Detroit News column
by Jerry Green
They are hockey players , and they play under a code that they do not share with the athletes in other sports. They ignore a hangnail or a sliced face or a fractured leg or a ruptured knee, and keep going. It is not that the athletes in football and the other collision sports are wimps. It is that the hockey players have learned their sport on a frozen, hard surface wearing razor blades on their feet, with clubs in their hands. Playing with damaged body parts is ingrained in their minds — and hearts.
Steve Yzerman will be playing as captain of the Wings in April when the playoffs start. My estimate, without any medical background, is 95 percent. He will be playing despite the doom-saying surgeons who operated on his terribly torn knee and then said he had just a 50-50 chance.
They operated on his knee, but they didn’t touch his heart . He played powered by that heart last spring when he led the Red Wings to the Stanley Cup on a crippled knee that buckled and ached. “What’s inside is more important than what’s outside,” Wings Coach Dave Lewis said.
That is the code.
