Jul 8, 2015 4 min read

Injuries to professional athletes can range from the run-of-the-mill, relatively unavoidable type to the bizarre ones, many of which occur away from the fields of play.

We’ve seen a variety of these just in the past few days. Closest to home – and on the low end of the oddball scale – the Pirates will be without sparkplug Josh Harrison for perhaps as long as six weeks after he wrecked a thumb sliding awkwardly into a base the other day. Baseball players seem to like the headfirst slide, despite indications there’s a greater injury risk from coming in that way, but Harrison no doubt thought he had the best chance of swiping the base headfirst, so it’s hard to fault him too much for hustling.

Then there’s the story of Rory McIlroy, one of the world’s greatest golfers, who will miss what is considered by many his sport’s premier championship, next week’s British Open at venerable St. Andrews. Lots of golf fans were hoping for a Sunday showdown between McIlroy and American phenom Jordan Spieth, who is halfway to a Grand Slam of the game’s major titles. Alas, McIlroy the other day was spending some of his free time engaging in a friendly game of soccer, and he ended up with ruptured ankle ligaments. Young people tend to heal fairly quickly, but not that quickly. On Wednesday, McIlroy dropped out of the Open.

However, unlike an athlete in a team sport, McIlroy is a private contractor with no responsibility to anyone much beyond his caddie and sponsors. Certainly, he’s losing out on money by being out of action, but a megastar like McIlroy makes the bulk of his cash off the course, from endorsements and the like. His on-course earnings pale in comparison. According to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, McIlroy has a net worth of $65 million and signed a $200 million deal last year with Nike. Not too shabby for a 25-year-old.

Then there are the really strange injuries, the ones that often are the result of boneheaded decisions by athletes.

Sports teams try to protect their players from themselves as best they can, sometimes putting restrictions in contracts to prohibit the athletes from skydiving, mountain climbing or even playing in pickup basketball games. But that doesn’t stop the truly creative players from finding novel ways of hurting themselves.

A few examples:

• In 2002, the San Francisco Giants had an all-star second baseman named Jeff Kent. During spring training that year, Kent ended up with a broken wrist. How did that happen? Well, Kent told his team he hurt himself by falling off his large truck while washing it. Unfortunately for Kent, there were people who not only saw him trying to do stunts on a motorcycle, but also wiping out on the bike. Kent wasn’t going to let facts stand in the way of a good story, so he stuck with the truck tale.

• A few years later, shortstop Clint Barmes, a recent Pirate who was then with the Colorado Rockies, turned up with a broken collarbone. He first claimed to have taken a tumble while carrying groceries, then amended that to falling while transporting a package of deer meat. Rumors he had been in some sort of ATV mishap were shot down by Barmes and a teammate – the one with whom he’d been riding ATVs.

• And then there’s Glenallen Hill, a rookie with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1990 who had a tremendous fear of spiders. Hill said he had a nightmare about spiders and was running away from them in his sleep when he suffered a variety of injuries.

But all of them have to take a backseat to Jason Pierre-Paul, a defensive lineman for the New York Giants, who the other day did severe damage to his fingers. What was Pierre-Paul doing? Holding lit fireworks. As comedian Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.” And it looks as if Pierre-Paul might pay dearly for his stupidity. The lineman had a long-term contract offer worth $60 million on the table. The Giants have now withdrawn it.

But shed no tears for Pierre-Paul. He’s still expected to earn about $15 million for the coming season, if and when he’s healed enough to play. That’ll buy a lot of Roman candles.