Some athletes play through pain. Others prefer to recover entirely before getting back in the ring.
Then there’s Brendan McKeage.
Wrestling for Alberta at the Western Canada Summer Games in Wood Buffalo, the 15-year-old Cochrane Cowboys grappler won a silver medal. With one arm.
Not fully recovered from a broken right forearm suffered at the end of high-school rugby season in May, the two-time Canadian Cadet wrestling champion took to the mat Aug. 9-11 at the Western Canada Games. His coaches and parents had been assured by doctors that McKeage’s arm had healed enough to wrestle.
“When I went to wrestle, there were actually a couple of fracture lines in my arm,” he said. “So I knew there was a risk, but I didn’t think I’d re-break it.”
After earning a walkover in his 54-kilogram weight class against Nunavut on Aug. 9, he wrestled Saskatchewan’s Maxwell Meekins and won that bout 10-0. Following the Meekins match, the arm was sore. But McKeage thought little of it.
“I broke it the first day. And I had to continue a few more days,” the Cochrane High School student said. “I didn’t know I broke it. It was just a bit swollen after.”
He went on to beat Manitoba’s Reed Langlois on Aug. 10 before losing to B.C.’s Earl Lagos in preliminaries and in the Aug. 11 gold-medal match. B.C. won the team title with Alberta taking silver.
“He’s wrestling a kid from B.C., and he didn’t have a good match,” said Cowboys and Alberta coach Vern McNeice. “He ended up in the gold-medal final with this kid the next day and he just wasn’t himself.
“We come home and we found out that he’s got a half-inch fracture in his arm and had had such since the first match. This kid had wrestled three matches without saying a peep, because we would’ve pulled him in a heartbeat. He didn’t know it was broken. He thought it was sore.
“You can imagine how tough that kid is to get through that. Unbelievable.”
Upon returning home, McKeage had his right forearm X-rayed, was told the arm was broken and wrist sprained before undergoing a procedure in which titanium plates and screws were installed in his forearm. He’s recovering, again, at home.
“It actually wasn’t that sore at all,” McKeage insists. “It is right now because I have a four-inch incision in my arm.”
While he recovers, he’ll be outside the room looking in, for now.
“I hope to get back on the mat when wrestling season starts (in November) for sure, though.”
