Playing with a sports hernia and then complaining that something should have been done with it before seems to me to be the opposite of “divaish”. TO paraphrase one of my favorite football movies, there’s a difference between being hurt and being injured. In the case of Shockey, he obviously knew he was in pain - but he was apparently told by medical professionals that it wasn’t the type of thing that needed to be corrected/get worse/etc.

If you’ve played football, you’ve been there. If something hurts but the training staff tells you “it’s just pain, it won’t get worse”, then you’re probably going to try to play anyway. IN the case of Shockey, it got worse.

Should he have gotten a 2nd or 3rd opinion? Maybe. But can you really call him a “diva” for trusting his training staff and then expressing his frustration that they didn’t do their jobs correctly?

As for Winslow, he had a Staph infection after his 2005 surgery, but I’m going to going to go out on a limb here and saw that this Staph infection had nothing to do with his surgery.

A Staph infection is also a potentially life-threatening situation - a little different than “calling in sick”. And I know that my boss certainly called people whenever there was a *serious* illness that required hospitalization.

People love to jump all over professional athletes as overpriced divas. In some cases, it’s warranted - here, it’s not.