THAT gif of The Beard (James Harden) landing a Nike-shod foot on the groin (euphemism) of a sticky-as-a-leech LeBron James in the game between the Houston Rockets and the Cleveland Cavaliers on March 2 (Manila time) keeps playing and replaying in my mind.
I mean, wow! What a sensational moving image that was on NBA TV. If that isn’t pain worthy of a Fifty Shades of Grey repertoire, I don’t know what is. I must say, though, that The King must really be a pretty strong and especially built person for not going down or staggering more when the moment hit him. I’ve seen grown men cry and fall to the floor when they get hit in the spheroids, at least in pictures.
Injuries in basketball, and all contact sports, lurk at every turn. I have a Top 5 of the Most Notorious Images of Basketball Injuries in the filing cabinet of my mind. Up there on top of the chart are visions of that thing that happened to Louisville’s Kevin Ware back in 2013 in a game against Duke, which has been called “the worst sports injury in the history of college basketball.” The kid fractured his leg in two places when he went down after trying to block a jump shot and the injury was horrible. So horrible that they’ve pulled down the video from the Internet that shows how the injury looked like.
Next in my chart is that image of Paul George whose leg landed, then broke as it hit the base of the basket stanchion during a Team USA practice game in August 2014. Coincidentally, George was driving hard to the basket to prevent the same LeBron James aggravator, James Harden, from scoring. George suffered a compound fracture of the tibia and fibula and brought us one of the most graphic images of how God didn’t design a leg to be. The Indiana Pacer still has to return to action from that injury.
Third in my book is the sight of Rajon Rondo’s elbow during Game three of the Boston-Miami Eastern Conference Finals in 2010. In a play, Rondo knocks the ball off Dwayne Wade’s hand, but the two players get tangled up. Wade falls to the floor and as he does so, he grabs Rondo by the waist and pulls him down with him. Rondo gets off-balanced and tries to stop the fall with his arm. His left elbow absorbs the shock and gets dislocated—backward. Have you ever seen an elbow go from its usual acute, straight and right angles to a mind-boggling obtuse angle of 225-degrees? Uggh.
Uhmm…so let’s not get into the details of the Milwaukee Bucks’ Andrew Bogut’s ugly arm injury (which broke in three places) in 2010, OK? Or then- Los Angeles Clipper Shawn Livingston’s “mangled knee” injury back in 2007.
Instead, let’s go back to that gif of Harden’s foot smashing into King James’s jewels for now. How painful is that, really?
Women like me will never know for sure, as much as men won’t be able to fathom how much it hurts to bring a child into this world. At least, in the afterbirth, women get to smile when they see the little bundle of joy. Men shoot out of the planet in that painful moment and some secretly wished they were women to escape the pain, I’ve been told.
Anyway, we have it on good authority (medicaldaily.com) that the two organs crucial to reproduction are covered in lots of sensitive, pain-sensing neurons called nociceptors which transmit signals to the brain. Once hit, the receptors send signals through nerves in the stomach (particularly the vagus nerve—the longest and most complex of the cranial nerves) that starts the Pain Festival. The vagus nerve sends elaborate signals to the heart and stomach, and through extensions of nerve tissue, to the ear. It causes nausea and vomiting, a rise in blood pressure, headache, dizziness…and crying.
Mentalfloss.com makes me almost feel the agony. The pain, it says,“insists on radiating throughout the groin and up into the abdomen…leading to a weird stomachache. This is the work of a phenomenon known as referred pain, which is when a sensation originating at one spot travels along a nerve root to other parts of the body and is perceived as happening there, too. It’s the same thing that’s going when you get an “ice cream headache.” In this case, the pain starts in your balls and travels up the perineal and pudendal nerves and the spermatic plexus, which cover real estate in the groin and abdomen, around the spine and even a little ways down into the anus, to make it feel like death has come for most of your lower body.”
One thing I can say is that I’m happy I’m a woman. As for James Harden, although he didn’t make LeBron James cry, he has been leveled with a one-game suspension for harming the royal jewels. It’s not the first time that jewel smashers have been suspended in the NBA, however. In the 2012-2013 season, Dwyane Wade got suspended for kicking Ramon Sessions in the groin. Jason Terry also punched Michael Finley there during the 2006 Western Conference semifinals between the Mavs and the Spurs and was also suspended for one game.
Harden’s suspension will be Harden’s first missed game for the 2014-2015 season, by the way. Oh, well, as they say, that’s the way the ball bounces. In the plural form. Ha-ha. La-di-da.