It was Jan. 2, 2010, midway through the final season of Keith Tkachuk's 18-season NHL career, and he was where he often was, parked in front of the net, looking to deflect a puck into the net or pounce on a rebound. Teammate T.J. Oshie took a shot that hit Tkachuk in the mouth and deflected into the net for a goal. Tkachuk never saw it. He was already making a dash for the locker room.
"I felt like I got hit with a sledgehammer," Tkachuk said. "Worst feeling ever. I wore a mouthguard, too, and it put a hole right through it. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
"I spent two years with various dentists, plastic surgeons, all these different things. It just wasn't much fun. I shattered the top bone off my lip, so they had to get bone out of my hip and put it up there. Five or six root canals."
Tkachuk was no stranger to physical play and broken bones, but he had somehow managed to get that far without losing any teeth. The pain he went through getting his teeth knocked out outdid anything he had experienced before. "Not even close, not even close," he said, shaking his head at the memory. "Not even close."
There are a lot of things that are part of the job as a hockey player, and losing teeth is high on the list. They take the ice with the knowledge that at any given moment, a wayward puck or stick or elbow will rearrange their dental work. All it takes is a second and you're picking up your incisors off the ice.
"It's the first thing people ask when they learn I'm a hockey player," said Chris Thorburn, the Blues tough guy now with the team's San Antonio farm team. "Have you lost any teeth?"
Most of them have. Hockey players come in two kinds: those who have lost teeth and those who consider themselves lucky. Those who have will gladly talk about it. Those who haven't feel they are tempting fate to bring it up. "That's (an uncool) question," said defenseman Robert Bortuzzo, who still has all of his, when asked. Those discussions are often accompanied by knocking on wood.
Earlier this season, Vladimir Tarasenko had a tooth knocked out, which he picked off the ice at the United Center in Chicago and brought to the bench. Not to worry: the tooth was a fake anyway, which is why Tarasenko hasn't put it back in and now has a distinctive gap in his front teeth.
"I look like (Ryan) O'Reilly now," Tarasenko said.
Tarasenko lost five teeth, three on the top, two on the bottom, when he took a puck to the mouth when he was 17 years old and playing in the KHL. Tarasenko said he hadn't expected to lose teeth playing hockey; his father played for years and never lost one.
"It's a hard feeling when you lose a tooth the first time," Tarasenko said. "After that accident, I wouldn't say nothing scares me, but the other pain is nothing, like when (you) get a slash."
Lost teeth are common enough that team dentist Dr. Ron Sherstoff sits in the lower bowl at Enterprise Center, ready to jump into action if needed. He can reattach a crown, put on a temporary filling for a chipped tooth or start a root canal downstairs, all with the intention of getting the player back on the ice as quickly as possible.
Sherstoff was downstairs when David Backes took an Oshie shot in the mouth in December 2014. Sherstoff did what he could for Backes, who despite his teammates telling him they had things under control, insisted on coming back to the game. (Backes also lamented that Tkachuk scored when he got hit and he didn't.) Backes went back in the game, played four shifts and then came out. "When the anesthetic wore off, it was some of the worst misery I've been in," he said a few days later. "I felt like my face was going to fall off."
That same day, an opposing player got hit in the face and had one of his teeth knocked back so that it was still attached but now parallel to his tongue. Sherstoff asked the player if he wanted to be numbed before he worked on him. "He said no," Sherstoff recalled. "I grabbed it, it popped back in, I put in a little wire across there and he was good to go."
It's days like that leave Sherstoff impressed.
"I played hockey for years when I grew up," he said. "I'm Canadian, so I had to. These guys don't stop for anything. 'Get me back out there.' Warriors."
But it's not as bad as it used to be, back when players didn't wear visors and sticks swung more freely. Back then, everyone seemed to be missing teeth. Players would take out their bridges as they went onto the ice and leave them in the locker room. Troublemakers were known to rearrange the neatly arrayed teeth, causing players to search for the one that fit their mouth. Bob Plager said he once stole a teammate's bridge on a road trip and mailed it home, causing the player to have to consume milk shakes for an entire trip.
Hockey players seem to be magnets for losing teeth. One-time Blue Paul Stastny was missing his front teeth, but it happened playing baseball when he took a bat to the face. Alexander Steen, who has the messiest mouth among current Blues, with four teeth missing in various places, lost one of them to corn on the cob. (Though it, too, was one that had already come out and been put back in.)
Steen has just had bad luck in his mouth. One of his teeth was knocked out by teammate Kevin Shattenkirk, who, frustrated over a play that led to a goal, swung his stick in disgust and caught Steen in the mouth. It was the one thing that the ever-genial Shattenkirk refused to talk about with reporters.
Tarasenko proudly smiles when asked about his teeth, and for some hockey players, it's viewed as a badge of honor, a sign that you really are a hockey player. Blues radio color commentator Joey Vitale said he always wanted to lose one of his front teeth so he would look like an old-time hockey player.
Be careful what you wish for. Eric Gryba of Ottawa caught Vitale in the mouth with an elbow and knocked out eight teeth. Vitale was getting married that offseason, and his wife insisted he get them fixed right away. So in one sitting, Vitale had eight implants put in. "Worst day of my life. Ever," he said.
Tarasenko said that after losing one of his front teeth for the second time, he doesn't plan on doing anything about it until his playing days are over, and that's a recurring theme in the Blues' dressing room: If it's just going to get knocked out again, why get it replaced? (There are, Sherstoff said, plenty of reasons, and he doesn't understand why more players wait.)
A good many of them lost teeth long before they came to the NHL. Joel Edmundson lost one playing road hockey when he was 12, the tooth lost forever in a snowbank on the side of the road in Manitoba. Brayden Schenn lost one of his front teeth playing mini-hockey in a friend's basement. The one day Chris Butler played without a mouthguard in juniors was the day he got knocked into the boards and lost a front tooth.
Losing teeth can bother players, but it also can bother family members. Just as Vitale's fiancee was less than thrilled, Robert Thomas' mother wasn't too happy when he took a puck to the mouth when he was 16. It was less than a year after Thomas had gotten his braces off.
"My mom was pretty angry about that one," he said. "It's part of the game. You can only do so many things. It's not the biggest deal."
For O'Reilly, losing teeth was an alternative to braces. He lost his front teeth playing junior hockey in Ontario when an opponent lifted his stick and he caught a blade in the mouth.
"I was almost glad in a sense," he said. "I had to fix my teeth, so playing hockey was a good cover."
The pain of getting teeth knocked out is nothing, players say, compared to the pain of getting the mouth fixed. Hockey players may be tough, but dental work seems to bother them.
"I've had two surgeries already," Steen said. "I have a third one to put the implants in and then the fourth one to put in teeth. So I have two more surgeries to go. The first one, I had to actually pick out the broken bones, then it was too small to sustain anything, so I had to have a bone transplant into my mouth. And then the third one is to put the actual implants in. But I do notice. They're both on the same side so I chew differently so I have to get treatment on my jaw every once in a while because it gets crooked and I'll get a little bit of a headache if things are off a bit. I have to eat differently. But hopefully soon, I'll be able to eat normally."
Not many people have jobs where going to work each day could result in a root canal, but that's how it is for hockey players.
"It's one of those things you laugh at," Edmundson said. "What are you going to do?"