If junkyard dogs could talk a language we understand, they probably would discuss their battle scars with the matter-of-fact nature of hockey players. Most of the talk around the Garden in the hours leading up to Thursday night’s Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final centered on the possibility of Zdeno Chara playing for the […]
If junkyard dogs could talk a language we understand, they probably would discuss their battle scars with the matter-of-fact nature of hockey players.
Most of the talk around the Garden in the hours leading up to Thursday night’s Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final centered on the possibility of Zdeno Chara playing for the Bruins three days after suffering a broken jaw, an injury sustained when a puck deflected off of his stick and resulted in his blood being shoveled off of the ice.
Eddie Olczyk, serving as analyst for NBC alongside Doc Emrick for the Stanley Cup Final, knows a thing or two about rebounding from a facial injury.
“I broke my face, and I had to wear a protective thing on my face for six weeks just to sleep,” Olyczyk told the Herald.
Still not flinching at the memory, Olczyk used a medical term to specify which part of his face he broke.
“I broke my zygomatic arch,” he said, pointing to his right cheekbone. “So they reset it, went in through the top of my mouth and then through my nose and they pushed the broken bone back into place. I had to sleep with a steel plate on my face for six weeks because when you sleep and put pressure on it, you could break it again, and then that’s when you have to put a steel plate in there.”
When Olczyk returned to the ice, he was wearing a protective device attached to his helmet.
“I missed like five days and played for whatever (number of games) in that fishbowl,” he said.
