Morning Look: Two Caps Black Eyes

Most of the injuries you read about in the sports pages Internets are tricky to see with the naked eye. Like, a second-degree MCL sprain, a la Clinton Portis? Tough to see at the grocery store. A torn right dorsal scapho-lunate ligament, like the one suffered by Brendan Haywood? Hard to notice at the dry cleaners.

But these dueling black eyes Caps defenseman Tom Poti has been sporting this week? Yeah, you can pretty much notice ‘em.

“You definitely get that strange kind of second look, like a double-take,” Poti told me yesterday. ” ‘What the heck is that guy’s deal?’ Things like that. It’s pretty funny to see different people’s reactions. If you go to the checkout counter…they kind of look at you. Nobody really asks what happened or how’d you do that.”

It turns out this is actually the second time Poti has had the double-black eyes this season; he said it commonly happens to hockey players when they get struck square on the bridge of their nose with a stick. The nose bleeds, there’s a dramatic pause, and then the rainbow emerges.

“Both sides for whatever reason turn black and blue and all different colors,” he said. “You never know how bad it is until you wake up the next day.”

Poti said he can’t count how many black eyes he’s gotten in his career, and pointed out that he usually forgets he even has them until he sees a mirror. I asked Caps Coach Bruce Boudreau whether he ever had the double black eye thing during his playing days; “I have no idea,” he said. “Not in a fight, I know that, because I was ducking pretty good. I mean, I had four broken noses, so I’m sure that my eyes were blackened.”

As for the treatment? None, or at least none that Poti knows of.

“You’ve just kind of got to let it run its course,” he said. “Usually it starts black, and then turns blue, and then yellowish greenish, and then it goes away.”

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