing teeth have been associated with hard-nosed hockey for decades, becoming a stereotype of the game, with some players, like Burns, even embracing it as a rite of passage or badge of honour. Gordie Howe, Bobby Clarke, Ken Daneyko, Stan Mikita, Bobby Hull — all have grins famous for what’s not there. Chicago’s Duncan Keith had seven teeth knocked out by a puck in the Western Conference final-clinching game in 2011 against San Jose and quipped afterward: “You’ve got to leave it all on the ice.”
Many casual fans might assume all players are missing a few teeth — not true — but there is far more interest in keeping the originals than there was in the 1980s, a time Kings coach Darryl Sutter recalls players writing their numbers on coffee cups, putting their teeth in the cups and setting them on a shelf before games.
“The joke was switching teeth around,” Sutter said with a sly grin.
The only way to help players keep their teeth is to force them to attach full-cage masks to their helmets. And that, in the NHL at least, is not going to happen any time soon.
If a player chooses to wear a mouth guard, he may help his chances of not having a concussion. His pearly whites, though, are still at risk.
“I’ve pulled teeth out of mouth guards,” Detroit Red Wings equip- ment manager Paul Boyer said. “They’re not designed to keep the teeth in the mouth.”
Dental care is one of the progressive moves made by the NHL, said Nashville GM David Poile. When Poile was an administrative assistant for the Atlanta Flames in the early ’70s, he said, he doesn’t recall the team even having a dentist.
“An oral surgeon who can also do plastic surgery is ideal,” added former defenceman Chris Pronger. “I had a nice set of teeth. Now, I’ve got new ones. I broke my jaw and you probably can’t tell I had 50 stitches here and 27 there.”