Sporting Madness

Just a week after I wrote this piece about heart failure and athletes dying young, another student-athlete has died. Neate has more on the tragic death of 19-year-old Ereck Plancher, a receiver at the University of Central Florida. As the Orlando Sentinel's Andrea Adelson writes , this is anything but an isolated incident. "The same story seems to play out every year: a seemingly healthy college football player dies suddenly as the result of a workout, and there are no immediate answers why," she wrote. "The last year there were no noncontact college football deaths was 1999. Since 1966, there have there have only been seven years when there were no noncontact college football deaths." The Sentinel also provides a list of athletes who have died recently after workouts. Those are some scary numbers, up there with the ones I found from the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation's national registry of young athlete deaths . Their researchers estimate there ...

Much ink has been spilled this week on the death of J.I. Albrecht by such worthies as Neate , Stephen Brunt , and Earl McRae . One of the prices of young age is missing the chance to appreciate and understand legends firsthand, instead relying on secondary sources. Still, said secondary sources did a marvelous job of filling a young sportswriter in on what exactly will be missed. If you can read those pieces and not be moved, you're a tougher man than I. McRae's piece in particular shows the dichotomy at the heart of sports fandom: we like our athletes and heroes to go out at the top, and have a hard time combining the bedridden old man with the legendary general manager. "This is the figure of physical power, of dominating presence, I remember," he writes. "I am not prepared for the J.I. Albrecht before my eyes. His sunken body covered in a white sheet from his neck to his toes. His unshaven face thin and pale. His good eye red and hurting. His left arm and hand...

The recent death of Windsor Spitfires captain Mickey Renaud hit pretty close to home for me : when an apparently-healthy young athlete inexplicably collapses at the breakfast table, it's tough not to think about both your own mortality and the role athletes play in our lives. Writing about a tragedy like this is a tough task, and it takes a special talent to portray someone accurately through the reminisces of friends and teammates. It's also an incredibly difficult topic to tackle, especially given the insular nature of sports in general and junior hockey in particular: these already close-knit communities tend to close ranks even more after this sort of tragedy. Fortunately, Gare Joyce has what it takes to do the job, and turned out a tremendous piece for ESPN's Page 2, more than worthy of further analysis here. Consider the title, "O captain, our captain," an allusion to Walt Whitman's poem about Lincoln's assassination, which was later famously refe...

In Truro, NS, for a few days, which is why updates have been a bit sporadic (also, covering three different games Saturday didn't help, but more on that later). Saw something I felt compelled to talk about, though. The Windsor Star is reporting that 19-year old Windsor Spitfires' captain Mickey Renaud collapsed and died in his home today. This is a huge tragedy for the Spitfires, the OHL, and Canadian hockey as a whole. It illustrates the here today, gone tomorrow nature of sporting potential and fame. One moment Renaud was a fifth-round pick of the Calgary Flames, captain of a respected junior team, and one of the team's best players with 21 goals and 41 points in 56 games: the next, his bright future inside or outside hockey is suddenly stripped away. The Romans perhaps summed it up best: sic transit gloria. It's these events that break the "fourth wall" between athletes and regular people. There are far too many of them: one of the best cases is soccer, wh...