Erik Johnson is a young defenseman for the St. Louis Blues, but more importantly, he's the face of the franchise. He's the one everyone points to when people start talking about the Blues becoming a good NHL team again. It's too bad Erik Johnson is now out for the season due to torn ligaments in his knee. The funny thing about this injury is that is supposedly happened when Erik Johnson caught his foot between the accelerator and brake pedals in a golf cart. 

Uh, huh. 

Typically, if you see injuries to star players in odd circumstances, something else happened. While we don't know what the exact situation was we can look at the answer given so far. The best comes from John Davidson, the St. Louis Blues president:

This is a hard one to believe, but it's the God's honest truth . . . he was playing golf and he pulled the golf cart up to where his ball was. And he took his left leg and put it on the ground and the right leg, he sort of reached back and put it on the brake. A lot of us do it . . . I do it all the time myself. As he pushed the brake, he missed a little bit, his leg got caught under there and he slipped and that wrenched his knee.

Yes, it is freakish. Who knew that stopping a golf cart could tear your ACL and MCL. 

The thing that concerns me about this answer is "God' honest truth." Is it a shot at convinving folks that he is really, really being honest? In most cases it just demonstrates people are trying hard to cover something else. 

Did something else happen? More than likely not. John Davidson has no reason to lie about an injury to his star player prior to the season starting. Erik Johnson, too, has never struck me as a guy who would lie. If anything, Erik seems to go out of his way to be proper about things. Still, this won't stop comments and perceptions like the following:

SkiptomyLou  September 18, 2008 8:31PM CST
I've pulled up to golf balls thousands of times and never hurt myself. My friends have done in tens of thousands of times and never hurt themselves. I've seen it done on the course hundreds of thousands of times and never seen an injury. I can tell already EJ is gonna be a huge bust. Jump on me all you want but I just got this gut feeling. I know it's premature but some players are just injury/accident prone and never live up to their potential. Let the name-calling begin, I can take it.

Erik Johnson is going to be out for the season. May I suggest the Blues provide a golf cart driver next year?