Pat Quinn popularized the dreaded upper-body, lower-body terminology
Today in the world of sports, it’s common for coaches to disguise injuries by referring to them in the ugliest terms known to sports: lower-body or upper-body injuries.
Some days it’s kind of funny to hear reporters, hunched over their laptops, throwing out the question to a colleague: “Did he say upper-body or lower-body injury?”
As ridiculous as these terms sound, it has infiltrated the sports writer’s vocabulary and some old, venerable sports writers from an earlier era are rolling in their graves over this convoluted phrasing.
Everything else in sports is so well-documented. Every statistic known to man can be looked up on the NHL.com, but injuries are a protected species.
No one, of course, wants an opponent to work over the injured part of the body when a players returns to action.
Two years ago, I wondered: Who the hell came up with this? It must have been a lawyer.
The trail led right to Pat Quinn’s door. Quinn, of course, had been a lawyer and a hockey coach and general manager.
Two years ago at a Leafs practice, Paul Hendrick, the long-time Leafs’ TV broadcaster, told me it was Quinn who first used the terminology when he was coaching the Maple Leafs.
I called Quinn in Vancouver to verify this information, and he confessed.
It was vintage Quinn on the phone. I asked him about the time when a reporter once asked if there was such a thing as a middle-body injury.
“I probably didn’t have a good answer then,” Quinn told me. “But I should have said, ‘You media guys all have a middle-body injury because you’re all a pain in the ass.’”
This is No. 23 on my top-40 list of favorite Toronto Star stories as I count down the days to retirement.
This story ran on March 18, 2014.
From off-hand obfuscation to NHL standby
By Curtis Rush
Fifteen years later, Pat Quinn has lulled the hockey world into almost complete acceptance of one of the most bloated, awkward injury terms ever in use.
The dreaded “upper- or lower-body injury.”
This is just coach-speak to protect players from being targeted by opponents.
It’s a terminology that only a lawyer — or someone with a law degree, like Quinn — would dream up. Or a coach who sees hockey as a war and reporters as spies. That was Quinn too.
In the spring of 1999, as coach of the Maple Leafs, Quinn popularized the term across the NHL, and spawned a generation of coaches who rely on this form of cover-up. Quinn recalls using the phrase to relieve the pressure he was getting from the media and the NHL headquarters to be more forthcoming.
“It just came out of thin air, “ Quinn, 71, recalls in an interview from Vancouver.
“I was tired of being asked about injuries.”
The NFL would never let him get away with this.
In that league, specific injuries are publicly provided 48 hours before kickoff in what is viewed as an attempt to prevent gamblers from getting close to players to obtain secret, inside information.
Quinn thinks that the league allows the media too much access — like in the HBO series that took viewers inside the dressing rooms and private lives of the Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings as they prepared for the Winter Classic.
“I was raised never to tell the opposition anything, “ Quinn said. “In the old days, if anybody asked about an injury, the coach would just tell the reporter to buzz off.”
Legendary Leaf goalkeeper Johnny Bower said that the only person he told if he was hurt was his wife, Nancy. He was worried coach Punch Imlach would sit him out if he found out he was hurt.
“I broke my fingers and stuff like that, “ he said. “Imlach never knew. The trainers would just tape me up.”
Gary Meagher, an NHL spokesman, told the Star that injury information hasn’t been released by the league in at least seven years.
“Individual clubs may release as they see fit, “ he wrote in an email. “Upper-body and lower-body is acceptable.”
The terms weren’t invented by Quinn.
But research suggests the former Leafs coach is the one whose liberal use of the term caught on with others in the hockey coaching fraternity.
Tracking down his first reference to upper- and lower-body injuries is tough, and Quinn can’t seem to recall with certainty when he first summoned up those evasive words.
However, he suspects it was during the first round of the 1999 playoffs against the Philadelphia Flyers.
Quinn was being questioned about the injury suffered by defenceman Dmitri Yushkevich.
Quinn’s memory is a little vague, but news reports at the time indicated that Yushkevich had hurt his left forearm and Quinn wasn’t letting on what the injury was.
Thinking quickly and trying to protect his defenceman in what was a physical series, Quinn came up with “upper-body injury, “ as he recalls. The wording came to him out of the blue.
“With these terms, I could abide by the NHL and I didn’t have to be forthcoming, “ Quinn said.
At the beginning of the next season, sports writers sometimes let their irritation show in their reporting.
In January 2000, the Star’s Rosie DiManno reported on an injury suffered by Maple Leafs tough guy Tie Domi, who wasn’t able to travel with the team on a western road swing.
“Coach Pat Quinn is famously paranoid about revealing injury details, “ she wrote. “Upper-extremity injury is the actual phrase he has approved for release to the media.”
The Edmonton Journal said of Quinn’s reference to the Domi injury: “This is a team that almost never tells you where a guy is hurt. You have to guess.”
Kevin Allen, longtime hockey writer for USA Today and president of the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association, told the Star that his organization has had several conversations with the NHL about the use of upper- and lower-body injuries, to no avail.
“They are inflexible, “ he said. The league cites competitiveness reasons and U.S. medical privacy laws for not becoming more transparent.
“It’s almost comical, it’s so absurd, “ Allen said, adding that season ticket holders should be entitled to better information “because they’re almost like stockholders.”
Scott Morrison, past president of the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association, recalls the frustrations the writers had.
“We battled through with just no disclosure whatsoever, “ he said.
Morrison recalls a particular incident in 1999 when the media battled over the vagueness of upper-body and lower-body injuries during the conference finals against Buffalo.
“I remember there was a real mess because the Leafs said Steve Thomas had an upper-body injury and we (Toronto Sun) wrote that he had a bum shoulder, “ Morrison said. “Half the Leaf organization went nuts.”
He said the writers understood the Leafs didn’t want Thomas to be targeted, but Morrison said that the reporter got the information from the other team. “There are not a lot of secrets on the ice, and they know where a guy’s ailing.”
Looking back, Morrison recalls the term as being an “incredibly clever turn of phrase.”
The references to upper-body and lower-body injuries may be clumsy, but over time, “everybody seems happy with it, “ Quinn maintains.
Morrison remembers an amusing moment when the media asked Quinn sarcastically if there was such a thing as a middle-body injury.
Quinn laughs, remembering when he took that question. He only wished now he could have delivered a cheeky response.
“I probably didn’t have a good answer then, but I should have said, ‘You media guys all have a middle-body injury because you’re all a pain in the ass.’”
