but that wasn’t the worst of it

but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst thing happened in the following game against Oklahoma City when Etan Thomas, their power forward, unintentionally stuck his finger in my eye and in the process cut by eyebrow pretty bad. My tear duct was almost cut and I ended up with 7 stitches and I couldn’t return to the game. Normally, a player can get stitches and get back into the game, but not in this case because I couldn’t open my eye and where I was cut was a risky spot, so they didn’t let me back in the game. Luckily, we won the game and so the pain of the eye injury wasn’t as bad as it could have been had we lost.

　　I remember several episodes similar to that one over the years…. Above all, I remember having problems with injuries to my teeth. Back in 2003 when we were playing in a practice game in Rosario against Brazil while preparing for the World Championships in Indianapolis, I got absolutely whacked by their well known point guard, Demetrius. It was a very hard foul and his intentions were dubious at best! He pretty much knocked my jaw out of place and may have broken a couple of the teeth. At the time it didn’t hurt much, but it really bothered me the entire trip. A dentist from Rosario sort of set my dental palette where it needed to be and as soon as we got to Mexico for the next games I had an apparatus put in my mouth to sort of hold the most damaged tooth in place to see if we could keep it alive. It really was terrible playing with this brace in my mouth the entire tournament, because the apparatus caused some blisters and they really, really bothered me. To make matters worse, all of the photos showed me with this big metal thing in my mouth!