The more I think about this little topic, the more big names pop into my head. Today, there’s even a diabetic in the mix. So here are a few more folks, and hopefully I’ll be able to close it out next time. Thanks again, Kelly, for starting all this.

Viktor Frankl. If I could meet Frankl, I would listen intently to his words, and waste no time uttering any of my own.

Bobby Clarke. It’s about time a diabetic made my list. The former captain of the Philadelphia Flyers played this great game of hockey as if everything was on the line, every tick of the clock. He was a rugged, tough, competitive, talented, daring, dirty, and smart leader. He could not be intimidated, especially when skating for his country’s honour, as the great Soviet forward Valeri Kharlamov found out. It was Kharlamov who came out of shift against Clarke with a broken ankle to show for it. The Russian had earlier doled out his own fair share of beaver food (hockey lingo for dirty stick work) to Clarke and other Canadians, and years later Clarke said that "If I hadn't learned to lay on a two-hander once in a while, I'd never have left (the minor league town of ) Flin Flon." 

On another occasion, the entire Soviet team left the ice against Philadelphia during an exhibition game, refusing to stand for any more of the hard-hitting tactics of Clarke’s team.

When Clarke is talked about in hockey circles, the discussion invariably includes the pair of Stanley Cup Championships in the 70s, his part in the 1972 Summit Series that pitted Canada against the Soviets, and his contribution in the 1976 Canada Cup series. But for our purposes here in the O.C., I should mention the initial reluctance of NHL teams to show interest in a minor league star afflicted with a chronic disease. Sparing you the details, once that particular problem was hurdled, and Clarke had been drafted by the Flyers, other teams quickly offered deals trying to get him for themselves.

In training camp, after a couple of serious insulin reactions, Frank Lewis, a member of the team’s coaching staff, took it upon himself to develop a dietary regimen for Clarke to follow. It included Coca Cola with extra sugar before games, orange juice with more sugar between periods, and chocolate bars for emergencies on the bench between shifts. It worked, and the rookie Clarke never missed a game in his first season in the NHL.

I’d have a hard time leaving Clarke off any fantasy team roster, if I was given to such pursuits. That he played at the highest levels of his profession well before the days of home blood glucose monitors earns him my admiration and respect, even given my allegiance to the Boston Bruins, and my scorn for the rest of the Broad Street Bullies.

Lenny Skutnik, Roger Olian, and Arland Williams . The word “hero” is used far too loosely these days, but for these men there is simply no more appropriate term. The first two men plunged separately into the icy waters below Washington D.C.’s 14^th Street Bridge on January 13, 1982 in order that they might save the lives of people who were aboard the Air Florida Flight 90 that had just crashed after taking off from Washington National Airport in blizzard conditions. Williams, a passenger who survived the impact, later died in the horrific event following his own heroic efforts to save others. It is men like these that I try to think of whenever I find myself whining over something that I really don’t want to be doing.

Louis, Neil, and Lance. Each of the Armstrongs fascinates me.

George Plimpton. You have to give this man credit. As an author devoted to something called “participatory journalism,” he knew that in order to write from authority on a subject, even in his enjoyable, self-effacing way, he needed to experience it firsthand. In more than 30 books, he described with great wit what it’s like to pitch against major league hitters, to golf with the likes of Palmer and Nicklaus, to take punches from boxer Archie Moore, to run a play against truck-sized linemen as a QB in the NFL, and to face Pancho Gonzalez across the net of a tennis court.

A source of amusement for me is to re-live a former life by standing behind the protective glass just in back of the goal during warm-ups at pro hockey games. I particularly enjoy taking uninitiated friends to that spot just to watch their initial flinching at the first of a thousand pucks to smack like lightning bolts into the glass. Only there can one “enjoy” the terror of multiple rock-hard biscuits moving at 120 mph in the chaos of monstrous bodies without fear of life-threatening injury.

Plimpton’s book, Open Net, is an engaging and often sophomorically preposterous (practical jokes include teammates secretly spraying his clothing with a product called “U-Stink”) account of goaltending in the NHL from the perspective of someone who admittedly had absolutely no business standing between the pipes. That he donned the pads against Philadelphia’s Broad Street Bullies in the 70s speaks to an undeniable determination to get at the truth. Later, he lamented a missed “opportunity,” having been safely tied up with reporters after his brief on-ice stint when his teammates and the Flyers erupted into a bench-clearing brawl. Between you and me, he was smart to stay with the reporters rather than return to the ice and face Philly’s blood-thirsty, stick-wielding, axe-murderers with names like Bob “Hound Dog” Kelly and Dave “The Hammer” Shultz.

I suppose his ineptitude for skating was the determining factor in securing a spot as a goalie, where the general misconception is that skating ability is not required to “simply” remain upright in the goal crease. His readers learned otherwise, as he wrote of his five minutes of playing time being spent mostly flat on the ice. I also doubt that anyone thought to tell him beforehand of predecessors like Pittsburgh Hornets goalie Baz Bastien, who years earlier sacrificed an eye after taking a puck in the face, or of Gilles Villemure, who was initially thought dead after catching one in the Adams apple.

Plimpton did not limit himself (or his readers) to sports experiences. In pursuing his life’s endeavors, he worked with the Grucci’s, a family of professional pyrotechnics, he was shot by John Wayne in a movie, and he was a percussionist under Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Were he alive today and sitting in my living room, he would no doubt listen to my story of a diabetic, and then spend a week testing his own blood sugar and sticking himself with needles.

Gotta love a guy who wants to get it right.