Sep
Nick Setta is fine
Courtesy Hamilton Spectator:
Nick Setta is fine.
No matter how many times you ask him and no matter how many ways you word your question, the answer’s always the same. He’s fine. Period. End of story. Fine.
Yes, he admits he fractured three vertebrae in a pre-season game against the Toronto Argos back in late June. Though he says the location of the breaks on the spine isn’t important.
“Somewhere in there,” he says. “Doesn’t really matter.”
Has it affected his kicking? I mean, the denizens of Ticat Nation are always worked up about something, but they’re particularly bent out of shape about Setta’s work lately. A missed field goal at the end of the game on Friday. A short miss the week before at home. A missed point after. Punts that haven’t seemed to leave his foot with the usual sonic boom. Kickoffs that are suddenly nowhere near the top of the league in average which is uncharacteristic for him.
So has it affected his work? Is the injury lingering? Is it still bothering him?
“No, it’s fine,” he says. “I’m in season and everything’s fine.”
Certainly, his movements on the field in games and during practices back that up. He doesn’t appear to be a man in any discomfort. Nobody works harder on his game. Nobody spends more time staying fit and twisting himself into more painful-looking stretch positions that you’d think would bother someone with a back that was still ripped up. And he sure wasn’t looking too sore while kicking up his heels with some Rockettes after practice yesterday.
If he has any residual agony, he hides it like a zen master.
But breaking your back had to hurt for a week or two at least, right? Probably more?
“I think it was just that moment,” he says, limiting the discomfort to the instant it happened. “It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine.”
Say this for Setta. There’s not a better guy on the team. There’s not a more popular man among his teammates. There’s nobody less likely to rest on his laurels and dine on past achievements instead of trying to attain some impossible level of perfection. There’s not a player less likely to blame anything but himself for his performance, good, bad or indifferent. Which is why these answers are both predictable and understandable.
Truth is, a bowhunter’s wayward arrow could hit him in the head during the game and become lodged in his skull and he still wouldn’t accept it as an excuse if he missed the ensuing kick.
So what is it? Why are his kickoffs and punts shorter than last year and his field-goal average down from 77.8 per cent to 72.7 per cent? Is it a slump?
“I don’t believe in slumps,” he says.
Is he feeling unusual pressure to do well?
“I don’t believe in stress and pressure,” he says, insisting he’s on a level emotional plane all the time on the field because of the work he’s put into his preparation prior to game day.
Is he bothered by what the fans are now saying?
“When I was rookie of the year, I was doing things that weren’t good enough (for some people),” he says. “When I was an all-star last year, there were some things not good enough.”
So, no. That’s not it either.
Which brings us back to the start. Why is Nick Setta Version 3.0 not getting quite the same results as Nick Setta Versions 1.0 and 2.0?
In the absence of an answer from the man himself, we’re left to guess. To do that, we might be best to consider him no different than a baseball pitcher who gets an injury. To compensate for the pain, the athlete adjusts something in his technique to buy relief from the discomfort while still being able to play. When the pain goes away though, it can take some time and a whole lot of effort to rediscover the exact form that created the magic in the first place.
Still, that’s just a guess. So c’mon Nick. We’re looking for something here. Anything. Has the back affected you this season in any way at all?
“We can talk about it after the season,” he says.
For now though?
“It’s fine.”
