A DUCKS’S DOGGED DETERMINATION

There are dog days and then there are dog days.

Professional hockey players are used to having their faces split by fists, their bones broken and teeth knocked out with sticks, their flesh slashed open with cold steel.

But when your dog kicks in your head, you know it’s not your day.

Shawn Antoski’s eight-year career in the NHL has been littered with stretched knee ligaments, separated shoulders, broken knuckles, strained hips and even hernia surgery. All of which are trivial when compared to the skull fracture and head injuries he suffered when the car in which he was riding ran into a concrete center divider on the Costa Mesa Freeway early in the morning of Nov. 24.

The Mighty Duck winger, who underwent surgery to have a steel-mesh plate inserted in his forehead, shook off the life- and career-threatening injury like an annoying little finesse player, left the hospital in only four days and began skating again last month.

Then one evening two weeks ago, he noticed that his 1 1/2-year-old Doberman pinscher, Jazz, wasn’t her usual jazzy self. So Antoski--who once nursed back to health a bird that hit the windshield of his truck back home in Brantford, Canada--decided to play veterinarian again.

Thinking she may have been drinking from the Tidy Bowl-laced toilets again, he put his head on Jazz’s chest to check her heartbeat.

“Her leg came up and hit me right in the forehead where the plate was,” Antoski said. “I reached up and it felt like a golfer took a divot out of my head. I had this huge dent. It was pretty scary.”

When his fiancee, Leanne Potter, came into the room and saw his face, she screamed and called 911.

“I was extremely frightened. You could see it was dented in and he was kind of panicked,” she said. “He was coherent and it didn’t seem like he was in immediate danger, but it was pretty scary.”

Paramedics arrived, took his vital signs and then Potter drove him to the hospital.

“They called my surgeon,” Antoski said, “and he said, ‘Tell him to come back in the morning and I’ll fix it.’ ”

Repairs required the insertion of a new, stronger plate and resulted in an even nastier scar that runs from his hairline down to the tip of his left eyebrow and ended any hopes of coming back this season.

“Thank God, I’m finally getting a little hair back,” he says, running fingers through the inch-long growth where wild shoulder-length strands used to roam.

Then he gingerly touched his forehead.

“If anything, I look like a hockey player.”

Playing a Role

Looking like a hockey player has never been the problem for Antoski, who was a first-round draft pick (18th overall) by Vancouver in a deep and rich 1990 draft. He’s 6 feet 4, weighs 235 pounds and could skate and score as a junior.

But Antoski, 27, believes his physical presence has held him back during a pro career that has fallen short of all expectations . . . the scouts who rated him so high, the four NHL teams he has played for and most of all himself.

“I’ve got my earrings, which are accepted in every other sport but not hockey, my tattoos and I ride my Harley and I’m certainly not afraid to answer the bell [fight],” he says, “but when you come to this level, you’re expected to play a role.

“As a junior, I could skate, score, set up other people and take care of my teammates too. But I was seen as this big, tough guy, and because I wanted to play at this level, I was willing to give up some individual skills in the spirit of a team concept and to try and fit in.”

In his first pro season, with Milwaukee of the International Hockey League, Antoski scored 17 goals and ranked third in the league in penalty minutes with 346. He was second on the Canucks in penalty minutes in 1993-94, his first full season in the NHL.

He was traded to Philadelphia in 1995 and played in a career-high 64 games with the Flyers that season. His search for an identity as more than a goon and an opportunity for increased ice time took him to Pittsburgh, where he signed as a free agent before the 1996-97 season. Last season, he came to the Ducks with Dimitri Mironov in a trade that sent Alex Hicks and Federik Olausson to the Penguins.

But he still was perceived mainly as an efficient bodyguard who had managed to keep all his teeth while separating others from theirs.

“People might not think about it that much,” he says, “but there’s a lot of pressure going out there every night knowing there’s a good possibility you’ll be asked to go knock someone’s head off.”

Make no mistake, Antoski is a gladiator with no qualms about bloodying an opponent’s face to enforce the game’s code of honor. And thus it has been extremely frustrating for him to watch the rest of the league declare open season on Ducks Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne.

Antoski has heard the sports-talk show uproar about the Ducks’ apparent inability to protect their prized pair and management’s apparent inability to acquire someone who will.

“I find it insulting in a way,” he said. “That’s why they brought me here after they traded Stu Grimson. To fill that void.

“Things just haven’t worked out.”

The Accident

He remembers nothing of the crash, only going to dinner with Potter and his cousin, Shawn Michael Hall, who was behind the wheel of the rented Mustang that ended up crushed against the freeway divider. Hall, of Toronto, was charged with felony drunk driving.

Potter and Hall, who were wearing their seat belts, escaped with minor abrasions and bruises. Antoski, who was sitting in the front passenger seat and was not restrained, slipped between the two inflated air bags and slammed into the windshield with his forehead.

“It’s so weird, I have no idea why I didn’t have my seat belt on because I always put it on, it’s like second nature,” he said. “Just a few days before, I’d gotten into [former Duck center Kevin Todd’s] truck and buckled up and he said, ‘Hey, don’t you trust my driving?’ ”

Antoski doesn’t remember terrorizing nurses and trying to escape from Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, where he was listed in serious condition after undergoing surgery for a depressed skull fracture.

Abnormally animated and chipper for someone who had just suffered a major head injury, Antoski went home from the hospital in four days and figured he’d be back swinging his stick and his fists on the ice in “a couple of weeks.”

Then a delayed-reaction depression set in.

“At first, I felt like I had hardly missed a beat,” he said, “then I started sleeping like 15, 16 hours a night and got worried. So I called Dr. [Craig] Milhouse and he said, ‘Finally. You’re human after all.’ ”

So Antoski went home to Brantford for a three-week convalescence over the Christmas holidays.

The Road Back

Thanks to his ill-advised foray into veterinary medicine, Antoski is convalescing again, this time at home in Orange. But he’s eager as a puppy to get the OK to start skating and working out again, ready to fight to return to the game he loves.

Will he hesitate to drop the gloves and answer that bell the first time it rings?

Right, about as long as he hesitated to remount his Harley after the accident.

“I’m not worried about it,” he said. “With all the assurances I’ve gotten from the doctors, there apparently is no reason I can’t play again.” His target date for a return is now set back to the beginning of training camp next season. The bone in his skull should grow to cover the gap within three or four months and then he figures to be medically cleared to play.

Antoski’s contract with the Ducks expires this season, however, and he has no idea if they want him back.

“It’ll be a couple of months before we get to the point of talking about a contract,” Duck General Manager Jack Ferreira said. “But we certainly haven’t ruled out the possibility of him being back.

“He has size and excellent speed, which is so important because you have to have to get there to make the hit. He was like a diesel train.”

And Antoski doesn’t feel derailed, just sidetracked.

“The right kind of happy ending here and we’ve got ourselves all the stuff of a Disney movie,” he says, smiling.

On second thought, it probably wouldn’t work. What Disney movie casts a dog as the villain?