d.: Hi, Cal.E. I’ve been watching last year’s Cat Skills Games on Animal SPorts Network.
C.: I didn’t know your cable supplier gave you ASPN.
d.: Yes, it’s quite interesting now that I understand Catonese.
C.: What’s your favorite game?
d.: So far, I would say the Cat-A-Pult. How’s your training going for the Cat Skills Games?
C.: Oh, I hurt my paw…
d.: Why? What did he do?
C.: No, d.c., my front right paw. It’s sore from playing the guitar. I guess I’ll just miss this year’s games. I know Tucker will be disappointed, but I suppose it’s unavoidable (heavy sigh).
d.: I want you to read something that I wrote, Cal.E. It’s an addendum to a chapter in my book “Beyond the Thirteenth Mile; The Iron Man Chronicles.” The name of the chapter is “Pain and Injury.” In this chapter, I talk about athletes who have overcome difficult injuries and circumstances. The first two I talk about are Kirk Gibson and Willis Reed. However, I know that more athletes than those two have played through extreme pain and even injury to accomplish a goal.
After being encouraged to research one of the people in this addendum by my editor, I found another one that most people will remember when I bring it up. Maybe this will encourage you to resume training. I know next to nothing about figure skating, but I still found researching Elvis Stojko to be fascinating.
I’ll text you the addendum, and you can tell me what you think tomorrow.
***
Another professional baseball player who overcame injury to lead his team to a World Series victory was Curt Schilling. In 2004, Schilling was An ace pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. He pitched game one of the American League Championship Series, and lost to the Red Sox hated rival, the New York Yankees. Most observers believed this to be a result of an injury he suffered in the previous series against the California Angels. Schilling tore the sheath of his right Achilles tendon away from the tendon during that series, which made it difficult for him to walk, much less pitch. The Red Sox lost the next two games as well, putting them in a 3-0 hole.
No Major League baseball team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit in a championship series and overcome it to win the series. The Red Sox rallied and won both games four and five. In desperate need of a win to keep the series going, the Red Sox doctor sewed the sheath of Schilling’s right Achilles tendon to his skin. The results were positive, but the work was obvious. This was the famous “bloody sock game,” in which Schilling pitched seven innings and won the game, all the while having blood soak his right sock. This propelled the Red Sox to victory in the seventh game, earning them the right to represent the American League in the 2004 World Series.
Encouraged by their ace pitcher’s performance, the Red Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals in four games, removing the “Curse of the Bambino,” and earning the Red Sox the distinction of winning the one-hundredth World Series. Many Red Sox fans believed that they hadn’t won a World Series since Babe Ruth had been sold to the hated Yankees because he cursed the organization upon his exit.
For his part, Schilling used the attention he gained from his bloody red sock pitching for the Boston Red Sox by stenciling K ALS. Those letters stood for strike out Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It earned its nickname by taking the life of the healthy Hall-of-Fame first baseman for the Yankees in the prime of his career.
Because Gehrig was Schilling’s favorite athlete, he adopted the charity that is dedicated to trying to find a cure for this condition and wanted to give it publicity. (A foothold on History https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/short-stops/foothold-on-history recalled 2/8/2023).
A story from north (and now south, after his retirement and marriage) of the border of the United States is the story of Elvis Stojko. During the 1994-95 Figure Skating World Championships, Stojko suffered a serious ankle injury while training. This limited his ability and discouraged him from trying a quadruple axle jump. Stojko was the only skater, most experts believed, that was capable of this maneuver. He didn’t think he could perform such a difficult maneuver during competition due to his injury, so he didn’t attempt it. However, he was able to land a triple lutz-triple toe loop combination in the free program, earning him his second World Championship title.
However, injury struck again in the 1998 Olympics, after Stojko was able to be the first skater to land a quadruple toe loop–triple toe loop during the 1996 World Championships in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Stojko’s home country. That made him the favorite to be the first Canadian skater to bring home a gold medal. However, Stojko didn’t disclose that he had suffered a serious groin injury while training, limiting his ability. His performance was further limited by his suffering from a case of influenza during the Winter Olympic Games. Stojko still earned a silver medal at these Olympic games, an astonishing achievement considering the circumstances. (Elvis Stojko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Stojko recalled 2/8/2023).
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