Feeling Bad About a Dumb Injury? These Dudes Did It Worse

Georgia Garvey
Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:00:00 -0800
Opinion

I hurt my knee taking a step onto a riser in a performance at my kids' elementary school the other day.

I'm not sure yet how serious the injury is, but it's the kind of incident that makes you feel about 100 years old and like a complete moron. I mean, who gets hurt taking the stairs?

So, after it happened, I decided to make myself feel better in a manner passed down through the centuries as a sure-fire method for dispelling shame: Find someone who did something even dumber than you did.
Updated: Sat Mar 07, 2026

I hurt my knee taking a step onto a riser in a performance at my kids' elementary school the other day.

I'm not sure yet how serious the injury is, but it's the kind of incident that makes you feel about 100 years old and like a complete moron. I mean, who gets hurt taking the stairs?

So, after it happened, I decided to make myself feel better in a manner passed down through the centuries as a sure-fire method for dispelling shame: Find someone who did something even dumber than you did.

With that, I commenced to furious googling, turning up tales of some of the most athletically talented people in the nation injuring themselves not in the heat of competition but in the heat of — in one particularly memorable instance — taking off their shoes.

I hope your schadenfreude at reading these tales is as rich and satisfying as mine was.

In 1986, Boston Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs — immortalized in a top-tier episode of "The Simpsons" as a passionate defender of Pitt the Elder for the title of Britain's greatest prime minister — fell and hurt himself trying to take off his cowboy boots in a hotel room. Apparently, Boggs injured his ribs so badly that, six days later, he had to leave the game early because he still wasn't fully healed. The image of a big, burly dude falling into a hotel table while trying to remove a boot makes me feel much better about the times I've tripped over an uneven patch in the sidewalk and tried to make it look like it was the sidewalk's fault.

Another pro baseball player, outfielder Glenallen Hill, had the nightmare to end all nightmares in 1990. While playing for the Toronto Blue Jays and right around the time the horror movie "Arachnophobia" came out, Hill wound up sleepwalking during a bad dream about being attacked by spiders. Running away, he crashed through a glass table and onto the disabled list for 15 days. Apparently, people in the league called him "Spiderman" for years afterward. So far, thankfully, I report that no one's given me a catchy nickname to immortalize my injury.

LA Kings winger Dustin Penner hurt his back in 2012, sitting down to eat the vegetarian pancakes his wife had made him for breakfast (not sure why he called them "vegetarian" as I thought all pancakes were vegetarian, but whatever). The media initially reported that Penner threw his back out taking a bite, and somehow his wife caught some blame, but he later clarified that it was the sitting, not the pancakes or the chef, that was the culprit. He did finish the pancakes, so either they were very good or he was stuck in the chair for so long he got too hungry to care about the pain.

I quite vividly remember 2004, when Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa, after two "violent sneezes," needed an epidural to deal with the pain from the resulting back spasms due to a sprained ligament. My husband still sometimes shouts "Sammy Sosa!" after a particularly big sneeze.

San Diego Padres pitcher Adam Eaton proved just how dangerous an old-fashioned DVD case could be when he accidentally stabbed himself in the stomach in 2001, trying to open the hard plastic packaging around one, requiring two stitches and time away from a game. This story is a time capsule. Try telling a teenager now and watch their confused response. What's a DVD? What's a DVD case? As for why the manufacturers made them so hard to open, that remains an unsolved mystery.

Now, of all the weird injury stories in the wide, wide world of sports, this one is my favorite: It's about a (formerly young) man, Glenn Healy, who, in addition to being an NHL goaltender with teams in New York, Toronto and Los Angeles, was also a world-renowned bagpipe player. News reports said he even played the world's most annoying instrument in the locker room (when his teammates would let him). The pipes, alas, did not always love Healy as much as he did them. In 2000, while he was removing the bag from his pipes, he slipped and cut his thumb, leading to 10 stitches and, one would assume, a deep sigh of relief from non-bagpipe-enthusiast players.

These are but a few of the many examples out there. Clumsiness, apparently, is not restricted to middle-aged ladies running around on a stage singing revamped Billy Idol songs to her kids. Sometimes bad luck even gets the best of the graceful, the strong and the generally physically competent.

I have to admit, this is one of those situations where misery loves company, so I'm sorry about the spiders, Glenallen Hill, but I'm glad we all found out about them.