The fine line between playing injured and playing hurt in the NFL so often is blurred.
“Playing hurt is what all of us do. Playing injured is stupid,” Justin Tuck told The Post.
Jason Pierre-Paul has a shoulder injury, the severity of which is unknown. He missed practice again Thursday and doesn’t know if he will practice Friday or play Sunday in another must-win game against the Packers.
It is JPP’s shoulder, JPP’s career. He risked plenty and showed his toughness in 2012 playing with a painful back that required surgery and left him without Superman’s cape this season. It almost always is an emotional tug-of-war for the so-called NFL gladiator between what he owes to his team and teammates, and what he owes to himself.
Rams Hall of Fame defensive end Jack Youngblood played in Super Bowl XIV with a fractured left fibula. It was a much different era, with a much different pay scale, with much different medical practices, and Youngblood, the John Wayne of the NFL, was a much different animal.
Over the phone Thursday, he was asked what advice he would give JPP.
“Go play,” Youngblood said. “It’s not about you. It’s about your football team.”
Here Youngblood asked: “Is he the captain of the team?”
I told him: “No, he’s one of their best players.”
Youngblood said: “That’s what the best players do.”
I asked him if he would understand if JPP doesn’t play.
“No,” Youngblood said. “I would not understand, because I’d want to see him go try.”
Youngblood’s leg snapped like a pencil in the second quarter of a playoff game against the Cowboys following the 1979 season. The doctors, conceding the leg couldn’t be harmed further, taped him up and he played the second half and again the following week against the Buccaneers, and two Darvocet got him ready for the 31-19 Super Bowl loss to the Steelers. He asked head coach Ray Malavasi to trust he wouldn’t be hurting the team and would take himself out if he thought he was. He never did.
“It felt like somebody had an ice pick in your fibula every step,” Youngblood said.
That was then, this is now. Youngblood was making $200,000 at the time. He recognizes “the economics of the game” has changed everything.
“These players are playing for millions of dollars today,” Youngblood said.
Indeed, JPP’s rookie contract is up after the 2014 season.
“ ‘What if I damage this opportunity? I may not have that opportunity again,’ ” Youngblood said of the current environment.
Medical teams today would not allow a Jack Youngblood to play with a broken leg.
“They wouldn’t give him the opportunity to do that,” Youngblood said. “They’re much more cautious.”
Tuck missed an important December game in Baltimore last season with a shoulder injury.
“It was injured, but that was also just listening to doctors — something I rarely did early in my career,” Tuck said. “It’s been many a times I went out there against the better judgment of people that observed me.”
On Tuesday, Tuck offered his shoulder advice to JPP.
“I told him it’s [the] worst injury I had and it’s the most painful, so if you can avoid anything that’s going to cause you to have surgery at the end of the year, do it,” Tuck told The Post. “I don’t know the severity of the injury. I don’t know that, but he just said his shoulder hurt, so I gave him my experience.”
Antrel Rolle arguably is the closest thing to Youngblood in today’s NFL. Or Lawrence Taylor, who once played through a torn pectoral muscle.
“For me, the only thing’s that going to keep me from playing [is] if I can’t run,” Rolle told The Post.
He has played through two rotator-cuff tears. Did the doctors advise him not to?
“I didn’t tell them about it,” Rolle said.
Did he have advice for JPP?
“He has to do the best thing for himself, and then do the best thing for the team,” Rolle said. “I don’t know how serious his injury is or exactly what’s going on with it, but I’m sure they’ll figure it out.”
Cullen Jenkins acknowledged he has played injured and hurt throughout his career in large part because he didn’t want to let his teammates down.
“You don’t want to be labeled as being somebody who’s hurt all the time, or who isn’t dependable and you can’t rely on him to be in the game,” Jenkins said. “So if there’s that possibility that you can get out there and play, you want to get out there and play.”
The dilemma: Playing injured versus playing hurt.
“Playing injured, you’re not able to do what the job calls for you to do,” Mathias Kiwanuka said. “Playing hurt — that’s called football. Everybody plays hurt, especially at this point in the season. I don’t think there’s one guy who’s going to line up in the trenches and not have a nick or a bruise or something that’s going to keep him from being as good of an athlete as he was in the preseason.”
If the Giants medical men say definitively you can’t play, you don’t play.
“Nobody knows your body like you do, and two guys might react differently to the same injury, so you have to be smart about it,” Kiwanuka said. “If a doctor tells you that you’re going to do future harm to yourself or your team by going out there, then you have to listen to him. But if it’s a situation where they’re saying, ‘As much as you can tolerate, you can go,’ then I say you go.”
Youngblood didn’t miss a game in 14 years (and for the record, neither has JPP in his four-year career, playing in all 61 of his regular season and playoff games). Why did he play with a broken leg?
“Because it was Sunday,” he said, echoing the title of his book.
I told Youngblood JPP’s argument would be he doesn’t know what his injury (or hurt) is.
“OK. I have no argument for that,” Youngblood said. “If that’s the way you see it, that’s fine.”
But you disagree.
“Yeah,” Youngblood said. “If I was on his team, I’d try to convince him to look at it from my perspective, because we would be on equal ground. I want him on the field at 75 percent to see if he can play.”