It was 2001, and the Seahawks played the http://i.imgur.com/QbYzHTH.jpg in D.C. Tobeck felt fine on the flight over and fine that afternoon, but in the evening, his stomach started sounding alarms.“I guess violent would be the word for it,” he says.
It was so bad that the team quarantined him, moving out roommate Steve Hutchinson. Tobeck didn’t come out of his room, but by Sunday afternoon — and with the help from some medication designed to clog him up — he thought he could play.
“I’ll never forget Holmgren,” Tobeck says. “I walked by Holmgren before the game and he just looked at me, real serious, and said, ‘Tough it out.’”
Backed by those uplifting words from his coach, Tobeck took the field for the first series of the game. He was locked in hand-to-hand combat with Dan Wilkinson, a 340-pound defensive tackle nicknamed Big Daddy.
“I’ve got to deal with the stomach issues, plus I have to deal with Big Daddy,” Tobeck says.
Then, disaster. Shaun Alexander took a handoff and, without anywhere else to go, rammed into Tobeck.
Say Tobeck: “Knocked the wind out of me, knocked everything else out of me.”
Tobeck stayed in the game, but when he finally left the field, he asked the trainers and equipment staff for a new pair of pants. And a bucket.
“I would come off to the sideline and there was a bucket there, and the poor guys had to stand around me with a towel,” he says. “I was shitting in a bucket on the sideline during a game.”
Tobeck, it’s worth pointing out, played center, and at some point during the game, a trainer had the sense to walk over to quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and tell him he might want to stop licking his fingers.
THIS is the kind of sports journalism that I pay quality money for.
― i eat ass with a knife and fork (Neanderthal), Wednesday, 21 September 2022 17:39 (one year ago) link