Most South Florida fans worried that Heat guard Dwyane Wade wouldn’t play in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals due to a rib injury. One worried aloud how far he would go to do so.
“I am so against painkilling shots, having learned the hard way,” said former Dolphins receiver and radio talk show host O.J. McDuffie, who has a lawsuit pending against the doctors and hospitals involved with treating the 1999 toe injury that ultimately ended his career. “I just wanted to make sure that D-Wade has all the information, that he knows what’s he doing, that he’s been told the truth. The important thing is to make sure he was well informed about the consequences.”
Wade reluctantly had received two injections, one below his 12th rib and one in his buttocks, before scoring 20 in a Game 7 loss.
“I went back and forth all the way until I did it, until the time I was on the table about to get it,” Wade said.
He agreed only after being assured he wouldn’t do further damage by playing. He acknowledged he would have taken the same approach to play in Game 1 of the NBA Finals.
Other athletes, while understanding Wade’s dilemma, would have been surprised if he had yielded to his reservations.
“It was Game 7,” Dolphins defensive end David Bowens said. “Everyone was relying on him and you saw how they lost in Game 6. I mean, you don’t want to go out like that. Whatever you have to do to play that game, you’ve got to do it.”
Bowens said he took Toradol injections a few years ago after knee surgery. “That shot, it worked,” Bowens said. “The next day, you would hurt really bad. You would feel it everywhere. When you’re on them, you can’t really feel anything. You’re up there.”
Actually, one could find hundreds of athletes who could speak from experience. Anesthetic shots, anti-inflammatory cortisone injections (not generally used on game day) and combinations of both have been part of professional sports for decades. Recently, we’ve heard horror stories–and heroic ones–about needles piercing Curt Schilling’s ankle, Andre Agassi’s back, Mario Lemieux’s hip and even Shaquille O’Neal’s toe. Astros pitcher Roy Oswalt, while nursing an injury similar to Wade’s, used injections to get through his 20-win season and the National League Championship Series in 2004.
The practice has been most prevalent in the NFL, however, because of the punishing and precious nature of each game, and the non-guaranteed status of contracts. While NFL teams must keep a record, they don’t issue press releases after pressing through flesh. So we usually hear only romanticized tales about quarterbacks.
We know that John Elway, Troy Aikman and Trent Dilfer took multiple shots to their ribs, back and shoulder, respectively, and that Steve Young took more than a dozen in the 1996 playoffs for what proved to be displaced ribs. We know Steve McNair has taken them for … well, everything. We know, because of “Namath: A Biography,” that Dr. James Nicholas prepared five syringes three days before Super Bowl III, to shoot Joe Namath’s left knee with Novocaine and prednisone (cortisone compound) while draining the right.
Namath waved off an injection to his right thumb, concerned it would rob his touch.
In 1995, Broncos tight end Shannon Sharpe estimated he had taken 82 shots to his ankle over the two previous seasons.
In an earlier era, few kept count.
“Between all the dislocated fingers and ankles and shoulders and knees, a couple of dozen, maybe,” former Dolphins defensive end Manny Fernandez said. “We wanted to shoot it if we could, so we could play. Was there a lot of pressure? A little bit. But did anyone really have to use that pressure? Not really. The only one to blame is me. I loved the abuse. I loved Sundays. I didn’t want to miss them.”
Fernandez remembered more than one sampling of what teammate Bill Stanfill referred to as “Cortisone Cocktails” — cortisone and xylocaine. He remembered linemen circling around an injured teammate on the sidelines so a physician could inject in some privacy. Mostly, he remembered “godawful screams” from the training room.
“Fifteen to 20 guys in line before kickoff,” Fernandez said. “Putting a 16-gauge needle into a sore, swollen ankle can be pretty painful. Until the stuff worked, it hurt.”
Nor did players think much about repercussions, especially with medical technology less precise and second opinions far less available. Hall of Fame center Jim Langer once slammed screws back into his leg with a slab of wood and a hammer.
“The long-term implications of playing injured was not even a thought,” Langer said. “I know it’s hard for people to understand that psychology, it’s hard for my wife even today.”
Former Dolphins defensive end Kim Bokamper has seen a change even since he played in the 1980s. The current sports anchor, who had “four or five” shots in the “course of doing business,” recalled one in New England, where a doctor left a long needle in his ankle while retrieving another syringe. “Where you draw the line in the sand is: Will this injury get any worse if I mask the pain?” Bokamper said. “I don’t know if, in the NFL today, it’s as accepted as it used to be. The guys would call their agents.”
“I’m not saying we were the smartest guys on the planet, but I think we looked at it differently than they do today,” Langer said. “I’m not faulting them. They have a lot more at stake. I was playing for $20,000. And I didn’t have an agent saying not to play. But if I was playing today, I would have a hard time asking an agent whether I could play or not. I answered to two people: myself and Don Shula.”
Certainly, an agent reasonably could argue against some injections, by citing established and alleged mishaps.
In 1974, Hall of Fame linebacker Dick Butkus won a $600,000 settlement from the Bears after claiming repeated cortisone injections had damaged his long-term health.
Steelers running back Jerome Bettis and the Blackhawks’ Chris Chelios missed playoff games in 2002 and 1996, respectively, after shots intended to quiet groin pain numbed their entire legs, when either the needle or the medication hit nerves.
In 1999, after requesting a pregame painkiller for his cracked ribs, 49ers tight end Greg Clark unknowingly played with a collapsed lung. The doctor who administered the shot disputed Clark’s interpretation the needle had caused the small hole, instead blaming the pointed edge of a displaced rib.
Charlie Krueger, who played from 1959 to 1973, won about $1.5 million in a settlement after claiming the 49ers had given him 150 injections without revealing the extent of his injuries. Former Raiders lineman Curt Marsh lost his foot eight years after his 1986 retirement, having relied on shots to push through an ankle injury.
“A body has a very fortuitous alarm system, and when that rings in weight-bearing joints, to play more on that, you have greater risk of injury,” said former Raiders team doctor Robert Huizenga, whose book “You’re Okay, It’s Just a Bruise” inspired the film “Any Given Sunday.” “When you turn off the alarm system, that is the scariest ethical dilemma a doctor faces. When in doubt, be very careful.”
Huizenga, who left the Raiders in 1990 and now is in private practice, called it common to give “double-digit” shots before games but believes increased litigation has somewhat curbed the practice.
Larry Starr, Marlins trainer from 1993 through 2002, said he and team doctor Dan Kanell “probably injected the least amount of any pro baseball team. Not that there isn’t a place for it. It’s not the use, it’s the abuse. It’s great for some joint-type things, non-weight bearing. … It’s important to know the player. Some players want to be injected for everything.”
Starr found this to be especially true of athletes with football backgrounds.
He said hip pointers, shoulder joints and rib injuries like Wade’s generally are ideal for injection. It is relatively easy to hit the spot with the shot, and the athlete won’t be pounding on the area, unknowingly doing further damage.
Why injections instead of just pain-killing pills? They’re more localized and concentrated, with fewer potential side effects such as lethargy or addiction.
McDuffie had recognized the pressure on players to play through pain but never had taken an injection until hurting his toe against New England in 1999. The shot numbed half his foot.
“I felt another pop afterwards,” he said. McDuffie alleges he kept taking the shots through the team’s two playoff games because he had been misdiagnosed and told he couldn’t do further damage.
“You trust these guys to do right by you, when they say you won’t have any adverse effects,” he said.
So, on his midday radio show, McDuffie recently riffed on Wade, Schilling and risk.
“Everybody talked about Curt being a soldier,” McDuffie said of the World Series hero, now on the disabled list. “Look at him now. He might never pitch again.”
