Meet pro sports' most injury-prone athletes and the, uh, injuries that sidelined 'em.
9. Cam Neely- After a pair of 50-goal seasons, Neely found his left hip and thigh on the receiving end of a semiclean Ulf Samuelsson check. It was mostly downhill from there, as he missed a full season recuperating (developing someone/something called myositis ossificans in the process) and prompted Bruins fans to reenact a Canuck-flavored version of Waiting for Godot ("Will he play tonight?"/"He said he would."/"I hope he does."/"Yes."). Despite Neely's return for another 50-goal campaign in 1993, the injury eventually got the best of him. A damn shame.
8. Triple H- Hell yeah, he's an athlete, not to mention a guy who "puts smiles on people's faces," as the WWE has been quick to remind us during this summer of its discontent. In addition to the usual assortment of pulls and concussions, Triple H tore his left quadriceps muscle right off the bone during one match; six years later, he tore his right one in another. Not to get all Eugene V. Debs/socialist/woes-and-inequalities on you here, but it's more than a little bit wrong that the WWE doesn't pay for its performers' health insurance.
7. Robert Smith- One knee. Then the other. Then an ankle. Then, like, a distended pinky toe and diphtheria and an achy-breaky spleen. So after finally staying healthy for a full 16-game season, what does Smith do? Up and quits, without much in the way of explanation. While we commend any jock with the brains and sense of self to get out while he still has some cartilage remaining in his joints, you gotta feel for the Vikings fans who stuck with him through the myriad MRIs. It'll take some monumental daintiness and/or bad luck for another player to wrest away his status as fantasy football's preeminent year-in, year-out tease.
10. Anfernee - One day, he was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The next, his mangled-beyond-identification left knee (four surgeries? five? eleventeen?) left him about as airworthy as John Daly.
6. Anna Kournikova- No, we're not looking for an excuse to run another cheesecake shot of the fetching Miss Anna. She really was that much of a lazy, injury-riddled letdown during her few years of competition. Truth is, despite her spinal injuries and seeming reluctance to concentrate on recovery, we can't blame her. She could either run herself ragged on the court and glad-hand corporate types in her free hours, or ditch the calisthenics and walk many a red carpet. Would you have chosen any differently?
5. Alex Tudor- Alex whose-a-ma-wha, you ask? He is—or was—one of the world's foremost cricket guys, described by one publication as having "all the natural attributes of a fast bowler: height, strength, and the ability to bowl fast and extract bounce from most wickets." We're not sure what we just wrote. Anyway, after establishing himself as the cricket world's equivalent of, like, Jeff Gordon, his back pooped out on him. His knee was next, followed by more back issues, and then rumors about slothful conditioning. What a wicked, wicked googly. Cricket buffs in Europe and Asia regard him with the same utter contempt that fans in St. Louis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Boston do J.D. Drew.
4. Sam Bowie- The Blazers actually made the right choice when they drafted him ahead of Michael Jordan; the team was teeming (ah, a delightful homonym!) with shooting guard/small forward types. Unfortunately, Bowie proved to have balsa-wood legs and tissue-paper tendons, and MJ proved to be a combination of God, Superman, and Springsteen. Revisionist history is a bitch.
3. Ken Griffey Jr.- We don't want to jinx him, as he has managed to remain hale, hearty, and largely free of sheared tendons for four consecutive months. Griffey's medical chart doesn't lie, though, what with its almost-comical assortment of broken bones (even during the off-season), hamstring ruptures, and hyperextensions. If we were in his situation, every time we looked up and saw Barry Bonds rounding the bases, we'd think, A few super-pills could've done me well.
2. Grant Hill- Hill's left ankle is the NBA version of Achilles', uh, Achilles. After numerous breaks and sprains, here's how bad it got: to make it better, doctors rebroke the thing and attempted to realign it with his leg bone. Not entirely unexpectedly, the procedure gave rise to a massive staph infection that damn near killed him. Since then, ankle-rotation therapy, whatever that is, has kept Hill sporadically upright…except during those sports hernia and left-knee episodes. His primary-care physician qualifies for combat pay about now.
1. Mark Prior/Kerry Wood- There are many, many reasons to pity Cubs fans, ranging from the Billy Goat to the Bartman ball to their pathetic affability in the face of sustained mediocrity. What Dusty Baker did to the gilded right arms Prior and Wood via senseless overuse, though, may rank as the most disheartening letdown of them all. Amazingly, with Wood on the cusp of recovering from his latest shoulder/bicep tendon/elbow apocalypse, the team believes he can be a real weapon out of the bull pen. Some people never learn.