Pain in boys and men

When Lebron James of the Miami Heat broke his nose in a game last week against the Oklahoma City Thunder, the way he writhed with pain on the floor as seen on tv gave the impression that he had been hit by nothing less lethal than a baseball bat.

That was not what happened, of course. Baseball bats have no place in a basketball court. What actually happened, as shown in the slomo replay, was that a wayward arm hit Lebron across the face. The way it looked, the contact did not seem hard enough to severely injure.

But sure enough there was blood, a considerable deal of it, the nose being one of the bleedier body parts. And if Lebron says he broke his nose, it being his nose, who am I to question that from thousands of miles away?

All I am saying is that, for a swipe across the nose, Lebron, all six feet eight inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of him sure acted as if he got hit by a runaway train. Smaller men like Manny Pacquiao sure can take far harder hits than that one and still shake their heads to pretend they are unshaken.

Now, don't get me wrong. Any man's injuries are his own to react to. One man's mosquito sting is another man's bear bite. And a broken nose is not something I would wish to suffer personally, the pain it brings something I would rather be ignorant of.

Still I have been there as a boy, back in the day when rough and tumble games and adventures were hallmarks of our preparation and conditioning to become men. And the boys of my generation, who grew up in the Sixties, have the twisted limbs, the missing teeth, and the bodily scars of growing up to show for it.

And one thing I can proudly say about these childhood memories is that we never agonized more than what the pain really caused our young bodies. Nobody wanted to be stigmatized for life as a sissy if you did not get up, stopped crying, wiped the grime off your face, and limped back into play as if nothing happened.

Back then we did not tell our parents what happened and going to the doctor meant all the ruses had failed. But if we can help it, we remedied our misfortunes with everything and anything that boyhood imagination can conjure.

And so, for cuts and abrasions, we chewed on the bitter leaves of guavas or mashed the petals of gumamelas and applied them on our wounds. And believe it or not (do not try this at home, though) but for particularly bleedy injuries on hands or legs, nothing beats plain old dirt or ash to stem the flow.

Now ash, whenever available, can be excruciatingly painful. But we never screamed in pain. Yes we can writhe in pain just like Lebron James. But we were little boys of ten, give or take a couple of years more or less. We were not six feet eight inches. And we certainly were not two hundred and fifty pounds.

So, the moment boyhood pride takes over, the miracle of innocence, and a little help from adrenalin, makes us jump in front of our friends, chest expanded, jaw thrust out, and became the men that our minds made our frail little bodies to be.

It was the end of the world for us to be caught writhing in pain on the ground the way Lebron did. And the way I saw him on tv, I cannot help but wonder if he can survive that one particular summer in a Filipino boy's life when he crosses the threshold into "real" manhood.

That one particular summer is when many of the boys of my generation all stood in line in the backyard of the neighborhood "manunuli" for the distinct but dubious honor of having a knife inserted under the skin of his little thingy and have it whacked by a piece of wood.

Off to the sea we would run to rinse the wood and savor the salty release from the scariest thing in life. Preferred medication for this rite of passage wound is a brown substance that one scraped off the palms of coconut trees. We monitored the progress of healing by comparing one another's rate of unswelling.

In the NBA, there are already rules against flopping. Because it does not look good for big men to fall like dominoes in the wind. And though there can be no rules against agonizing, maybe a little self-control is in order for image-building. Crying does not look good on big men.