The blades of a hockey skate are sharper than a meat cleaver. One nasty cut can leave a trail of fear. When there’s blood on the ice and the smell of death in the air, even the tough guys of the NHL can have trouble scrubbing away the dread.
“We have sharp skates. And you have to consider getting cut a realistic possibility,” Avalanche defenseman Jordan Leopold said Monday.
He revealed a nasty, purplish scar on his leg, where a skate recently sliced his leg with a gash that required 30 stitches to close. “The skate cut me like a knife,” Leopold said. “I didn’t even realize what happened for about five seconds, until the blood started gushing. That’s scary.”
Hockey danced a little too close to death again this week, when Florida forward Richard Zednik required life-saving surgery in Buffalo after having his throat slashed in a freak accident with teammate Olli Jokinen during a loss to the Sabres.
“The chances of a player getting a skate in the neck are few and far between,” Leopold said. “But when I saw it happen, my stomach got a little light.”
The trail of blood was 100 feet long, as an ashen Zednik stumbled toward the Florida bench, his neck transformed into a fountain of blood upon being clipped by the skate of a tumbling Jokinen.
“It really brought back a bad memory,” said Avalanche assistant coach Jacques Cloutier, his heart racing back nearly 20 years to another game in Buffalo when teammate Clint Malarchuk’s neck was slashed by a blade, quickly dumping a grotesque pool of red at the goaltender’s feet.
One painful thought immediately struck Malarchuk.
Get off the ice, because his mother was watching the game on television and Malarchuk didn’t want her to see him die.
“We were all panicking on the team bench,” said Cloutier, recalling the awful March night in 1989, when a collision in the crease between Steve Tuttle of St. Louis and Uwe Krupp of Buffalo resulted in a skate slicing the carotid artery of Malarchuk. “Players on the ice didn’t know what to do. In the stands, you had fans fainting. The sight of it caused (two) people to have heart attacks.”
After an ambulance rushed Malarchuk to doctors who would save his life and the blood was removed with shovels from the ice, it was Cloutier who skated to the goal and replaced his injured teammate.
“I was shaking,” Cloutier said.
Shock filled the arena with such heaviness that players from both teams were unable to lift their sticks to shoot.
And every time he allowed his eyes to drift ever so slightly to his right, Cloutier stared at dark, ugly stains that could not be scraped away.
We love hockey both for the high-speed athleticism and the inevitable train wrecks. The game might be considered barbaric if it were not played by proud competitors who carry sticks and a sense of honor.
But troubling thoughts linger from the creepy Sunday injury to the 32-year-old Zednik, listed in stable condition while being treated by intensive-care personnel at Buffalo General Hospital.
Why wasn’t the Florida-Buffalo game stopped when the incident with 9 minutes, 56 seconds remaining in the third period created a scene that Sabres goalie Ryan Miller described as gore-splattered as any footage from a Quentin Tarantino movie?
And how lucky do NHL players feel that they don’t come face-to-face with life-threatening situations more often?
“Freaky things happen on the ice. But you have to look past them,” Leopold said. “You can’t be scared and play this game.”
NHL players realize the skate blade that cut Zednik could leave a scar on them all. Almost two decades after worrying his Buffalo teammate might die, Cloutier can still see the blood squirting from Malarchuk’s neck with every tortured heartbeat.
“I know there’s a video of the game. But I haven’t seen it,” Cloutier said. “Any time it comes on TV, I turn my head.”
Hockey players understand the dangers of big bodies, hard boards and razor-sharp skates. They signed up for a violent sport.
Sooner or later, there will be blood.
But once the puck drops, nobody dares think of the fears that could cut the courage from the heart of any man.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
