Louisville players react to Kevin Ware injury
Sports Saturday
Occasionally something happens in sports that is so memorable that we replay it in our heads for years. Sometimes it’s an amazing play, such as, say, Michael Jordan’s switch-hands lay-up against the Lakers in the 1991 NBA finals. Sometimes it’s something awful, such as the Louisville player Kevin Ware breaking his leg in the quarterfinals of March Madness last weekend.
In case you missed it, Ware contested a three-pointer by Duke player Tyler Thornton and, when he came down, his leg fractured so badly that the bone was sticking out of his skin.. Some of his teammaters crumpled to the court in horror.
There is a scene in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” that captures a related feeling of horror. The narrator remembers the moment when his little girl experienced a sudden attack of polio and went down:
Then, one day, she was up, playing. Isabel was in the kitchen fixing lunch for the two boys when they’d come in from school, and she heard Grace fall down in the living room. When you have a lot of children you don’t always start running when one of them falls, unless they start screaming or something. And, this time, Gracie was quiet. Yet, Isabel says that when she heard that thump and then that silence, something happened in her to make her afraid. And she ran to the living room and there was little Grace on the floor, all twisted up, and the reason she hadn’t screamed was that she couldn’t get her breath. And when she did scream, it was the worst sound, Isabel says, that she’d ever heard in all her life., and she still hears it sometimes in her dreams. Isabel will sometimes wake me up with a low, moaning strangled sound and I have to quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping against me seems a mortal wound.
Of course there’s a major difference since Kevin Ware will recover and perhaps will even go on to play basketball again. But that instant of horror when one is sickened to the very core of one’s being—that’s what it felt like to watch him go down.