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The Anterior Cruciate Ligament Is All In Your Mind

Resolved: That when a professional athlete, no matter how weird he may be, says his knee hurts, maybe it does.

Manny Ramirez follows the dictates of his heart, which flits through life with the straight-line logic of a bat seeking mosquitoes at dusk. That's a given. We all know it.

Ramirez called in sick Wednesday and last night with a sore knee. In another indication of why journalism is a dying profession, a number of people who get paid to comment on Boston sports jumped to the conclusion Ramirez is malingering. This allowed them to spin the childish morality tale that is so beloved in these parts. Athletes never get sick, hurt, or just plain suck. They fail for important spiritual reasons that teach the young 'uns vital life lessons. In this case, the lesson is to turn the radio dail or look for the funnies in the paper instead of the sports section.

Maybe Ramirez IS jaking it in his covert contract struggle with Sox management. This would mean, among other things, his agent should kill himself. The traditional means of gaining lavish contract extentions is to show up for work and hit the snot out of the ball, two things Manny was doing with some regularity before last Wednesday. Being weird is not the same as being stupid, and Ramirez never struck me as the sort of person too dim to grasp the law of supply and demand.

So it is more logical to assume that Ramirez's knee DOES hurt. Does it hurt enough that he should miss a game with, gasp, the Yankees? Let me answer that question with another one. How the hell do Drs. Shaughnessy and Felger know? Can an MRI be conducted by seance?

The summary version of Manny's medical history with the Red Sox as is follows. 1. He doesn't get hurt too often. 2. When he does, he's not what anyone would call a fast healer. That could be hypochondria, or it could be the way his pain neurons and synapses are wired. The human body is as mysterious as its tenant the human mind.

Not playing for selfish personal reasons is about the worst sin in the pro athlete's book. It is almost as bad as it would be for a journalist to make serious charges without the evidence to back them up.

posted by Michael Gee @ 6:15 AM