Culture
How Maple Leafs staff helped save a rec-leaguer from a skate cut to the throat: 'I thought I was going to die'
It was inside the Toronto Maple Leafs dressing room that Ike Werner first allowed himself to believe he was going to survive.
After having his throat cut accidentally by a skate blade during a Sunday afternoon rec league game at the NHL team’s practice facility earlier this month, a terrifying experience turned surreal when the 37-year-old looked over and saw Maple Leafs forward Nick Robertson receiving treatment in an adjacent room.
“That was my visual,” Werner told The Athletic. “Him being worked on.”
Werner had taken note of the luxury cars behind the gated section of the parking lot when he pulled into Ford Performance Centre that afternoon. The Zamboni was resurfacing the ice earlier than usual, too, so he figured the Leafs had skated on Rink 2 before his “Prestige Worldwide” team faced off against the “Jagrbombs” in the True North Hockey League.
That fact became much more significant to him when, on his third shift of the game, he suffered a gruesome cut and was scrambling for help, only to find himself under the care of Leafs athletic therapists Paul Ayotte and Neill Davidson.
“They were so good,” Werner said. “They were so calm and that helped kind of ground me, if you will, because I was spiraling.”
It’s not a spot any rec-leaguer could reasonably imagine finding themselves in — even after the October death of former NHLer Adam Johnson while playing professionally in England.
That tragedy cast a light on the need for more cut-resistance equipment in the sport and has seen players at all levels start wearing it. Werner recalled the topic being discussed among his men’s league team in the fall and said he even tried, unsuccessfully, to purchase a neck guard at that time.
As one of the older players in a reasonably competitive league, he was more cautious than most when it came to his gear by wearing wrist guards, cut-resistant socks and, after previously wearing a visor (pictured at top), recently moving to a full face shield.
“When Adam Johnson died, you couldn’t buy neck guards,” Werner said. “I tried. Now, that was a couple months ago, and I probably could have kept on it but didn’t.
“One of the things I said to my wife was, ‘It’s rec league. It’s not as fast. The equipment isn’t at that level. The skates aren’t as sharp. It’s not going to happen in rec league.”’
Except when it did.
NHL player poll: Why 78 percent say there should be no neck-guard mandate ⤵️https://t.co/mIvJtEuyGh
— The Athletic NHL (@TheAthleticNHL) February 2, 2024
Werner has no recollection of what happened. None of his teammates were sure immediately afterward, either.
In fact, it wasn’t until the convenor of Werner’s league sent a clip taken from a 360-degree camera installed in the arena on Tuesday night that anyone had a clear picture of what transpired.
The play looked as harmless as they come. Standing in the slot in front of his own goal, Werner poked at a loose puck as an opponent came on to it and wound up knocking him off balance. As the opponent fell to the ice, his right skate kicked up and caught Werner under the face mask.
Incredibly, the force of the impact didn’t knock Werner off his feet even though it left him significant bruising to his upper chest and neck area that remained a week after the Feb. 4 incident occurred. It also opened a cut that required 12 stitches to close.
The video clip confirmed the only aspect of the sequence Werner recalled clearly: He picked up his dropped stick after the collision and skated under his own power to the bench.
What also stood out in his memory was how little pain he felt in the immediate aftermath of the play and how little blood there seemed to be. He says it felt like a small abrasion or jersey burn. Except when he returned to the bench an official told him that he needed to leave the playing surface immediately.
Longtime teammate Jack McVeigh accompanied Werner to the dressing room after getting a brief look at what his buddy was dealing with.
“It was quite shocking that he was alive once you saw the injury,” McVeigh said. “He took his hand off of his neck and you’re like, ‘Oooooh. Holy f—.’
“I don’t even know what went through my head other than ‘You have to go get that dealt with.’”
Werner didn’t lose his own cool until catching a glimpse of the gash in a mirror once back in the dressing room. According to McVeigh, he immediately went white.
There was a brief discussion about calling an ambulance and getting to the arena lobby until Werner remembered the Leafs were in the building. He got the attention of Armando Cavalheiro, who works as a cameraman for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and was standing nearby after covering practice. Cavalheiro started banging on a back door to the dressing room until it was opened and Werner was let in.
He was immediately tended to by Davidson and Ayotte, the Leafs medical staffers, who applied pressure to the neck area and examined the injury. They ultimately closed it with Steri Strips and bandaged Werner up after determining that he needed to go to the hospital for further testing before stitches were put in.
Just as importantly, they provided reassurance that everything was going to be OK.
“They were so good,” Werner said. “Asking me some questions: ‘Can you breathe OK?’ ‘Can you swallow OK?’ Like those types of things to just rule out any severe, severe things.
“They’re like ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’”
Under normal circumstances, they might not have been around to help someone injured during a 4 p.m. rec league game.
The Leafs typically practice at noon but didn’t skate that day until 2:45 p.m., because the team was returning from the All-Star break and league rules dictated that no mandatory activities were scheduled before mid-afternoon.
A father to a 3-month-old, Werner went alone to St. Joseph’s Hospital with only a quick message sent to his wife that he’d been cut and was going to be OK. He was admitted immediately to a hospital bed and received his stitches by 5:15 p.m. — only an hour after leaving the ice.
Because the skate that grazed him was so sharp, the cut was clean and easily stitched closed. A local anesthesia was applied and Werner began bleeding heavily while doctors examined how deep the wound was. He had to throw out the shirt he was wearing in favor of one McVeigh dropped off for him at the hospital.
However, it was a good-news scene. A CT Scan showed that the skate had cut into muscle but not through it, making surgery unnecessary.
One of the emergency room doctors told Werner she plays hockey at a high level recreationally and vowed not to return to the ice without first getting a neck guard of her own.
“It missed my vocal cords, my esophagus, arteries, veins, everything,” Werner said. “I’m just lucky. I’m just lucky.”
He didn’t even spend the night in hospital.
Ike Werner has upgraded to a full face shield since this photo was taken. He couldn’t find a neck guard, though.
Werner’s brush with death brought him in contact with five different highly-trained medical professionals between the time he was cut by the skate and when he eventually returned home to a long embrace from his wife.
Each of them told him he was lucky to be walking out the door.
That’s left him reflecting on all of the what-ifs from a day that will almost certainly stick with him for the rest of his life.
For starters, the weather had been unseasonably nice on that Sunday, and during a walk with his newborn, he thought about skipping the hockey game altogether. What if he chose to stay home?
What if his team wasn’t short a defenseman for that game and he was playing his normal position at forward instead?
What if he’d gotten up and tried to rejoin the play rather than skating to the bench after being cut? Would his body have been able to handle the continued exertion?
What if the cut was just a little bit deeper or angled a centimeter or two in another direction?
What if the Leafs were operating on their normal schedule that afternoon and the medical staff wasn’t still in the building to answer his call for help?
“I thought I was going to die and they said, ‘You’re not going to die. You’re very lucky.’ And they patched me up,” Werner said. “I credit them with just making sure I was OK. At that point, I wasn’t bleeding that much, but if I had just taken myself to the hospital who knows what would have happened?
“It ended up being a lot of blood.”
He doesn’t consider himself a religious or spiritual person, but he’s certainly got family and friends who believe some greater power was looking out for him that day.
It wasn’t easy to calm his mind long enough to get a restful sleep in the immediate aftermath of a situation where Werner himself notes: “I almost orphaned my kid and my wife was going to be a widower.”
About the last place he expected to find himself when showing up for a Sunday rec league game was inside the Maple Leafs dressing room.
He’s lucky he did.
“I’m not a Leaf fan — I’m a Calgary fan — but I’ve just been joking, ‘I might be a Leafs fan now,’” Werner said. “Not from a team perspective, but a behind-the-scenes perspective.”
(Photos courtesy of Ike Werner)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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