It only took them a mere 4 hours after my post about athletes playing through pain, but the highly paid sportwriters at Fox Sports finally came up with a photo gallery of athletes playing through pain.
Way to go guys!
And here I am some lowly golf nut nobody ever heard of. Go figure.
thanks to Charlie Riedel of the AP for the great shots of Tiger throughout the tournament
Playing with pain
What great athlete has never played through pain in the quest for victory? This is not your ordinary kind of pain, a headache, a toothache, a muscle ache, no, this is the dibillitating kind of pain as a result of a sports injury. Where most of us would just collapse on the nearest sideline (couch), screaming for the next available appointment with Jack Kavorkian, professional athletes not only have to overcome this agony while performing at their peak but are expected to - all the while risking permanent damage and increasing the pain tenfold by pushing the envelope!
In sports this is referred to as, "playing through pain", and it's something that all pro athletes are expected to do, especially in team sports. Shake it off, walk it off man, BE the pain, suck it up pardner, eat the pain, thank you sir, may I have another! It's an athlete thing folks. Ask any pro athlete if victory is any sweeter than when acheived through pain and you may be surprised at the answer. It certainly doesn't do their legend any harm and their peers respect them for it.
Playing through the pain
The dead givaways that there is major suffering going on while playing in pain are not so much dictated by the actual location of the injury such as in Tiger Woods case, the knee, but are seen more through facial distortions like, winces, grimaces or hissing of air through gritted teeth brought about by nerve grinding pain as a result of an injury (old or new). Most times these reactions are hidden behind football helmets and hockey masks (where serious pain lives). But a guy like Tiger Woods who has the TV cameras focused on him so acutely that you can see the imprint from his wife's last kiss, just can't hide his pain. Believe me, he wants to hide it because he does not want the world to see he is human NOR does he want his fellow competitors to think he would use the pain as an excuse should he (gasp!) actually not win. I have a theory about guys like Tiger that I would like to share with you later in this post. (more…)
