Can The Gain Be Worth The Pain? Often-Injured Former Idaho Star Sacrifices Body For The Broncos

All hail warrior Mark Schlereth, man of steel, the kind found in braces and bedpans.

Strung together like rusty cans on the back of a wedding car, Schlereth clanks on to the field here Sunday as perhaps the toughest man in Super Bowl history.

Since high school, the Denver Broncos guard has undergone 20 surgeries.

Doctors have cut on his left knee, his right knee, his left elbow, his right elbow, his back and his groin.

Yet Schlereth remains standing and starting for Sunday’s battle against the Green Bay Packers, a testament to the spirit of man and the miracles of medicine.

“Back in ‘95, one doctor told me I would never play again because of one of my knees, said it was impossible,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Check out the films … loser.”’ All hail warrior Tom Glassic, a guard in Denver’s first Super Bowl, after the 1977 season.

Playing despite seven surgeries, he was a hero in a community starving for them. Because of the courage shown by him and others, the town would never be the same.

Neither would he.

“Today, I can’t even stand up when I’m going to the bathroom,” he said.

Tom Glassic is permanently disabled.

By doing what he was taught - blocking with a perfect stance - the disks in his back have since deteriorated.

Some of the strongest knees in the game have been reduced to scar tissue.

He can barely walk. He cooks dinner from a chair and waits for the worker’s compensation check that will pay for another operation.

At 42, the warrior is wasted.

“I am physically a mess,” he said. “I am one step out of a wheelchair.”

All hail Mark Schlereth, the toughest of the tough.

He not only will step willingly into the trenches against massive Packers defensive linemen Gilbert Brown and Santana Dotson.

He also plays in the face of statistical evidence that when his career is finished, he will be crippled.

A 1997 Newsday survey of 1,423 former players concluded that 63 percent are afflicted with a permanent injury.

And there’s a good chance none of the respondents underwent 20 operations.

‘I can’t believe Schlereth,” veteran teammate Harry Swayne said. “If I was him, I would have stopped the surgeries at, what, maybe 10?”

While there is no research indicating whether more players are getting hurt than in past years, many say today’s injuries can be more devastating because of the abundance of artificial turf.

Medical techniques are better, increasing a player’s chance of retiring safely from those injuries.

But, in a cruel irony, those advancements also increase his chance of returning to the field sooner.

Schlereth has always chosen the latter option.

Just this season he returned from “season-ending” back surgery in six weeks.

All hail warrior Scott Curtis, who played linebacker in Denver’s most recent Super Bowl appearance, after the 1989 season.

He walked onto the field before the game as captain of the special teams. He later came off the bench to make 12 tackles. His team was outmanned, but he was unafraid.

Until about six months ago, when his surgically repaired back began hurting, and his legs grew numb, and there was shooting pain.

His infant son Jack screamed for Curtis to pick him up, and he couldn’t.

All hail Mark Schlereth, the baddest of the bad.

“You put my body on a normal person, they would be running to the hospital,” he said. “There are times I wonder, what am I doing to myself? Why am I doing this?”

Ah, but the stories he can tell.

There was the time after one of his operations, at the University of Idaho, when he fell while walking through a snowy campus on crutches.

“I stepped off a curb, slipped, and there I was, on the ground, snow falling, me crying and waving my crutch around and shouting, ‘Get away from me!”’ Schlereth said.

All hail Mark Schlereth, the meanest of the mean.

He is proud of telling the story of earlier this season, how he spent an entire Sunday trying to pass a painful kidney stone with a Monday night game looming.

“Doctors finally came in Sunday night and said, ‘If you want to play tomorrow night, we have to get that out now,”’ he recalled. “So I got in the operating room and they put my legs in stirrups and …” Tom Glassic, what would you say to Schlereth?

“I’d say I’d do it all over again, even if I knew what would happen,” he said. “We had a Super Bowl reunion last year, and I still got chills.”

And what does Mark Schlereth, who already can’t get on the floor to play with his children, say?

What do you think?

“I’m not concerned at all, medicine may be able to someday replace some of the things that are wrong with me,” he said. “I can’t worry about what will happen 10 years from now.”

Nor would one even care to imagine.