Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

Maybe it's because I have a vasectomy coming up, but lately I've had an unhealthy fascination with groin injuries.

Mainly, I've been measuring my post-operative pain next to whatever ailment a particular athlete has suffered, like the very common pulled groin — which sounds like either the result of excessive self-love or a kind of Southern barbecue. According to various medical papers, groin injuries occur in 2 to 5 percent of the American population, and 50 percent of the Cincinnati Reds.

I know that technically, issuing a 60-day plant-closing notice to your vas deferens and straining your abductors is not the same thing. But to a guy, the groin is the suburbs surrounding the Nether Regions Metroplex. Close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and hard shots between the legs.

This knowledge is ingrained at an early age. In my early childhood years, my friends and I, when playing tackle football without pads on the hard turf of our lawns, didn't worry about possible brain, arm or leg injuries. We just didn't want to get hit, as we put it, "where it counts."

My 7-year-old son is well aware of the necessity of protecting his privates. His baseball team requires only one piece of protective equipment to be worn at all times — a cup. Before games, his coach will yell, "Cup check!" And 13 boys, ages 7 and 8, will percussively bang their cups in unison with both hands, looking and sounding like a Santana audition.

Athletes in general don't like to joke about injuries, but they especially don't like joking about injuries Down There. In 2003, New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza told a Playboy interviewer that the only thing he hates more than striking out is "getting hit in the nuts."

"One time I took one on the cup and my left testicle turned purple. And people laugh!" Piazza harrumphed. "It pisses me off when that happens and guys laugh. That's when I really wanted to grab somebody, because it's not funny." It's especially not funny to Piazza, who with injured maleness can't participate in the non-gay sex he can't get enough of.

In most sports, there is no greater crime amongst your peers that intentionally hitting someone in his greater jimmy-ness. Andrew Golota went from heavyweight boxing contender to Polish joke after being disqualified in two 1996 title fights against Riddick Bowe for a chronic inability to stop punching Bowe's penile region. When anyone wants to illustrate how much of a jerk Chicago White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski is, they bring out the story of how he reacted to taking a shot in the groin while with the San Francisco Giants. The team's trainer rushed up to him, put his hands on Pierzynski's shoulders, and asked him: "How do you feel?" "Like this," Pierzynski said, jamming his knee into the trainer's balls.

(Interestingly, the one group of athletes who do not wear cups is a group that protects every other part of their bodies — football players. It's some sort of test-of-manhood thing. Obviously, only people who didn't have a cup check early in life go on to become professional football players.)

While any male hearing the phrase "groin injury" will bend over slightly and cup his hands over his unmentionables in sympathy pain, some injuries are worse than others. For example, Utah Jazz guard John Starks in 2001 missed playoff time with what doctors called a "twisted testicle," otherwise known in the NBA as a loose ball foul.

My purpose in extra research into man pain is to get a feel for how much I might suffer during and after the vasectomy. You do get anesthesia for the surgery itself — they freeze you, so you become groin on the rocks — but my doctor gave me a Valium to take the morning of the surgery, just because many men are so nervous, they throw up at the sight of the first snip. (That must be the moment a doctor questions his decision to become a urologist.)

However, the pain sets in for a while after the surgery, enough to incapacitate you for a couple of days. So would that pain be better or worse than a pulled groin?

All I know is this: on the back page of the April 21 Chicago Sun-Times there was a huge picture of the Chicago Cubs' Nomar Garciaparra, grabbing his full Nether Regions Metroplex as if it were about to fall off, which was possible, because he had just torn a groin muscle off the bone. No matter what happens with my surgery, it's not going to hurt worse than that.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.