I got hit in the eye one night when I was with the Birmingham Bulls at the time in the WHA and we were playing the New England Whalers. I got hit in the eye with a shot, from close in, a rising slap shot, and those masks, well they fit right to your face, and so it was just like getting punched. I got cut for 28 stitches, it bruised my eyeball, scratched the cornea, still, my left eye is more sensitive to light. Back then, they took me off the ice and stitched me up and said ‘are you alright?’ and I said ‘yeah’, and back then, concussions never even came into play.

But I said ‘is there a hair or something in my eye?’ and the doctor looked at it, fortunately, he was knowledgable in the optometry part of it, and he said ‘no there’s no hair or anything, you must have bleeding in your eyeball’. So they rushed me to a hospital, I had a week off, and I was only out for maybe ten days, then right back at it! It was funny, because they told me ‘yeah you can play, you won’t do any more damage unless you get hit in the eye again, but you might have problems with depth perception.’ So I asked ‘well how long is that going to last?’ and they said ‘not long maybe only a week or two’. I remember I was playing in the WHA All-Star game just after I came back and a guy took a shot from the red line, I had no idea where it was, and it blew by me from the red line.

Back then, the masks, no one even thought about concussion protocol, but the masks were very good for any sticks around the net, you wouldn’t get cut, but anytime you got hit with the puck it was just like getting punched in the face, and punched really hard. They’d come out and say ‘do you know where you are?’ and you’d say ‘yeah I’m in a rink’ ‘okay, you’re good to go!’ But they never asked which rink.

-John Garrett, former goaltender in the NHL and WHA and current analyst for the Vancouver Canucks. Much more from Garrett (mostly Canucks related) by David Quadrelli of The Canuck Way.