That’s Grit. Now Spit!

Craig MacDonald es muy macho. The gritty fourth-line grinder’s horrifying mouth injury & ensuing adventures in dentistry made some headlines in the hockey world. 50 stitches. 9 broken teeth. 3 root canals. Sounds like a nightmarish version of the 12 days of Kovalchuk, er, Christmas. Equally staggering to me is the fact that MacDonald played against the Capitals 6 days later. MacDonald’s mouthful of pain was the most ghoulish thing to happen to the Lightning since Dan Boyle’s severed wrist tendons. MacDonald’s got the kind of grit the Bolts need to muster if they have any hope of making this year’s playoffs.

I’ve been thinking about MacDonald lately as I undergo my own minor dental dramas. To my knowledge, the only case of missing teeth & root canals rivaling his appears in James Frey’s now discredited memoir. The guy writes about getting 4 root canals without anesthesia, required by his status as a drug rehab patient. Even if only part of this is actually true, it’s pretty gut-clutching:

“The drill is turned on. I sit and I wait.

The drill comes and the drill hits and I squeeze the [tennis] balls so hard that I think my fingers are f*king breaking and I moan. I moan in a steady tone that fills my ears so that I don’t have to hear the drill but I still hear it and I concentrate on the sound of the moan so that it will distract me from the pain but it doesn’t. Bayonet bayonet bayonet bayonet bayonet. The drill makes a hole and moves around the circumference of the hole and makes it wider and the grit mixes with the spray and moves down my throat and collects beneath my tongue. Bayonet, bayonet, bayonet. The hole gets larger and larger. Bayonet bayonet bayonet. There’s a f*king drill in my mouth. Bayonet.” (from A Million Little Pieces, Mom edits added).

While Frey goes for a hyped-up Hemingway style, the muy macho MacDonald has been understated in describing the effects of taking a puck in the mouth. "I've never had anything like that feeling in my life," MacDonald told the Tampa Tribune. "You go to stick your tongue out and there's nothing in your mouth. It wasn't fun for a couple of minutes until I figured out exactly what was going on." Now that’s grit. That’s the old-time hockey of all guts and no glory. In case you’re wondering how a soccer mom can handle such gory details, have I got some birth stories for you . . .