Youve got other crap to worry about than your little finger: Welcome to the NFLs mangled

By the time the top of Ronnie Lott’s left pinky finger was cut off, the stories were getting out of hand.

The future Hall of Famer’s hand had gotten stuck between Dallas running back Timmy Newsome’s helmet and shoulder pads in a game against the Cowboys in December 1985. The injury left Lott’s finger bent and squirting blood.

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He had taped up the mangled digit so he could play in a playoff game seven days after the accident. Now, a few months later, he had chosen partial amputation over a simple procedure that would have fixed his finger but came with a lengthy rehab timeline that might have interfered with the start of the 1986 season. So finger be damned, Lott decided. Cut it off.

Before he left the hospital, the questions were already flooding in from fans and friends alike. Did part of his finger really get snapped off in the helmet? Was it still on the field? Did he really ask to have it cut off midgame?

Lott laughed at the tall tales. The whole situation was not as gory or exciting as people were making it out to be, he thought: He hurt his finger playing football; he wrapped it up to play in the postseason because that’s what football players do. And now he was getting it fixed — er, chopped off — so he could play in the upcoming season. Simple really.

For Lott, the real question was what his finger looked like after the amputation. So alone in his hospital room, he quietly removed the bandages from around his new-look half pinky and stared at it.

“It looked like ET’s head,” he said.

Lott had joined an unofficial group of NFL players with mangled fingers bent every which way, and he learned what came along with membership. Questions are common. Stares from across the room are frequent. And pant pockets can be a real pain in the ass.

But it’s a welcoming club, something Lott learned from his good friend and fellow Hall of Famer Anthony Muñoz, the informal president of the group. Muñoz, one of the greatest linemen to ever play the game, has perhaps the gnarliest finger of them all, a left pinky that’s permanently bent 90 degrees thanks to 185 games in the NFL. The shared experience bonds those in the mangled finger club, though admittance into the group is subjective. It’s a you-know-it-when-you-see-it type thing.

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“Everyone is trying to get in like, ‘Baldy, does this qualify?'” said former lineman Brian Baldinger, whose right pinky juts askew. “It’s like I’m some sort of official judge. It’s hilarious. Who knew back then in 1983 it would be such a popular thing? People love to see it and take pictures with it. It’s crazy.”

All members of the club are familiar with the regular looks from across the room. Some of them — including the Hall of Famers — have become so well known for their peculiar injuries that it overshadows years of production on the field.

“They don’t recognize my face,” Muñoz said, “but they recognize my pinky.”

Children in particular take great interest in the damaged digits. When former Vikings great Alan Page — NFL Hall of Famer, associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom — talks to students, the kids are more interested in a left pinky finger that juts out horizontally. Because of that, Page wrote a children’s book with his daughter called “Alan and His Perfectly Pointy, Impossibly Perpendicular Pinky.”

“When I talk with young children, I tell them it makes a great bicycle turn signal,” Page said.

Members of the club have gotten used to the photo requests, including a specific one if the player smiles and poses with an arm around the fan:

Uhhhh, can you, ummm, show your hand in the photo?

“I think people are genuinely curious how you’ve lived with it,” said Lott. “What’s the ramifications? People are curious. At the same time, we also find ways to make people laugh about the situation and we find ways to make people comfortable about the situation. There’s a lot that comes with it.”

Baldinger, now an analyst for NFL Network, was in the first session of two-a-day training camp practices with the Cowboys. On one play, he lined up as a left guard against star defensive tackle Randy White. Baldinger’s hand got caught on White’s jersey as White threw Baldinger’s hand to the side and his pinky came out of its socket. He screamed when he first looked at the finger bent sideways, but trainers calmly popped it in place, taped it to his ring finger and told him to return to the field.

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After practice, Baldinger went to the cafeteria for lunch. He dreaded having to walk past the table of defensive linemen that included White, Ed “Too Tall” Jones and John Dutton, a trio of trash-talking big hitters that let the young players hear it.

“They sat in the front row of the cafeteria and they would abuse everybody that came down the steps just nonstop,” Baldinger said. “So when I walked in, they all stood up like, ‘Wahh, wahh, wahh,’ like I was crying.”

Baldinger didn’t know what to think until all the defensive linemen put their hands up together in unison.

“And they all had messed up fingers,” Baldinger said. “They basically just said, ‘Welcome to the club. You’re one of us now.’ It was initiation, like a badge of honor.”

For most, it took years to lose all the ligaments that keep a finger pointing straight. Once a dislocation happened, players said, they were more susceptible to it happening again. That’s what happened to Muñoz and former Packers center Larry McCarren.

“Eventually it just wouldn’t pop back in,” said McCarren, whose left pinky looks like Muñoz’s. “During an NFL season, you’ve got other crap to worry about than your little finger. I don’t want to give you some bullshit. It just happened enough where it wouldn’t go back anymore. Did it happen weekly, monthly? Christ, I don’t remember.”

Not all finger injuries are created equal. On the sideline, with his awkwardly bent right ring finger, Pete Carroll looks like a member of the group. But his injury came when he punched his brother as a pre-teen after a particularly competitive one-on-one basketball game. Since he could still throw a football and shoot hoops, he never got it fixed, even as he played football through college. “I can only imagine how good I could’ve been,” Carroll said with a laugh.

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There aren’t a lot of ways to prevent finger injuries. Tape is the most common defense. Linemen typically tape two fingers together in hopes that will keep one from getting stuck somewhere it shouldn’t. Said Muñoz of his preferred brand, Johnson & Johnson: “J & J were my best friends.”

It’s far from a foolproof plan. When Muñoz sat with Tony Gonzalez for the recording of NFL Films’ top-100 production, Gonzalez stared at an action shot of Muñoz playing, then started laughing. “Tony looks over at me and goes, ‘Hey bro, I’m looking at your pinky and it’s going sideways — and then I’m looking at this picture and you have them taped. So it’s obvious the tape didn’t help,'” Muñoz said.

There’s no data for tracking such injuries, but they seem to have occurred more over the last three decades. Muñoz has a theory about that: When he first began playing, offensive linemen were taught to block more with their chests and bodies, keeping their hands inside. Then, in the early 1980s, linemen were told to punch and use their hands more, the primary blocking method still taught. Naturally, Muñoz said, that led to more finger injuries.

“It was 17 years of getting your hands out there … between defensive linemen and shoulder pads and jerseys,” Muñoz said of his career. “You’ve got big guys coming full speed at you, and you’re stopping them with your hands.”

After retirement, all of the members of the club have the same conversation: Should I fix this thing?

The problem, they soon learn, is there’s no quick fix. The only option typically available is to fuse ligaments together, which would straighten the finger but make it impossible to bend. For most in the club, that’s not a worthwhile trade-off.

“It’s like, well, if I wouldn’t be able to bring it in and make a fist and it’s just going to stay straight, why mess with it?” Muñoz said. “Plus, you’d lose a great conversation piece — or it would go to a different conversation of ‘Why is that sticking straight out?’ The main thing is it doesn’t hurt and I can still wrap it around a weight or a golf club, so I’m good with it.”

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In fact, over the course of almost a dozen interviews for this story, players had only heard of one who fixed his bent finger. That was Roger Staubach. The former Cowboys quarterback had, as Baldinger put it, “a finger like mine.” Staubach famously broke the pinky on his throwing hand several times, including once in Super Bowl XII. “Captain Comeback” underwent surgery on the digit one offseason, Baldinger said, and doctors put his finger in a splint and told him not to do anything with it for six weeks. Just let it set.

But Staubach was a crucial part of the Cowboys’ winter pickup basketball games and couldn’t stand to sit out, so shortly after the procedure he was back on the hardwood. One particularly hard chest pass from an unnamed teammate hit Staubach right in the repaired finger and sent the splint flying off.

“After that, it went back to being crooked and bent,” Baldinger said. “That was it. He gave it a shot and re-injured it.”

The injuries seem to have struck pinkies more than other fingers, but no phalange is safe. Former Rams wide receiver Torry Holt’s left middle finger is bent at a 45-degree angle. Giants Hall of Fame defensive end Michael Strahan’s left ring finger bends 90 degrees.

That can make wearing rings quite the challenge. When Muñoz was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he realized the knuckle on his right ring finger was bent, causing a rigid lump the jewelry would have to slide over. He ordered a size 17 Hall of Fame ring just to ensure it would get over the knuckle. “If I put it on my other hand and hung my arm down, it would fall right off,” Muñoz said.

Which brings us to the last prerequisite for membership in the club, a sense of humor. Amid the questions asked and the stares, you have to be able to laugh at yourself and crack some jokes.

Muñoz hosts an annual golf outing to benefit his charity and likes to occasionally mess with the people working in the pro shop. He’ll pretend he forgot a glove and needs to buy one, holding his hand in a fist and asking to try on a double-XL. Then he’ll pause.

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“And,” he adds, “‘The pinky has to go out like this.’ And then I’ll hold my hand out and they always go, ‘Ahhh, gross, get out of here.'”

The looming winter presents one of the biggest annoyances for members of the bent finger club: For most of them, it’s too difficult to put on winter gloves.

McCarren lives in Green Bay and works as the Packers’ radio color analyst, so he’s no stranger to the challenge. “You’ve got to buy cheap gloves that bend real well,” he said. “If you get some real solid gloves and try to fit a finger that’s bent like mine into the little finger hole, it just won’t work.”

Baldinger has his own effective if less elegant solution.

“You’ve got to do the mittens, man,” Baldinger said. “The gloves are too tough.”

— Additional reporting by The Athletic’s Michael-Shawn Dugar.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic, Photos: Al Messerschmidt, Ross Lewis / Getty Images, Jim Mone / Associated Press)

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