Sports Heroes Come From the Most Unlikely of Places

This is a story so small that no one reported it.

It didn’t happen in professional sports or big-time college sports. No one saw it on television, and there were only about 600 people in the building. It’s a story about people you’ve never heard of before and likely will never hear of again.

It begins with blood on the ice.

Usually, in hockey, blood on the ice is evidence of someone’s fist applied to someone’s nose. Or someone has used a stick to rearrange someone’s hairdo. What we forget is that everyone wears razor blades on their feet.

Even when Ryan Theros went down in a tangle of three bodies with two minutes left and his team losing, 5-1, the collision looked no different than hundreds of others since he first stood tall on hockey’s steel blades as a 3-year-old.

This time, though, he felt pain high in his left thigh, near the groin. He saw his pants cut open, his padded breezers sliced. There was such a gash in his leg that he could see “pure white fat hanging out.” Later, he figured the back point of someone’s skate blade had gouged him open.

The big man -- a 6-1, 235-pound senior forward from Two Harbors, Minn. -- rose from the pile and skated toward the Northland College bench for a line change. But at the boards, as Theros started to leap over, he couldn’t do it. Instead, he collapsed. That’s when he saw the blood. “It was pumping out,” is the way he put it.

This is a little story, an unreported incident in a Division III hockey game in Wisconsin, Northland College against the Milwaukee School of Engineering, rivals in the Midwest Collegiate Hockey Association.

I know the story only because hockey fan Dave Lewis told me what happened when Theros collapsed. From Lewis’ e-mail:

“One of his teammates, I’m not sure which one, literally dove on top of Ryan and grabbed his legs to put pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding. Both team trainers rushed out on the ice while the public address announcer asked if there were any doctors in the crowd.

” ... Milwaukee Fire Department paramedics arrived and also helped treat Ryan. All the while, Ryan’s teammate lay sprawled out on top of Ryan, squeezing his leg to stop the bleeding. The trainers, doctors and paramedics worked on Ryan in front of the hushed crowd for at least half an hour before putting him on a stretcher and taking him to the hospital.

” ... He was not going to let his buddy bleed. The scene was something I would expect to see in combat with one soldier refusing to leave his wounded buddy. Ryan Theros is lucky to have such a hero for a teammate. These are the guys we should be reading about instead of the T.O.s of the world.

“I wish I had noticed the teammate’s number so I could tell you his name. He is a true American hero.”

His number is 22, his name is Jim Junker. He’s a junior, a 5-8, 165-pound forward from St. Paul, Minn., who said, “I saw Ryan’s pants full of blood, so I jumped over the boards.”

The way these wonderful things happen, Junker’s father, Mike, is a paramedic. As a high school student, Jim Junker wrote a paper on a paramedic’s work. Doing research for a month, Jim Junker rode with his father on emergency runs.

“I knew,” the son said, “that if there’s bleeding in the general area of a major artery -- this was near the femoral artery -- you have to apply pressure.” Unless the bleeding from a femoral artery is stopped, death follows, quickly.

Junker scrunched his jersey into a ball and pressed the bundled cloth against the open wound. When Milwaukee School trainers Ben Kessel and Mark Cole rushed to Theros’ side, they pressed hands atop Junker’s until paramedics put the player on a stretcher.

The good news of that day in early February came during the ambulance ride to a hospital. Theros said, “They told me it wasn’t the femoral artery.”

Doctors put four stitches deep inside the wound and needed 16 more to close it. After two hours in the hospital, Theros joined his teammates for the six-hour bus ride back to the Northland campus in Ashland, Wis., up near Lake Superior.

Three weeks later, going to class, laughing, Theros still had a bruise from groin to kneecap.

A little story.

But nice.