Saturday, February 19, 2005
(Warning: This chronicle contains graphic descriptions of sports injuries that may be offensive or disturbing to some readers. Please proceed at your own discretion.)
Few things match the spectacle of contact sports as a demonstration of both the fragility and resilience of the human body.
Perhaps the most grotesque, excruciating injury I ever witnessed on the field of play was the broken leg suffered by Cincinnati Bengals nose tackle Tim Krumrie in the opening minutes of Super Bowl XXIII against the San Francisco 49ers. The play itself lasted only a few seconds, so fast that you didn’t really have time to register it.
Thank God for the modern miracle of instant replay, huh?
In slow motion, from a camera angle directly behind the Bengals defense, football fans were treated to repeated viewings of the play — the snap of the ball, the moment of impact, and the gruesome sight of Krumrie’s leg, broken below the knee, flaring out at a nearly 90-degree angle like a ragdoll’s.
Despite a terrific 12-year career that saw him start two Pro Bowls and lead his team in tackles five times, Krumrie will likely be remembered most for that devastating injury, incurred so early in a game he had waited his whole life to play. I wince even as I write about it 16 years later.
What I witnessed on ESPN2’s Friday Night Fights this weekend doesn’t top that, but it would have to rank somewhere in the top three.
While I’d been looking forward to Saturday’s title bout pitting undisputed middleweight champ Bernard Hopkins against top contender Howard Eastman, Friday’s welterweight contest between Mexico’s Antonio Margarito and Argentina’s Sebastian Lujan wasn’t even on my radar. I was just channel-surfing when I happened upon the fight, already in the seventh round of a scheduled 12.
By the time I tuned in, neither man seemed to have much left in his tank. Margarito, Ring Magazine’s welterweight champ, was throwing an almost continual flurry of jabs and punches, but none of them seemed to have any real power or speed, and Lujan seemed to be ducking as many as he leaned into. One gets the impression that this perpetual windmilling of his opponent is Margarito’s style, though, because through nine rounds he had thrown an incredible 1,013 punches.
A quick note about human physiology: Cauliflower ear is caused by sudden or repeated trauma to the ear. Based on the severity or frequency of impact, a blood clot can form beneath the skin of the ear, producing the swollen, misshapen appearance from which its common name derives and often weakening the skin’s attachment to the cartilage. The average person may live his entire life without ever sustaining that kind of trauma; a boxer, on the other hand, might experience it several times on any given night, during the course of his 47 minutes (or less) in the ring.
As ineffectual as Margarito’s punches seemed to be, his right hand apparently had no trouble finding the left side of Lujan’s head, because in the ninth, the color commentator pointed out Lujan as having “a classic example of cawlee-flower ear.” By now, the fighters were clinching, and dancing away from the camera so that one really couldn’t see more than just the occasional flash of what the commentators were describing.
In the 10th, however, due to the amount of blood spray attendant to Margarito’s roundhouse rights (one of many unassailable arguments against buying ringside seats), the damage became apparent to everyone, especially the ringside doctor, who summoned the referee to stop the fight. At this point, we all became privy to the more pressing reason for calling the TKO: the top of Lujan’s left ear had torn away from the side of his head.
Let’s go to the videotape.
Repeatedly and in slow motion, we are given a perfect, unobstructed view of Lujan’s ear during the 10th round. What had seemed mildly unsettling only moments before was now like watching the Zapruder film: a Margarito right hand, the spray of blood as Lujan’s head snaps backward and to his right, and — freeze frame, right there — the swollen red bulb of Lujan’s upper ear drooping tenuously from the front-to-back tear where his cartilage had separated from his skull.
It’s Tim Krumrie’s leg all over again. I flinch, I grimace, I hiss through gritted teeth at the mere thought of it.
What happens next, however, is a great education if you’re a fight fan, because Lujan happens to have a top-notch cut man working in his corner. I’ve seen cut men, in 60 seconds or less, press down the swelling and seal gashes around boxers’ eyes to stop the bleeding and restore their vision, at least enough to sustain them through the next three minutes of abuse.
What Lujan’s cut man performs, however, is nothing short of magic. (For Lujan’s part, now that he has a moment to sit pensively and reassess his career opportunities, the treatment seems to cause him more pain than the beating he was taking only a minute ago.) The cut man displays his sleight of hand, pressing against the blood clot, gradually forcing it entirely out of Lujan’s ear. Next he soaks up the blood with a towel, giving himself a clean view as he goes to work on the tear, wielding his arsenal of cotton swabs and salves, and in the time it would take you to read this sentence out loud, voila! he has seemingly made whole what Antonio Margarito had rent asunder.
Cut to the center of the ring now as a victorious Margarito stands amid his entourage, soaking up the adulation of the crowd. The referee hands him his title belt, in which he seems only mildly interested. After several seconds, Lujan enters the shot, approaching his opponent with two seemingly perfect ears (at least for a guy who’s just been hit roughly 400 times in a span of 40 minutes).
The two men embrace. “No hard feelings.” “Congratulations on a great fight.” “Hey, your ear looks great. My compliments to your corner man.” Or some such sportsmanlike banter (translated from Spanish).
My favorite remark of the night came during this last scene, when the network’s color man, our expert on the subject of “cawlee-flower ears,” noted that Lujan is a great competitor, who’ll bounce back from this loss and get right back to training for his next fight… but first, it’s off to hospital to get that ear reattached.
Oh, to be an E.R. doc in Atlantic City on a Friday night.
