My playing days ended on March 16, 1996

It took years to harden my heart.

Suited up. Pre-Injury

My playing days ended on March 16, 1996 in Happy Valley, Pa. I’d push off my left knee only to be met with acute and intense pain. Such episodes had occurred throughout the season, my knee would lock up on a warm-up jog, or buckle during line drills. On that day it was far worse and more frequent. Six Advil at halftime got me through the game, but afterward I couldn’t even carry my equipment as I limped a ridiculous distance to the visitor's locker room.

I spent the next few days on crutches, got x-rays and an MRI, and when the doctor scoped it a week later, I naively figured I’d be on the field in a couple weeks.

Two unsuccessful surgeries over the next year left me hobbled and bitter. I symbolically suited up for our last game of my senior year. Once we gained a big enough lead, the plan was I’d see some crease attack action—try to score one last goal. But, we never got a big lead, in fact we lost. I don’t know if a last shot would have given me any closure, but being denied the opportunity made me angry. In a fit of self-pity, I took it as proof that the guys I used to play with (guys who still got to play while I unsuccessfully rehabbed) didn't give a damn. But honestly, I’d done more to shut myself out than they had to exclude me. I’m not that close to guys I played with in college (certainly not as close as I am with high school teammates), because I deemed my-own-damn-self a pariah when I could no longer play.

The bitterness festered amidst a volatile mix of inherent love of the game and hollow anger at a busted knee.

As an assistant high school lacrosse coach, frustration would rise when, unfairly or not, I would interpret a player’s lack of effort or preparation as a slight to the sport, an offense to those like me who had the game ripped away. I was often unhappy on the sideline, but couldn’t fathom resigning that post. And then, one summer when I was surrendering a week of vacation to coach a team camp, I broke down. I had taken it all so personally, for nearly a decade, and I needed to cut ties with the sport.

That cutting of ties didn't last all that long, but the act of it let me come back to lacrosse without the burden of that gaping open wound.

They called it “dashboard knee”, seen more in car accidents than the lacrosse field. The bent knee allows a massive traumatic blow to be delivered to the hard, smooth cartilage on the base of the femur and a chunk falls off. At first the diagnosis was delivered to me as good news (“Your knee structure—ACL, MCL—is in great shape”). But ACLs they can mend; I've had multiple surgeries on both knees. Been “non-weight bearing” on crutches for a month and a half each time. But I’m left with knees that swell to grapefruit size with a round of golf, or the mere thought of making a hard v-cut.

I am currently doing a painting featuring guys I played with in college, guys who made their mark, have accolades recorded in the program’s history. I’m not in it. I’m not bitter about that anymore.

Vs. Duke 1995

www.laxpopart.com

Lax's Moonlight Grahams

To utterly misquote F Scott Fitzgerald: “There are only second acts in American lacrosse.”

As the sport’s popularity grows, perhaps we are in sight of a new era in which pro lacrosse players and coaches make enough in salary and endorsements to commit full-time, teams play in dedicated stadiums (as opposed to college, even high school campuses), and teams practice multiple times per week allowing the strategic game to advance. I’d be interested to see that development in the game. I’d like to know what MLL caliber athletes could do with more sophisticated game plans and more time training together.

And yet, I hold tightly to what we have had.

As a coach of middle and high school students, I was thankful that our sport offered no lucrative professional options which might muddy the values of coach or player. It made the metaphor ‘lacrosse is life’ more, well, metaphorical. The lessons learned on the playing field of teamwork, perseverance, and integrity were always meant to be applied to other pursuits, always meant to contribute to the kind of man you’d be in your life and career after your playing days.

The metaphorical “second act” is and was perpetual reality; even the greatest players in our sport have eyed another profession as they played and studied in high school and college. This makes one’s college degree and college choice more meaningful. We are not a sport in which college is a way station on the road to the pros. Instead, lacrosse can open the door to some of the best colleges and universities in the country, for the purposes for which such institutions exist.

 [Within that line of thinking, a NOTE: As a freshman and sophomore in high school, I had no idea which college I should attend. I am thankful that recruiting in the 90’s still meant you took your five official visits and could pick your college your senior year. I hope we get back to a time frame more like that.]

Much like the USCLA players before them (the battlers of the Mt Washington Lacrosse Club, Brine, Long Island Athletic Club, etc.), today’s players enter the highest level of post-collegiate lacrosse knowing it is not a career. But times have changed as well. Today’s MLLers are not weekend warriors; it is no beer league. The players train as professionals, but on their own time and dime; not at a team facility while being generously compensated.

Now to taint a lacrosse post with a baseball reference. Remember this bit of dialogue from Field of Dreams:

Ray Kinsella: Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came within... y-you came this close. It would kill some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. God, they'd consider it a tragedy.

Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham: Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy.

Lacrosse is full of Moonlight Grahams, men who pursued their lacrosse dreams, and then pursued another. Young lacrosse players—pour your heart into the game, and through that struggle learn to pour your heart into other lives.

Jim Fenzel

jimfenzel.com