The 5 Most Horrifying Sports Injuries of All Time

Super Bowl Sunday, 1998. The Denver Broncos were taking on the Green Bay Packers, with Denver riding the legs of running back Terrell Davis to the big game. It's the second quarter, and things are going great for Davis when, at the end of a play, he gets kicked in the head and goes out cold.

This sort of thing happens in football, of course, and after waking up, Davis told everyone that he was fine. He went to the sideline and then watched as the world went dark around him. While most of us would have just chalked that up to another power outage or possibly the apocalypse, Davis realized that he had just gone blind.

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On the plus side, he didn't have to see the Packers fans anymore.

This is when you'd think you'd take a moment to reconsider your life -- it's not a sane person's line of work that asks you to take blows to the head so hard that your goddamn eyes just stop working. After presumably feeling around his face to make sure the last hit hadn't knocked his eyeballs out of his skull, Davis went to sit down when the coach told him he was needed back in the game. He went in (of course) and ran one play, unable to see a goddamn thing.

The trainers then hauled Davis to the locker room and gave him migraine medication (temporary loss of vision can be a symptom of migraine headaches, something Davis suffered from). He sat there for what had to have been the longest 15 minutes of his life, wondering if he would go down forever as the guy who got hit so hard at the Super Bowl that he went fucking blind.

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"I always thought that if this ever happened it'd be due to my chronic masturbation."

When he could finally see a little bit in front of him, Davis returned to the field for the second half of the game. And he dominated -- Davis went on to rush for an additional 103 yards and two touchdowns in the second half, for a total of three. For comparison, the most touchdowns scored by any running back not named Terrell Davis in Super Bowl history is two.

It was March of 1989, and Clint Malarchuk's Buffalo Sabres were facing off against the St. Louis Blues. Malarchuk, who was in goal, was fighting a puck out of the crease when St. Louis winger Steve Tuttle flipped over. Tuttle's skate zipped up through the air and sliced Malarchuk's jugular vein open. Yeah, that jugular vein.

The fountain of blood that spurted from his neck was enough to give audience members heart attacks while players puked all over the ice.

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This was different from the vomiting that usually accompanies watching the Buffalo Sabres.

This is the part where normal, non-Canadian hockey beasts bleed out and die in a matter of minutes, traumatizing thousands of spectators for life. Malarchuk was having none of that (at least none of the first part, anyway). Malarchuk controlled his bleeding by sticking his glove directly inside the wound (in case that doesn't mean anything to you, hockey gloves tend to be so putrid smelling that shoving it in somebody's face on the ice is about as insulting as it gets).

Malarchuk calmly skated off the ice -- "so that my mother, who was watching the game back home on TV, wouldn't have to see me bleed to death" -- and the team trainer held a towel over the wound until they could get Malarchuk into surgery.

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Tragically, the flashbacks got so bad, the towel would later hang itself.

Ninety minutes of surgery and 300 stitches later, doctors managed to save his life. And Malarchuk, presumably riding the high you receive when you punch Death right in his dick, wasn't about to hang around in a hospital bed with PTSD like some pussy. He spent just one night in the hospital and returned to practice four days later. A week after that, he was back in goal.

Well, shit, who could possibly top that?

Anthony Van Loo's the guy in the video, and at the time it was documented he was, literally, dead. He had a pre-existing heart condition that probably should have kept him off the field, but he had been fitted with a nifty little device called a defibrillator. It works by defibrillating the everliving daylights out of your heart to restore it to its normal rhythm after it, you know, stops beating or some shit.

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Pictured: Not playing possum.

When he dropped dead on the field, his entire team knew what had just happened. After all, the guy had a pre-existing condition, and it's never good when a person who was standing relatively still crashes to the ground. Well, it only took a few seconds for his built-in miracle of modern medicine to kick his slacker heart's ass into gear, and we see Van Loo sitting up shortly thereafter. He joined that tiny, elite group of humans who can tell you exactly what it's like to be dead.

"Coach? I just might need to call in sick for the rest of today's game."

Not only did he return from his trip off of this mortal coil, but he continued playing soccer, and in fact is still playing today.

Wait, how can there still be one entry left? We've had dudes get digits lopped off, throats slashed, and freaking die on the field of play. So what could possibly be left?

WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT. PLEASE STOP READING.

To understand this injury, it should be understood that there are certain developments over the course of a rugby match that basically all consist of demolishing each other, but have been given clever little names like "scrum" and "rucking." And outside of some ear protection (you know, so they don't get ripped off) and the cushion of some enormous balls, nobody wears any padding.

Anyway, Wayne "Buck" Shelford was a professional rugby player in New Zealand. It was 1986, and the opponent was the French rugby team. The match was so incredibly intense that they named it the Battle of Nantes, after a major French Revolution battle.

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Key differences: more headbands, less pelvic gyrating.

About 20 minutes into the match, Shelford found himself at the bottom of one of those gnarly "ruck" things we mentioned earlier, which is actually a writhing pile of really, really tough dudes in cleats who will do basically anything to get that ball. Any men reading this ought to grab their junk and a vomit bowl before they read the rest of this sentence, because we're about to tell you that Shelford had his scrotum ripped open by a cleat, and he jogged off the field with a testicle hanging out of him. Literally. Hanging.

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To help get rid of that mental image, here's some puppies playing in the snow.

So what did Shelford do? Of course he's a tough dude, but come on -- a torn nut sack would make Superman curl into a whimpering ball.

But instead of passing out and/or dying, Shelford had the trainer stitch him up right there on the bench. They even filmed the surgery and broadcast it on TV to the French people watching at home. And then Shelford went right back in and kept playing. WITH A TORN SCROTUM.

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Kittens on a warm summer day.

So, the next time you are considering calling in sick for work because you have a hangover, remember Shelford's ball sack. Then print out a picture of a torn scrotum and pin it to the wall of your cubicle to motivate yourself.

Erik tweets here, and he has a far more talented friend who runs a blog here.

For more truly bat-crazy athletes, check out 5 Insane True Tales of Wrestlers Refusing to Break Character and The 5 Most Badass (And Possibly Insane) Athletes Of All-Time.