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)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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