If Daniel Craig were an Athlete, he’d Play Hockey

I just saw an ad for a movie that featured Daniel Craig, and it took me back to my time on the set of Casino Royale. Though the action was theoretically in Miami, we were in Prague in February.

Daniel Craig was a total pro. Easygoing, just another member of the cast, doing his best.

There’s a lot of time between shots in a project like this, and during a break Craig was sparring with his coach (or was it his on-screen adversary? facts are skitterish). Maybe he was working to keep warm, maybe to make the fight scene better.

He hurt his wrist. Not a big injury, not the sort of thing that slows down a pro. When he reported the setback he seemed a little embarrassed about the attention his discomfort brought. I wasn’t in his head at that moment, but I think he might have regretted bringing it up at all. But he’s a pro, and a pro tells his director if there might be a weakness in his game.

Which is totally the opposite of soccer, which I presume through national profiling is Craig’s sport of choice. Can you imagine what a soccer (football, according to Craig’s people) player would do with a minor wrist injury? Lie on the field and cry like a baby, that’s what. Aaaaah! how can I kick a ball with this terrible pain in my wrist?

Note to proponents of the game: get up off the grass and play and maybe you’ll convince me.

There are sports where the ability to shrug off a minor tweak is still valued, but when it comes down to being embarrassed about being hurt, about not wanting to make a deal of it at all except how it might affect your team, then we’re talking hockey. That’s where Craig was that day on set. He was a hockey actor.

4 thoughts on “If Daniel Craig were an Athlete, he’d Play Hockey

  1. While the British aren’t much into hockey, they are into rugby, which seems to have a similar mentality. I saw the second half of the NewZealand-France World Cup final, and there was a lot of bloodshed — literally. So that might potentially be Daniel Craig’s sport as well.

    • That’s an excellent point – Rugby is probably even farther on the tough-axis than hockey; if you don’t get a scar in the big game, you aren’t playing hard enough.

  2. Not ALL footie is pansy-ball. There are countries for whom “tough” is as important as winning (generally those new to the game, but England doesn’t whinge much) … but then there are the F’n Italians and Argentinians. The best teams do whine the most … you can decide how much correlation there is.

    Case in point: I’m sure you can find YouTube footage of David Villa snapping his shin bone this week. Although any player may roll around if it’s a game-changer, he went down in the box, and instead of asking for a PK or even looking pained, he just held his shin together with one hand and waved the medics over with the other. No visible flinching. Hockey-caliber stuff.

    And I would argue that hockey goes too far the other way. If you want to win the game, you let the guy take a few swings at your (helmeted) head with his (gloved) fists, bleed a bit, and get the other player tossed with a game misconduct. What they do instead is retaliate for everything, ensuring matching penalties, which defeats the point of having penalties in the first place, and probably even favors the team that breaks the rules (since they can choose when to have a goon go apesh*t, and those goons often pick fights with actual players).

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