Jordan was featured in Sports Illustrated: On Campus. It's a newspaper insert that's put in the BG News every Thursday. I was bored at work, so I went ahead and transposed the whole article:
On Feb. 29, 2004, Bowling Green goaltender Jordan Sigalet awoke to...well, you know how your arm feels after you've slept on it all night? Sigalet had just that feeling--from the neck down.
"It was strange," says Sigalet, then a junior who would lead the nation in saves and shots faced. " A tingling feeling. It almost felt like I had a lot of static in my clothes."
Sigalet phoned his mom, Genevieve, a nurse, who said, "Go straight to the hospital."
"What is happening?" Sigalet wondered. Only two nights earlier he had stopped 42 shots in a 2-1 victory against Northern Michigan. Now Sigalet, one of the biggest sensations in college hockey, could feel no sensation in his body.
"The doctor said MS," says Sigalet, a Vancouver native and seventh-round pick of the Boston Bruins in 2001. "I didn't even really know what it was."
MS--or multiple sclerosis--is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system and afflicts approximately 400,000 American. While there is no cure for MS, it is not fatal. Symptoms can range from partial numbness and disabling fatigue to advanced stages of paralysis or blindness.
"I remember being in the hospital room when he got the news," says Bowling Green coach Scott Paluch. "Right there, even then, Jordan asked, 'O.K., how do I fight this?'"
Sigalet, who also led the nation in minutes played a year ago, hates to sit in a single period. Always has. When he was 12, an opponent's skate crashed down upon his bare hand, nearly severing two of his fingers. "I wanted to go back into the game." Sigalet remembers. "My mom told me I was crazy."
Less than two weeks after the MS diagnosis, Sigalet returned for a best-of-three series versus Ohio State in the Central Collegiate Hockey Association playoffs. Between the pipes he stood, somewhat unsteadily.
"I couldn't feel anything from my neck down," Sigalet says. "It was like floating on ice. Twenty seconds into the game I dropped my stick. I just couldn't grip it."
And yet Sigalet would make 77 saves while allowing six goals in season-ending consecutive losses to the Buckeyes. A week later Sigalet's teammates named him team captain--the first goalie to wear a "C" in school history. A sentimental gesture, one might surmise, except that outside of his brother (Jonathan, then a freshman defenseman) and two roomies, none of the Falcons knew about the MS.
As the months passed, Sigalet's secret became nearly an onerous a burden as his disease. Fatigue forced him to miss workouts, which made him wonder: Was the captain setting a poor example? Pangs of guilt led to stress, the last thing an MS patient needs. "It felt as if I was carrying a huge burden on my shoulders," says someone who already was being injected three times a week with medication.
Last September, Sigalet informed his teammates, who were, for hockey players, appropriately sympathetic. "When they heard my whole body goes numb, a lot of the guys told me to take Viagra," Sigalet says. "When someone scores off me in practice, they ask, 'Did I score because your hands are numb?'"
This season Sigalet has started 23 of the Falcons' 26 games. He is tied for 11th among D-1 goaltenders in save percentage (.922) and is the leader in fan voting for the Hobey Baker Award, hockey's version of the Heisman. Most gratifying?
"At Michigan, after they scored on me, the P.A. system played a phone ringing," he says. "And the crowd, in unison, screamed, 'Hey, Sigalet, it's your mom on the phone. She says you still suck.'"
"That's great to hear," Sigalet says. "All I ever wanted is to be treated like hockey player."
Jordan Featured in SI:OC
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Tricky_Falcon
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