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You know all of the stories about super-human pain-threshold. You have heard about Jack Youngblood playing a Super Bowl on a broken leg, about Lawrence Taylor splattering the Saints with a separated shoulder, about Eli Manning gritting his way through plantar fasciitis, a condition that would make a Marine plead for a wheelchair, crutches and fistful of Percocet.
Part of the Vince Lombardi folklore includes a story about Marv Fleming, a Packers tight end who broke a bone in his foot but never saw injured reserve because, Lombardi reasoned, the injury in question wasn’t to a “weight-bearing bone.”
Football players are just different from you and me.
“It goes back to what your high school coach always tells you,” Giants linebacker Michael Boley said. “He says, ‘There’s a difference between being hurt and being injured, and you’d better learn the difference, because if you’re injured you can’t play. But if you’re only hurt, you’d better play.’ ” Only hurt.
Justin Tuck only hurt his groin this year.
Only hurt his neck.
Only hurt his ankle. Only hurt his toe.
And lately, only hurt his shoulder.
“Every time something heals and you feel like you’re getting back to normal, then something else seems to happen,” Tuck said. “That kind of year.”
His teammates know what Tuck has endured to stay on the field this year. His coaches know. Tuck surely knows. Yet he was still feeling down about it. He is used to being a leader on the Giants’ defense, used to playing well and making big plays, and allowing that do the leading on his behalf. Robbed of his physical well-being, riddled with hurt, he admits to enduring some blue patches during the season.
“I didn’t think I was doing my part,” he said.
But he needn’t have worried.
“There’s a reason why he’s a captain, why he’s our captain,” fellow defensive end Dave Tollefson said yesterday. “Maybe he doesn’t realize it, but the other guys who follow him do it for a lot of reasons: Good husband. Good father. Great player — and I mean a great player, a Super Bowl-winning player. He didn’t have to worry about us. We’d follow him anywhere.”
Still, it probably took one of Tuck’s own to shake off whatever embers of self-pity had invariably clung to him. Antrelle Rolle swore — and continues to swear — he was not referring to Tuck when he vented, in the moments after the Giants fell to the Redskins on Dec. 18, “If you are injured, then so be it, you are injured, we understand that. But nicks and bruises, everyone needs to be on the field, man. Because we are not getting better like this.”
But even if that is true, the words had a distinct effect. A few days later, a few days before he would have one of his signature games of the season against the Jets, Tuck and coach Tom Coughlin had a chat in Coughlin’s office and the gist of that talk was this:
Injuries stink. Pain stinks. Aces and pains and bumps and bruises, the stamp-collections of NFL players? All awful. All brutal. Nobody likes them. Nobody wants to play with them, or play through them.
Play through them, anyway.
“I just decided that this is the way it was going to be,” Tuck said. “From then on, that’s the way I’ve approached it. You can’t argue. You can’t ask why. You either play or you don’t play.”
You’re either hurt or you’re injured.
The pity is on the weeks he has been able to manage the pain, keep it tolerable, Tuck has been what he always has been, a ferocious and feared foundation piece on a defense starting to resemble its 2007 antecedents. In many ways, Tuck is the Michael Strahan of this unit, a veteran with the experience and the talent to inspire as well as lead — and at 28, he is eight years younger than Strahan was in January and February of 2008.
Of course, when you add up all the “only’s” he probably feels a lot older than that. It really is best not to think about it for as long as the shoulder (or the neck, or the toe, or the ankle, or the groin) will let him.