For whatever reason, people feel the need to cheer athletes after they get injured.
It might have started at a football game, because that's where some of the most serious injuries seem to happen. The standard image is of a player being wheeled away on a stretcher, giving the thumbs-up as the crowd cheers.
We're glad you're alive, seems to be the crowd sentiment, which isn't a bad thing at all. It's important to remember sometimes that games are just games.
(Can't help thinking about the Southern Illinois cheerleader last month who fell from the top of a pyramid. Paramedics strapped her head and body to a stretcher, and she kept on cheering, swinging her arms back and forth as they wheeled her away. That's not doctor recommended.)
It's the minor injuries that bother me. Do we need to cheer that a guy gets a sprained ankle? A slight concussion? If a guy lies there for 2 minutes, is looked over by four trainers, and then jogs off the field, does he deserve a cheer?
At Tuesday's playoff game between the Falcons and the San Diego Gulls, a guy for San Diego just got wrecked into the boards and, when he finally got up a couple minutes later, he was booed all the way off the ice. You gotta love those hockey fans.
It was an entirely different message than what fans usually give after a guy gets hurt. This was more of a "You're a wimp. Get up and toughen-up before we turn someone else loose on you."
Of course, they might have also been upset that Brad Both, the guy who hit him, had been given penalty minutes.
The reason fans were booing had nothing to do with the player getting up. It was because the replay showed a clean check and Both was given a penalty. The next night, when another San Diego player ran into the net and was down for a much longer period, he was given an ovation when he got up and went off without a stretcher. The Bee doesn't cover the Falcons well enough to know that hockey fans respect all players, even though we love to bag on opposing teams. If the writer had been sitting on the player's bench side, he would have seen the most vociferous Falcons rooters (the Bud Zone group) standing and applauding the Gull player's recovery.