Specialty networks like ESPN, NESN and TSN love highlights. With so many sports and leagues to report on, game highlights are a mainstay; touchdown after touchdown, goal after goal and of course a plethora of slam dunks. The more outstanding feats often get repeat showings and slow-motion analysis. Recently one such exemplary bit of action from the previous night that warranted multiple replays had nothing at all to do with athletic skill, and everything to do with an inadvertent hockey stick to the groin.
Over and over they showed this poor bastard just about being impaled on the blade of a Reebok composite hockey stick during a collision with an opposing player. The television commentators said it was a jab to the groin, but that’s just pretty talk, a euphemism for a shot to the nuts. He would have been better off had his groin taken the brunt of the blow, but nope, smack in the athletic cup which, at that speed, offers some, but not nearly enough protection.
What is odd about these groin related misadventures is that invariably the people watching it will laugh. Truth be told, I laughed. Is it because we feel a sense of relief that it did not happen to us? Should you be testicularly challenged for whatever reason, let me assure you there is nothing, and I mean nothing, funny about it. Yet among those not directly affected it can provoke absolute gales of laughter.
These calamities often occur during some sort of sports activity. Often, but not exclusively; don’t overlook the awkwardness and misery of the inadvertent swinging of an over sized purse to the pills situation at a cocktail (where else?) party. Much like its brother, the accidental elbow to the boob, this is accompanied by much embarrassment for all involved.
For those of us who grew up playing street hockey, it was almost a rite of passage. The good old slap-shot of a wet frozen tennis ball that catches you square in the choir buttons. Of course we lads were a compassionate lot, and as the first waves of pain and nausea threatened to mercifully rob you of your consciousness, shouts of “Ding Dong” echoed throughout the neighborhood. We called it ball-hockey for a reason.
Sometimes it’s not in a social setting, sometimes it happens when you are on your own – and have no one to blame. When I was in my early teens I spent many a pleasant hour whipping a lacrosse ball – think SuperBall, but bigger – at the wall of a school building and catching it with a first baseman’s glove. I did this so much that I honed my skills and before long I was seeking a more challenging endeavor. Eventually I realized that if I chucked the ball at the seven or eight cement steps that led to the school’s door, it provided me with a random return; maybe up, maybe down. This kept me on my toes, sharpened my reflexes – sadly, not quite sufficiently. On one particular day I, being a bit cocky (what else), hurled the ball at those steps while running toward them only to have the ball hit in such a manner that it came screaming straight back, about waist-high, and caught me square in the cojones.
I sat there on the same steps just waiting it out. My eyes watered and my nose ran, but that seemed appropriate at the time as I was sure my gonads had been lodged in one of my sinus cavities. Of course eventually things returned to normal, but I still flinch when I see a lacrosse ball.
If there was anything positive about this painful lesson it’s that it happened long before iPhones with cameras and even the Internet. If not I just know I would have been dumb enough to have set my phone to record my great feat of youthful athleticism, only to capture the agony of defeat. I wonder if I would have gone viral?
DCMontreal 
I suppose I should be grateful that lacking the external, convex plumbing of the male of the species, I could not know that particular pain. On the other hand, there’s always labor and birth, if we are going to be competitive. But I guess it doesn’t really count because it isn’t (yet) part of a sporting event 🙂
Although I’ll never have the benefit of first-hand experience, from what I’ve heard, and from what I can imagine, I’m willing to concede that childbirth is more painful.
From my observations, laughing at such misadventures is not something that everybody does (my husband does). I cringe in empathetic pain if a man is felled by a blow to THAT region, even though I don’t have any gonads. I can’t watch programs like ‘The Science of Stupid’ without feeling a little traumatised. Do you think perhaps that women have more mirror neurons than men?