Reports of Stan Mikita’s ill health have been greatly exaggerated, not that you would recognize him.
“I’m bald,” the Blackhawks Hall of Fame center was saying the other day. “It’s my Michael Jordan look. But unlike some people I know, my hair is growing back. Maybe I’ll stick my finger in an electric socket and go into the new century with an Afro.”
Then again, Mikita has stickhandled around enough fire lately. Like most athletes, active or retired, he is neither a good nor a willing patient. Men and women who play sports for a living tend to dabble in delusions of indestructibility, even when the body says no.
Naturally, Mikita had to play one more golf tournament in Florida before surrendering to medical authorities, but at least he finally went to the hospital and underwent surgery for an aneurysm that, had it ruptured, could have been fatal or left him paralyzed.
According to Robert A. Beatty, a family friend who performed the operation just before Christmas, the artery wall on the left side of Mikita’s skull was perilously weak and might have burst at any time.
But the danger is past and now Mikita can think about walking 18 holes at age 59 without feeling like he skated three periods against Henri Richard.
“I wasn’t right all last summer,” Mikita said. “I didn’t have any energy. Then I stepped on the scale one day and saw I was down 11 pounds. Which is not me. I can’t afford to lose weight.
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“Then I started driving the ball like you, shorter and shorter by several yards off the tee. I went in for a bunch of exams, and I was hoping that, like the saying goes, X-rays of my head would show nothing. But they saw problems.”
Mikita can only wonder which jolt in which bygone game caused the trouble, if indeed hockey was the source. When he left his native Czechoslovakia as a kid, he couldn’t speak English and literally had to fight for respect on the rinks of Canada.
When he joined the NHL in the late ’50s, nothing changed. He was still smallish and still feisty. He clearly earned the nickname Le Petit Diable. The little devil logged 154 penalty minutes in 1964-65, when he also led the league in scoring with 87 points.
Then things changed. In 1966, Toronto’s Kent Douglas put the lumber to Mikita’s head for 35 stitches. He tried a helmet, but didn’t like it. The next season in Pittsburgh, Mikita ducked to avoid a deflected puck and his right ear was about cut in half.
He played the next night, of course, but with a helmet. Also in 1967, Mikita won every trophy worth winning, including the Hart for most valuable and the Lady Byng for sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct, would you believe. Only 12 penalty minutes for the reformed diable.
“I don’t know if all that contact for all those years had anything to do with this thing or not,” Mikita said. “But I look around at all the concussions guys are having now in hockey and football and it makes you think. `Just what I needed. More stitches and another scar.”‘
Besides his plastics business, Mikita is active with the Blackhawk Alumni, American Hearing Impaired Hockey Association and the Celebrity Players golf tour. He still attends several Hawks home games. He worries like any other fan.
“I don’t know if some of the young guys appreciate what the Indianhead jersey means,” Mikita said, “but it’s not just here. I feel for the fans. There’s so much movement in the NHL that pride in a team’s uniform and tradition is lacking other places too.
“I can see that, and I’ll see it better soon. Dr. Beatty took care of my head, and now I’m going to have the Lasik procedure for my eyes. The man who’s doing it, Dr. Randy Epstein, tells me the golf ball will look bigger and so will the hole.”
But so will the trees, lakes and bunkers, no?