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.”
All joking aside, though, winning in the NHL playoffs comes down to all the players on the roster gutting it out through both the injuries the know of and the ones they choose to ignore. There are multiple factors that contribute to playoff success, such as timely scoring, rolling four lines, stout defense, and a hot goalie. But the bedrock of all Stanley Cup–winning teams is toughness, mental and phys- ical stamina. The NHL playoffs are a brutal slog unlike any other in sport. A deep run essentially means playing every other night for two months.
“The playoffs are a battle of attrition,” says Rick Tocchet, a Stanley Cup winner with the Pittsburgh Penguins who played in pain for the last eight years of his ca- reer.
Tocchet was renowned for having one of the highest battle levels in the league. He is the NHL’s all-time leader in Gordie Howe hat tricks (a goal, an assist, and a fight in one game) and scored more than 400 points while accumulating over 2,000 penalty minutes. Tocchet knows firsthand that for a team to win the Cup, it needs more than talent and a hot goalie. It needs an absence of memory, the ability to ignore, to forget, to disregard the searing pain that stabs them in the ribs and the throbbing pulse from the broken thumb, and the straight and hard fact that their separated shoulders won’t allow them to lift their arms up even to wave for a taxi.
Players win the Cup by mentally focusing on surviving in increments, one treat- ment at a time, one plodded step out of the training room at a time, one practice at a time, one lap at a time, one day at a time, and one game at a time.
“For two months, the level of play is intense. It’s eat, drink, sleep hockey,” says Tocchet. “It’s the teams that can withstand the soreness and pain and black it out that win. There’s the Thursday game, and after the game you’re in ice buckets. You have trainers working on you. You probably rest on Friday. Then on Saturday, you do your morning skate to just get back out onto the ice a bit and stretch out. Then at the game you just block it out again. The mental part is just as hard.”
It should be noted, too, that all this happens only after the players have endured the punishing eighty-four-game regular season, a meat grinder of practices, road trips, divisional rivalries, and games. Still, the NHL playoffs are a whole other level, a period of supreme sacrifice and almost insane intensity.
Along with all the dramatic goals, saves, overtimes, and epic Game 7s in the Stanley Cup playoffs, there is an endless list of stories of players fighting through injury.
“All that lore is carried through,” says Chris Nilan, the renowned tough guy who won a Stanley Cup in 1986 with the Montreal Canadiens. “Guys like Bobby Baun playing with a broken ankle and scoring that huge goal. The endless guys getting stitched up, teeth knocked out, and still playing.”
Bobby Baun of the Toronto Maple Leafs sustained a broken ankle from a Gordie Howe slap shot in Game 6 of the 1964 finals and returned to the game to score the
winner in overtime to even the series. Anaheim Ducks captain Paul Kariya was hit so hard by New Jersey Devils defenseman Scott Stevens in the 2003 finals that he lay motionless and unconscious on the ice for several minutes, until his eyes popped open and his visor fogged over. After a trip to the training room for repairs, he returned to the game and smoked a slap shot for a goal. Chicago Blackhawks goalie Charlie Gardiner won the Cup in 1934 despite suffering from a chronic tonsil infection that had pain eating away at him through the entire playoffs to the point that he died from the infection two months after the playoffs ended. In Game 3 of the 2000 Eastern Conference Finals, Vermont-born moose John LeClair was hit in the face by New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur’s stick, which required a Frankenstein-like thirty-six stitches and caused gruesome black-and-green bruises. LeClair slapped a visor on his helmet and returned to the game. In 1987, the Flyers played the Edmonton Oilers, and early in the series, Philly’s Mark Howe got kneed in the thigh, which resulted in a brutal charley horse. At night, Howe slept with his leg tied so it would not straighten out and tighten up. In 1985, Dave Poulin played with three broken ribs for an entire playoff series; the staff had to inject him contin- uously to try to take away the pain. And then there’s legendary Montreal Canadiens forward Maurice “Rocket” Richard, who in 1952, during Game 7 of the Stanley Cup semifinals, returned to the game mere minutes after being knocked unconscious with a bandage covering his forehead and a jersey stained with blood, then skated end-to-end into hockey immortality when he rushed the puck from his own zone and danced through the entire Boston Bruins team to score the series-deciding goal.
“Everyone knows the stories of guys like Kris Draper and Patrice Bergeron [more on that below]. You see what they fought through to win the Cup,” says Coyle. “You watch those guys when you’re younger and you hear about their injuries. You watch them, and they still go out there and play. Guys set that example.”
Every spring more bruises and scars and stories are added to the hockey annals when teams are bounced from the playoffs and finally reveal the true nature of their players’ injuries. At that point the team can dispense with the hazy term “upper- body injury,” which could mean anything from a player’s belly button to his skull.
After the Boston Bruins lost to the Chicago Blackhawks in the 2013 Stanley Cup Finals, it was revealed that Patrice Bergeron of the Bruins did not merely have an “upper-body injury” but had in fact suffered a calamitous number of injuries, un- precedented in the history of playoff carnage. Bergeron is an all-world defensive centerman, a gold-medal winner for Team Canada, and a Stanley Cup winner, and is widely considered to be the best two-way forward in the game. His role is to go head-to-head against the opponent’s top forwards at every spot on the ice: penalty kill, power play, face-offs, and offensive and defensive zone coverage. But Bergeron’s game isn’t predicated on violence, on slashing and hitting and fighting, the style typical of defensive forwards; it’s more cerebral than that. Bergeron kills them cleanly with skill, strategy, and a high hockey IQ, a chess master instead of a simple checker. He makes life miserable for the NHL’s top forwards by reading the plays in the offensive and defensive areas and taking away scoring chances with precise positioning. Bergeron plays hard in all three zones, and because of it his body has been picked apart, piece by piece, like the guy in Operation.
By the time the Bruins had clawed their way to the 2013 finals, Bergeron had to exert Herculean effort just to put on his pads, let alone play in the games. But in his eyes, it was the least he could do for his team and his city, which had been suf- fering from the Boston Marathon tragedy of that April.
Oftentimes, sporting events and teams can reflect the mood of a city or a nation (the “Miracle on Ice” is of course a historic example). Athletes and teams can inspire, unite, and rally a populace during deeply charged and emotional times, representing more than just their own team colors. Patrice Bergeron and the 2013 Bruins were all about sacrifice, because the city of Boston, a town built by patriots, has a long and proud history of standing tough. As David Ortiz told the fans at Fenway Park just days after the attack, the terrorists had messed with the wrong city.
In his first few games in the opening round of the playoffs, Bergeron took stitch- es in his eyebrows and acquired a huge cut across his nose from a heated alter- cation with Pittsburgh forward Evgeni Malkin. In the postgame press conference, Bergeron wore a camouflage Army Ranger jacket with the Bruins logo on the side, a tradition started by a few of the Bruins’ players who were friends with real Army Rangers. It was meant to represent the sacrifices of the military and a warrior spirit and was worn after each game by the player who best exemplified these traits.
There is no real way to compare actual combat to a sports game, to compare a real battle to a sports rivalry, to replace a shattered limb or fully repair a life that has been blown apart by a terrorist bombing with a silly game of hockey. The Bruins knew this. But Bergeron was going to give everything he had to try to win the Cup for his team, and, more important, his suffering city, so that they could at least have one moment of reprieve.
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