Ike Davis Right to be Angry with Reporter

Ike Davis had a confrontation Monday with a writer who reported that he hid an injury from the Mets last season, and it appears that Davis has a right to be angry.

On Sunday night Mike Puma of the New York Post wrote:

Ike Davis concealed an oblique injury from Mets officials for most of last season because of bad timing and the fact he was struggling and didn’t want to surrender his spot in the lineup.

Davis himself told Puma, “I thought about saying, ‘Hey, I would like to take a couple of weeks off, because I’m not feeling great.’ But then the timing was bad and it was when I was getting sent down. It would have been a great time, but it looks bad and I just can’t say that.”

Puma admits that Davis “was reluctant in admitting to The Post his oblique was an issue for most of last season, beyond the ‘pop’ in Washington” on August 31 which finally ended his season. Puma said it was because he did not want to be known “as an Alibi Ike” (whatever that is).

But maybe Davis was “reluctant” because the injury was not as bad as Puma made it out to be. In addressing the issue on Monday, Davis, who was”agitated” according to ESPN New York, said, “If you hurt something, like your oblique and it pops, there’s a time in-between. It doesn’t automatically go, ‘Oh, I’m healthy and then I pop.’ There’s a time where something hurts. But you can’t go, ‘Oh, I feel a little something here. It’s a little tight. It hurts a little bit.’ I can’t pull myself from the game.”

Davis said every player hurts every day; you just keep playing. “Unless you can’t physically go out and play, you can’t say anything. So that’s what we do. And you have injuries that last a little longer or they don’t. Sometimes they never pop. I wish it didn’t. But it did.”

Directing a comment to Puma, Davis said, “You made it look like an excuse. It’s an excuse. It shouldn’t have been a story anyway. It’s just an overblown thing. Everyone has injuries and then they get hurt. So it was pointless to write an article. I sucked last year because I sucked. It’s not because I had an injury. You always have injuries. And now it just looks bad.”

Davis is right. He had the usual nagging pain that all players have, and Puma seems to have made it out to be bigger than it was by writing the damning sentence that Davis “concealed an oblique injury from Mets officials for most of last season.”

Perhaps there was a miscommunication on Sunday. Maybe Ike Davis could have done a better job of telling Puma that this was just a common pain that happened to get worse. Or maybe he did tell Puma that but it did not fit the story Puma wanted to write. Whatever happened, in this case it appears an athlete is right to be angry with what a reporter wrote.