It Hurts Only When He Sits : Golic Dismisses Pain During Games, but Afterward Is Another Matter

Where was Bob Golic going?

Two nights before, during a Monday night game at New Orleans, Dec. 16, he had suffered a torn left calf muscle in the Raiders’ game against the Saints, sending an internal gush of blood through his lower leg.

“I couldn’t believe how much blood was inside of me,” Golic said. “My leg was black from (mid-thigh) to my ankle.”

You’ll tear just about everything if you play nose tackle long enough in the NFL. Golic is finishing his 12th season. In 1984, he ripped the right calf while playing for the Cleveland Browns.

On Tuesday, Dec. 17, Golic was sent to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for a magnetic resonance imaging test. Doctors ordered him to keep his leg elevated to keep the blood from clotting in the muscle.

So for five hours Golic kept his leg up, allowing the blood to drain slowly down the back of his leg into the area around his hamstring.

But when Golic stood up and walked around, gravity pulled the blood back down toward his ankle.

“They didn’t want the blood to pool in one area,” Golic said. “There was a lot of treatment to spread the blood out, because it’s easier for the body to assimilate it back if you get it out of one area.”

But what about Golic? Where was he going? By Wednesday, it appeared that someone had spray-painted his entire left leg purple.

And like Frankenstein’s Igor, Golic dragged his limb through the team’s training complex in El Segundo.

A few months off wouldn’t hurt.

“They said something about Hawaii,” Golic would joke. “Or some other island. They said not so much a training table but a lawn chair, or some sort of poolside chair would be very appropriate.”

Golic slowly moved on as he made his way to . . . where? Home? Back to the hospital? Maui?

Practice.

What?

That’s what his wife said.

“Everyone said, ‘Why in the hell don’t you take some time off?’ ” Golic said. “I don’t know.”

Golic wrapped the calf as tightly as tape would allow, swallowed a handful of aspirin and played an entire game against the Kansas City Chiefs last Sunday.

How well Golic played is a matter of opinion. He thought he had played OK.

“Everybody has those things called endorphins, and they just kind of kick in,” he said. “I guess I was borrowing endorphins from other people that day, because it wasn’t until after the game that I all of a sudden went ‘Ouch!’ ”

Someone didn’t play well against the Chiefs, who gained 468 yards against the Raiders, 206 on the ground, but Golic apparently held his own.

“I thought Bob played his butt off,” said teammate Howie Long, who played sparingly because of strained left knee ligaments. “Honestly. I thought Bob played better than anyone up front. So explain that. I don’t understand it, but he played his butt off.”

Raider Coach Art Shell agreed.

“He was pretty effective,” Shell said. “Bob handled things from tackle to tackle, he just can’t get outside. Bob didn’t do a bad job.”

Golic on one leg apparently is better than anyone else the Raiders have because he will be back on the field for Saturday’s wild-card playoff game against the Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium.

Golic said his leg is much improved.

“There’s almost no color at all,” he said this week. “It’s not even fun to show anymore. (Before,) you could have driven a golf ball with my foot. It looked like a club.”

It’s easy to forget how much Golic cares for the game because he spends so much time making light of it.

He has been a master quipster since entering the NFL in 1979 as a second-round draft choiceof the New England Patriots.

Golic came into the league as a linebacker but made his name as a nose tackle with the Browns from 1982 through ‘88, when he was named to the Pro Bowl three times. He joined the Raiders as a Plan B free agent in 1989.

He described his switch from linebacker to nose tackle as a de-evolution process in which man, over time, drops from a standing upright position to all fours.

Golic doesn’t play injured because it might appear noble. The combination of his love for the game and a high pain threshold makes it difficult to keep him out of the lineup.

“It’s not that it hurts less,” he said of his threshold. “It’s just that I notice it less.”

Golic has missed one game in his career--that time in 1984 when he tore his right calf muscle while playing for the Browns. He practiced all week and thought he was going to play. But just before kickoff, Coach Marty Schottenheimer decided Golic should sit.

Golic didn’t agree, and Saturday he will get another chance to show his former coach what a man can do in a game with a torn calf. Schottenheimer now coaches the Chiefs.

Golic also has a certain sense of urgency.

At 34, he doesn’t have many more chances. He has made it to three AFC title games--two painful title-game losses to Denver while he was with the Browns, one with the Raiders--but never a Super Bowl.

Who has time to sit?

“I don’t want to miss games,” he said. “I enjoy the game too much. I don’t want to sit back just because I’m hurt. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to play under any condition until somebody with higher authority than me tells me differently. At that point, they’ll have an argument on their hands.”

Twice in his career, Golic has received pain-killing injections before a game, but never when it involved a muscle or joint that could be further injured. He said he took a shot once to deaden the pain of torn rib cartilage. On another occasion he took an injection after having broken his big toe during the week.

“A lot of guys don’t want to play in pain,” Golic said. “I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. It’s a personal thing, not something you can teach.”

After last Sunday’s game against the Chiefs, Golic was sent back to the hospital because there was a fear of blood clots in the calf. But the doctors have cleared him to play again.

Now it’s up to Golic.

“There’s pain,” he said. “A lot of pain. Like a toothache pain, real deep, intense and constant. (Tuesday) morning I came in and said: ‘I just want it to stop for a while. Hook me up to a morphine drip or an eggnog drip, I don’t care. Whatever the season dictates.’ You just want it to go away.

“Last night I didn’t sleep. I lay there. I had nothing to do but lay there, and you think about it.”

The way Golic sees it, though, he has the rest of his life to heal.