I have a lot more respect for Mark Recchi today, this you have to read

Posted May 18, 2009 by Erik Erlendsson

Updated May 18, 2009 at 09:12 PM

I became a very big Mark Recchi fan this season. He is a classy, classy human being and a pretty darned good hockey player on top of that. It’s funny because Recchi had somehow developed a reputation from his days in Pittsburgh at the beginning of last season as some sort of a locker room cancer because he was having issues with Michel Therrien (which, apparently, so did a lot of the other Penguins’ players). So when a player with that form of a reputation comes to a new team, you sort of have the preconceived notion about them. But throughout the course of this season, I saw nothing like that from Recchi. He was a standup guy, always willing to talk to me and never dodged anythng. And his teammates loved him.

Now, after hearing about this following the Bruins’ elilmination from the playoffs, the legend of Mark Recchi will only become greater as the Boston Herald reported that Recchi played Game 7 against Carolina just after undergoing surgery to remove kidney stones the night before.

Are you kidding me? 

I can tell you, I passed kidney stones New Year’s Eve 2005 (forced us to miss out on a New Year’s Eve party, too!!!) without knowing what was going on and it was without a doubt the worst pain I have ever experienced. It would go away for a brief period of time and then come back with extreme pain in my lower back on the left side. I was vomiting off and on too, just from enduring the pain. I certainly don’t want to go through that again and I can’t imagine playing hockey 24 hours after undergoing surgery to remove one. I got on an airplane the next day, and that was enough for me.

So my respect factor for Recchi went way up and I say to Mark, I raise this glass of cranberry juice to you!!!