Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - IceRay's Wingfield reaches summit in recovery

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Wednesday, August 4, 1999

IceRay's Wingfield reaches summit in recovery
Left wing who broke leg in February scales 2,800-foot mountain trail as part of therapy
By Mark Button
Caller-Times

Brad Wingfield ran to the top of a mountain Tuesday.
   Not bad for a guy who, a little more than five months ago, had his right leg snapped apart like a chunk of peanut brittle.
   It was Feb. 26, the Corpus Christi IceRays trailed at Lake Charles, 3-1, with a minute to play in the second period. Wingfield, a pit bull of a left wing known more for landing right hands to chins than putting pucks in goals, rushed up the right boards with the puck.
   He crossed the blue line, saw the goalie coming out to challenge. Wingfield saw one defender back - big Joe Middlestadt - skating toward him, hoping to cut down the angle of the shot.
   "But I knew I had time to get a shot off," Wingfield said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia. "I beat the goalie through the legs, but he knocked it down and the puck trickled wide and sat on the edge of the crease. The goalie was too far out and I remember thinking if I could beat the defenseman to the net, I could put that puppy home."
   But Middlestadt caught him, hit him high as the goalie flopped back to try and cover the puck. Middlestadt's hit pinned Wingfield's right skate against the metal pipe frame of the net. Diving, Middlestadt cross-checked Wingfield to the ice. The right skate did not give.
   The rest of his leg folded down. Almost everyone heard it.
   Pop!
   "It was the weirdest thing," said Roger Lewis, Wingfield's linemate who trailed on the play. "I heard the pop and I knew it had to be his leg. I kind of stayed away because I knew he was in pain. I've never seen anything so severe in hockey, and I've been playing for 20 years."
   Right away, Wingfield knew it was messy.
   Serious crunch
   "It felt like my leg had been chopped off at the knee," Wingfield said. "It felt torn off, knee and everything."
   Wingfield lay on the ice for a minute, "crying,'' he said, "like a little girl." Maurice Sicard, the IceRays trainer, came out on the ice.
   Then a doctor.
   Then a stretcher.
   "The look on his face was not one of pain; it was disbelief," said Tom Hoefer, the Ice Pirates public relations director. "He held his leg up and his ankle was hanging down at a 45-degree angle."
   The prognosis: A spiral fracture of the right tibia and a shattered right fibula. "The break was about four inches above my ankle, but it spiraled down into the ankle," Wingfield said.
   Surgeons inserted five metal screws into the leg - four on the ankle, one under the knee - that same night.
   On that night, Wingfield's season, his third as a professional, ended.
   Tuesday, his comeback reached a new plateau, 3,700 feet above sea level.
   For the first time since the gnarly injury, Wingfield got out of the gym, where he had been working a stairmaster and riding an exercise bike for a total of 50 minutes a day, four days a week for the last two months, and tested the leg against the elements.
   More specifically, the Grouse Grind trail on the face of Grouse Mountain in Vancouver.
   It's only 1.7 miles long, but it covers 2,800 feet in altitude.
   Some people call it Mother Nature's stairmaster.
   "And it's rocky," Wingfield said. "There are boulders bigger than my house and loose rocks the size of softballs. Lots of loose rock. The Vancouver Canucks train there, and they run a race there every year."
   Wingfield expects a full recovery in time for the start of training camp on Sept. 27 and said he will re-sign with the IceRays as early as today.
   Goal-setter
   He's big on goal-setting. Wingfield wanted to ascend to the top of Grouse Mountain in less than an hour.
   He did it in 59 minutes.
   IceRays coach Taylor Hall was there, running along side.
   "Coach ran it the other day it in 46 minutes," Wingfield said. "He ran with me all day today. He would run ahead, then come back to me and run again and do some standing squats while he waited for me."
   Hall has been waiting for Wingfield since the injury.
   "There's no doubt that we're a much better team with Brad Wingfield out on the ice," Hall said. "If we would have had him in the playoffs against Lake Charles, things would have different. I want him back next year. He has some unfinished business to attend to."
   Right now, Wingfield is attending to skating.
   He's been back on the ice for about a month and he can blast forward at full speed without pain. Skating backwards and cornering are the problem areas.
   "But I'll be back," he said. "The goal is to be ready, to be 100 percent for the start of training camp."
   Wingfield said he liked the view from atop Grouse Mountain. On Tuesday, he took a minute to savor the sight.
   Then he ran back down.



, Mark Button can be reached at 886-3613 or by e-mail at buttonm@caller.com.

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