11/05/24
October 18, 2008
Gimme a High Four!: On the football field, a place where Trevor Wikre says "time slows down", he felt something like "wet popcorn" in his right lineman's glove.
You mean where he quoted from the article?
Can't blame the kid for doing this. And it is just a pinkie that would have sustained a lifetime of perpetual issues. Easy decision.
posted by charlatan at 08:00 PM on October 18, 2008
Well, good on this lad to have commitment to his game. The end of that article is where it's really at, with the picture of aging "boys" pulling their cherished memories out of a drawer. Will he miss part of his pinky in his later years? Maybe. Would he have missed the memories of the game he would have abandoned? Most definitely.
But his descriptiveness has ruined my popcorn.
posted by THX-1138 at 09:08 PM on October 18, 2008
I like my pinkies, I'm glad they're there. But were they gone, I would not care. There's naught I'll do, While I'm alive, Where four would serve me Worse than five.
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:11 PM on October 18, 2008
Damn, Joey. You're a true poet.
posted by outonleave at 07:02 PM on October 19, 2008
Sports injuries are my muse.
posted by Joey Michaels at 10:12 PM on October 19, 2008
That's all kinds of messed up.
posted by lil_brown_bat at 11:33 PM on October 19, 2008
I've twice asked two different surgeons to cut the top two joints of mine off, but they won't do it.
My sports career was ended by a severed tendon in the right pinkie. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't a lineman, but a professional typist of the letter P. No, wait, golfer.
The surgeons tried to put it together again: the frustration of spending months without doing anything that might have caused me to try and close my hand - no drinking, no driving, no drink driving - only to then go for the weekly check-up and be told the tendon had snapped again despite my caution. The surgery itself failed, but the time it took (about 15 months in total) alone would have been enough to set me too far behind the curve to catch up again, so I jacked it in and got a real job.
The middle joint of my finger is now bent at 90 degrees and I can't straighten it. I shake hands with strangers and they think I'm a Freemason.
Twice I've had a notion to try and get back into golf, and both times it has seemed to me that the only way to do that would be to have the top two joints of the finger removed - just to get it out of the way. Both times, the surgeons have refused to do it with some reasonably compelling arguments. The best argument is that there's no certainty that having half a finger would serve my golf swing any better than having the mangled digit I have now.
Given a time machine that could take me back to the emergency room (but that was somehow not good enough to take me back half an hour further to tell myself to stop using the dodgy knife to cut grips off clubs), I'd tell myself to decline the surgeon's kind offer to reconstruct my tendon.
If they'd just stitched the wound (two stitches, max) and left the tendon in two pieces, the only loss of movement would have been in the top joint, which, let's face it, unless you're a concert violinist (and a left-handed one at that), isn't exactly vital. I could have taken the flight to Australia I was booked on and played on the Australasian Tour as planned.
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.
Fair play and good luck to Trevor Wikre. He told the surgeons what he wanted and he got it. I hope he doesn't ever regret the decision, but from what I've just read about him, I can't believe that he ever will.
posted by JJ at 05:34 AM on October 20, 2008
Sir, I nominate this post for the award of Best Title/Description Ever.