It was Game 7 in the opening round of the 2014 NHL Western Conference Playoffs, the game for all the glory, between the Minnesota Wild and the Colorado Avalanche, and young Wild forward Charlie Coyle wasn’t about to sit out just be- cause he took a rising snap shot straight to his face. The shot from the point (from his own teammate Ryan Suter, no less) tagged him square and put a massive dent between his lip and chin. But that didn’t really matter all that much to Coyle. He had worked his ass off to get there, left Boston University early to reach his hockey dreams at a faster clip, and spent endless hours training and preparing for the NHL in the minor leagues of New Brunswick, Canada, and Houston, Texas. He had played imaginary Game 7s a hundred times over in the backyard shinny games of his New England youth, too. So he wasn’t going to leave the real thing for long just because of a mere flesh wound.
“I knew it was cut but didn’t know how bad,” says Coyle. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, crap, I have to miss a shift. It’s Game Seven, and I’m going to mess up the lines!’ Then I got back to the bench and the cut exploded.”
There were splotches of blood all over his jersey, pants, and skate laces. Once the blood traveled from his face all the way down to his boots, things got serious. The massive and gaping wound still wasn’t going to stop Coyle from playing, though. He just headed toward the locker room to get some repairs made.
That’s what treatment is called in the NHL playoffs: repairs. When a player gets hurt during the NHL playoffs, the injury becomes less of a medical condition and more of a blue-collar fix-it job. Injuries aren’t treated so much as they’re worked on, a broken part to be fixed and laboriously put back into working order, no different than a carburetor being taken out, cleaned up, and given a new gasket. When a player is cut or has something broken or something separated during the game, he retreats to the workshop that is disguised as a training room and has his wound hammered, sewn, or bolted shut, mended with tools and tape and glue and nee- dles. Whatever it takes, really, to get it fixed so he can get back out there working again.
A typical NHL medical staff consists of highly educated professionals who have advanced degrees and accreditations from prestigious schools. But during the NHL playoffs, the trainers and doctors become craftsmen, putting players’ bodies back together, piece by piece, right there on a bench or in a locker room. They set aside the fancy medical terms, diagnoses, and extensive treatment plans that they learned in school and just start snapping and popping and stitching things back into place.
Occasionally, in the moments when things get extremely heated during playoff games and players don’t want to miss a single shift, they’ll refuse to leave the bench to receive treatment for their minor cosmetic and dental injuries. So they’ll simply spit their teeth out right there on the bench into a gauze pad that has been delicately placed before them by the medical staff.
“They got me right on the table and went to work on it,” says Coyle, as if his chin were a clogged fuel filter and not, in fact, a part of his face. Deep inside the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, the Minnesota Wild medical staff performed a quick fix that would have impressed even a Daytona pit crew. “I think I missed six minutes of the period. Right as we were going out for the second period was when they finished putting in the last of the fifteen stitches.”
Coyle is a rock-shouldered, big-bodied Bostonian who’s got some serious jam in his game. While he’s not known for rough play or fighting, he plays extremely hard on the walls and in the corners and bulls his way to the net, often carrying a defenseman on his back. But he’s also an earnest, affable guy with an aw-shucks attitude, someone you’d want to marry your sister.
Despite his youthful age (twenty-one) and lack of experience, the importance of the NHL playoffs and the pain you have to endure to win the greatest trophy in all of sports was not lost on him. Even though Coyle was one of the youngest players on the Wild team at the time and had been up with the club for only two seasons, he knew what was expected of him with regard to playing in pain in the NHL play- offs. No coach had to sit him down and give him a history lesson on what the play- offs mean. No veteran player had to pull him aside and give him a heart-to-heart testimonial about how to survive and compete in the NHL playoffs.
All Coyle had to do was look around the locker room. There to his left was Zach Parise, who was battered from his shoulders to his toes from going into every hard area of the ice and battling relentlessly in the crease, taking on every man and shot that came his way despite his short, 5'9" stature. Across the room was Zenon Konopka, a longtime NHL fighter who estimates he’s received close to five hundred stitches in his career. Konopka’s face looks like a Rand McNally road map. His long journey battling through the minor leagues and the NHL has tat- tooed his sacrifices onto his skin. His face and hands are full of scars, contours, dents, and markings. Some scars rise and fall, some cut in jagged lines, some even crisscross each other; some scars are a decade old, while others are brand-new. The old injuries still hurt all the same.
“I’ve taken two slap shots off my face,” says Konopka matter-of-factly. “One was in my first year in Wheeling, West Virginia, when I was playing for the Wheeling Nailers. Shattered my nose. The other time I was playing in Syracuse. That one left this scar on my forehead. Both were from my own guy, when I was in front on the power play.”
Konopka pointed toward a scar off center on his forehead that took twenty- seven stitches to close. That old scar on his forehead had remarkably almost connected lines with his latest battle scar, a thirty-stitch cut on the bridge of his nose that he suffered from a wayward high stick from Colorado Avalanche forward Jan Hejda.
“One time I got cut for thirty,” says Konopka, not skipping a beat. “They had to put in two layers of stitches. You know when they put in layers of stitches it’s usu- ally a pretty good one.”
Leading up to the playoffs, Konopka had been playing for long stretches of the season with a broken hand, but continued to fight and take draws. He even took the time to give young Coyle face-off tips.
Standing at the head of the locker room was Wild assistant coach Darryl Sydor, a veteran NHL defenseman who famously got his knee twisted during a game in the 2000 Stanley Cup Finals when he played for the Dallas Stars. Unable to stand up, Sydor crawled and dragged himself across the ice, right back into the goal crease, where he lay down in the line of fire as a human shield for his goalie. There were also a handful of Wild players who were suffering serious injuries but were completely silent about them, choosing not to even acknowledge them publicly and taking their treatment in private.
“There were guys in this locker room who had injuries you didn’t even hear about,” says Coyle, shaking his head in amazement.
nside the locker room Coyle learned firsthand that in the NHL, if you want to get the bounty and harvest, you first have to plow the field. It was the same exact lesson learned by Wayne Gretzky, arguably the best player of all time, decades ear- lier.
After the grizzled and veteran-heavy defending champion New York Islanders beat an upstart Edmonton Oilers team in the 1982–83 Stanley Cup Finals, Gretzky and teammate Mark Messier walked past the victorious Islanders locker room expecting to see a raging party of popping corks and celebratory bubbly shower. After all, the Islanders had just won their fourth straight Stanley Cup, and that’s a helluva reason to throw a party. But when the door cracked open it revealed only beaten Islander players with ice bags draped all over their bodies. Turns out the face of winning in the NHL was not a Wheaties cover shoot. Gretzky and Messier saw that the face of winning was ugly, depleted, and swollen.
Despite everything Gretzky had done that season—setting scoring records every week, every month, putting up 196 points during the regular season (71 goals and 125 assists), 38 points in 16 playoff games, winning the Art Ross Trophy and the Hart Trophy—all of it still wasn’t enough to win the Cup. He saw in those ice bags draped over the victors what sacrifice really looked like, and, in turn, rededicated himself to winning the Cup. The importance of playoff hockey was a lesson learned by Gretzky and Coyle (and all manner of players in between) through osmosis, a
gradual absorption of what they saw and heard from the players and the stories around them.
“Some players are born with toughness. Some players watch other guys. Some players learn it through experiences,” says Coyle.
In Coyle’s case, here was a young player, as fresh-faced as a power forward could be in the NHL, and mostly unexposed to the playoff culture. And yet he showed unbelievable character and strength to forge ahead during those 2014 play- offs. At the time he was cut for fifteen stitches, he was already playing with a badly separated shoulder. Worse still, when the Wild won that Game 7 against Colorado, they moved on to the second round and faced the Chicago Blackhawks, in which series he suffered a bad separation in his other shoulder. Yes, Charlie Coyle played with two separated shoulders. And despite that, he led the team in hits.
Don’t bother making a big deal out of it, though. Coyle brushes it right off.
“It’s the playoffs, and everyone is in the same boat. No one is one hundred per- cent,” says Coyle, offering the exact same stock answer that players have given for the last hundred years. “So there really is no excuse. You can’t sit around and say that I have this or I have that. I had two separated shoulders. You can’t make ex- cuses. It’s playoff hockey, and that’s what it comes down to.”
Forty years earlier, a young Minnesota North Star named Lou Nanne felt the same way. After nearly a four-decade career in collegiate and professional hockey in the state of Minnesota as a player, coach, and general manager, Nanne is now an elder statesman in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes (and ten thousand ice rinks). Before he took his place in the Mount Rushmore of Minnesota hockey (along with John Mariucci, Herb Brooks, and Glen Sonmor), Nanne played for the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers and then in the NHL for the North Stars, for whom he battled in the playoffs and suffered a few horrific injuries.
“Every time we played in the NHL playoffs, guys were playing with broken bones and were completely banged up,” says Nanne. “We were playing St. Louis in the playoffs and beat them, and then we played Montreal. I cut my elbow really bad. In each game, the cut would open. Then they’d stitch it back up. Next game, I’d cut it again, and they’d stitch it back up. They’d take the stitches out and put them back in.”
But that was only half the story.
“After the St. Louis series, we lost to Montreal, and after our playoff series were over I made a USO tour to Vietnam,” says Nanne. “I was over there three weeks after the playoffs. I had, like, a tennis ball on the end of my elbow. Every time I’d bend it, pus would squirt out. I came back and went to the doctor and they cut it open. They found out they had stitched part of my elbow pad in the elbow.”
As incredible as that may sound, Nanne just rolls with it and has a laugh, because that was simply the way it was during the old-time hockey days of the 1960s and ’70s. The equipment was basically cloth. The pads were plastic caps, and they barely worked. When Nanne played at the University of Minnesota, he was speared in the face and fractured a cheekbone. He got some stitches and returned to the game. Afterward, his face swelled up massively and he went to the hospital. The doctor told him he couldn’t play, because if he got hit again in the area it would affect his vision.
His Gopher teammates had already left for their next game, at Rensselaer Poly- technic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. So Nanne, unbowed by his serious, potentially life-altering injury, had to call the Minnesota head coach, John Mariucci, and ask him if he could still play. Mariucci said sure, as long as he wore a mask. Nanne acquired a lacrosse helmet with a mask that held sponges on his face. Dur- ing warm-ups, he couldn’t see the puck, so he cut out the sponges. The game
started and Nanne checked an RPI player, whose hands came up and hit Nanne in the face. Nanne’s mask went through Nanne’s lip and cut him so badly that he had to get stitches in his mouth. But this kind of thing only prepared Nanne for what was to come in the NHL.
“In Los Angeles, we were playing the Kings,” says Nanne, the story breezing out of his memory as easily as a Sunday stroll. “I took a shot in the ankle during the game. We flew to Vancouver the next day. They brought me in for X-rays to see if I had cracked my ankle. The doctor said the ankle was fine. But the X-ray picked something else up. The doctor said the crack in the other ankle—my good ankle— was healing perfectly.” After a hearty round of laughter, Nanne says nonchalantly, “Everybody in the playoffs went through stuff like that.”
0 comments: