A Ducks's Dogged Determination

There are dog days and then there are dog days.

Professional hockey players are used to having their faces split by fists, their bones broken and teeth knocked out with sticks, their flesh slashed open with cold steel.

But when your dog kicks in your head, you know it's not your day.

Shawn Antoski's eight-year career in the NHL has been littered with stretched knee ligaments, separated shoulders, broken knuckles, strained hips and even hernia surgery. All of which are trivial when compared to the skull fracture and head injuries he suffered when the car in which he was riding ran into a concrete center divider on the Costa Mesa Freeway early in the morning of Nov. 24.

The Mighty Duck winger, who underwent surgery to have a steel-mesh plate inserted in his forehead, shook off the life- and career-threatening injury like an annoying little finesse player, left the hospital in only four days and began skating again last month.

Then one evening two weeks ago, he noticed that his 1 1/2-year-old Doberman pinscher, Jazz, wasn't her usual jazzy self. So Antoski--who once nursed back to health a bird that hit the windshield of his truck back home in Brantford, Canada--decided to play veterinarian again.

Thinking she may have been drinking from the Tidy Bowl-laced toilets again, he put his head on Jazz's chest to check her heartbeat.

"Her leg came up and hit me right in the forehead where the plate was," Antoski said. "I reached up and it felt like a golfer took a divot out of my head. I had this huge dent. It was pretty scary."

When his fiancee, Leanne Potter, came into the room and saw his face, she screamed and called 911.

"I was extremely frightened. You could see it was dented in and he was kind of panicked," she said. "He was coherent and it didn't seem like he was in immediate danger, but it was pretty scary."

Paramedics arrived, took his vital signs and then Potter drove him to the hospital.

"They called my surgeon," Antoski said, "and he said, 'Tell him to come back in the morning and I'll fix it.' "

Repairs required the insertion of a new, stronger plate and resulted in an even nastier scar that runs from his hairline down to the tip of his left eyebrow and ended any hopes of coming back this season.

"Thank God, I'm finally getting a little hair back," he says, running fingers through the inch-long growth where wild shoulder-length strands used to roam.