Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Montreal’s Josh Gorges played on a torn ACL for eight years

gyi0062844726

Last night we found out that Montreal would be losing the services of defensive defenseman Josh Gorges for the remainder of the season thanks to a knee injury in which he’ll need to have surgery to repair. Knee injuries are no joke and they’re a bit too common amongst Habs defensemen as Andrei Markov is out with one himself.

What we sometimes don’t know is how badly an injury really is or how much pain a player will go through in order to keep playing or keep his spot in the lineup. Hockey players are generally considered a tougher bunch than most amongst athletes, you have to wonder if sometimes the stories you hear about how much pain a guy plays through is just myth making. Josh Gorges scoffs at such claims as he says he’s been playing with a torn ACL in his knee since 2002.

A day after Canadiens GM Pierre Gauthier announced that Gorges would need season-ending knee surgery, the 26-year-old blue-liner wasn’t ready to see the glass as half-empty just yet.

“I’ve had better times. This obviously sucks. As a player, you never want to be on the sidelines watching and it’s something new for me so it’s going to be difficult to deal with,” admitted Gorges, who has been playing with a torn ACL since his days with the Kelowna Rockets in 2002. “Obviously, right now, it’s tough to swallow and it sucks, but down the road I’ll have a good knee that’s 100 percent functional and working better than it has in seven years. I’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel at some point and when that day comes, it will be good.”


Now since we’re just keyboard jockeys that sit here and type out words for a living, jamming a finger or stubbing our toes are generally the worst injuries we’ll encounter when working from home. To hear about a guy playing with a torn knee ligament for over eight years is astounding and ridiculous.

We’ve said it before jokingly at times but usually pretty seriously: Hockey players aren’t human. Say, anyone seen that cart they took Brett Favre off for having a cut on his chin?