Fracture

Despite chronic back problems over the last year, Westminster junior Amber Nichols has been a key player for the field hockey team. Playing alongside younger sister Lindsay, the midfielder fights through the pain to consistently win balls, then advance them upfield. Her efforts helped the Owls outscore their opponents, 19-0, through the first six games of the season. Off the field, she is an honor roll student who's interests include the arts and nature. You've suffered through some injury problems over the last couple seasons.

A year ago, River Hill's girls basketball team began the season with its best players on the bench. Guard Greeba Outen-Barlow had pain in her back -- it turned out to be a stress fracture -- and forward/center Keiko Miller-Tate had a badly sprained left ankle.The absence of Outen-Barlow and Miller-Tate, two of the top players in the county, took its toll as the Hawks lost their first four games of the season. Miller returned, but Outen-Barlow's back condition frustrated her all season and the Hawks never got untracked.

PURCHASE, N.Y. -- In fulfillment of pessimistic prophecies that Latrell Sprewell was bad news about to happen, the New York Knicks learned last night that their controversial new headliner will miss from three to six weeks of this 12-week NBA season with a stress fracture in his right heel.Team physician Norman Scott said that after X-rays and a CAT scan failed to show a break, an MRI late yesterday revealed a "microscopic fracture of the heel [calcaneus bone]." Scott said no surgery is required, but Sprewell will be fitted with a removable cast called a "walking boot."

All it took were two games for Willis Otanez to catch the injury bug that has swept through the Orioles' clubhouse. Outfielder Danny Clyburn can only hope he's more immune.Good luck.Clyburn was recalled from Triple-A Rochester yesterday when Otanez went on the disabled list with a fractured left wrist. Otanez, who is lost for the remainder of the season, suffered the injury Thursday night while diving for a first-inning fly ball from Chicago's Albert Belle. It was his second major-league appearance, and it ended the club's outfield experiment.

Ravens starting defensive tackle Tony Siragusa is expected to have surgery on his right hand this morning and is listed as doubtful for Sunday's game against the Tennessee Oilers at Memorial Stadium.Team doctor Claude T. Moorman met with Siragusa last night at the team's Owings Mills complex to take a look at studies of Siragusa's right middle finger that has a spiral fracture. The Ravens had been hoping for some type of cast for the finger.But Moorman ruled that out last night."We had the fracture in a splint since Sunday, but since then it has moved and it is an unstable fracture," Moorman said last night.

X-rays tell the story of her life: healed fractures across her arms, legs, ribs and neck, fractures so numerous that the question "How many?" seems cruel and absurd.At 9 months, Jasmine Pass might not have a major bone that hasn't broken at least once.Look at Jasmine and you see eager, intelligent eyes -- eyes that follow everything that moves.Look again and you see a child spending life in a molded shell, a child who can break at any moment, a child who is handled like china."She'll have fractures her whole life," said her 38-year-old grandmother, Ellen Paylor, who cares for her in a narrow Baltimore rowhouse on North Lakewood Avenue.

This month's cold spell is bruising knees and breaking bones across Maryland, as stubborn patches of ice are sending unsuspecting pedestrians sprawling.Emergency rooms report a spike in the number of patients with strains, sprains, bruises and, of course, fractures coming in over the past week. "They're all over the place," said Ann Lesini, office administrator for a group of orthopedists at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center.Her doctors have treated 20 patients Tuesday and yesterday with injuries suffered in church parking lots, at shopping centers and on front steps.

ELMONT, N.Y. -- Jade Flush, a 4-year-old filly being trained by Nick Zito for the Breeders' Cup Distaff, apparently took a bad step at the end of her workout yesterday morning at Belmont Park, suffered a fairly severe in-line fracture of her right foreleg and will race no more.Zito speculated later that the injury might be traced to an overextended effort that his filly made two weeks ago in the Spinster Stakes at Keeneland in Lexington, Ky., when she ran second by a head to Inside Information.

BasketballPortland Trail Blazers -- Placed G Rod Strickland on injured list with a slight fracture of the right wrist; signed G Steve Henson.CollegeAkron -- Re-assigned football coach Gerry Faust to a fund-raising position.

The day after the Preakness was a little gloomier than usual yesterday in the stakes barn at Pimlico.Two horses, including fourth-place finisher Personal Hope, bled during the race and will miss the June 5 Belmont Stakes.And the extent of injuries to Union City, the D. Wayne Lukas-trained runner who broke down midway through the backstretch and later was destroyed, were more extensive than originally reported.Lukas reacted angrily to suggestions that the horse should not have started in the race because he had missed a day's training Wednesday and had not had a speed workout or breezed between the Kentucky Derby and Preakness as all of the other starters did."

O'Hair rallies to win Quail Hollow event golf Five weeks after he blew a five-shot lead against Tiger Woods at Bay Hill, Sean O'Hair showed his mettle in hard, blustery conditions Sunday in Charlotte, N.C., with a 3-under-par 69 and rallied to win the PGA Quail Hollow Championship when no one could catch him. Despite a bogey-bogey finish on the two hardest holes on the course, O'Hair was the only player in the final nine groups to break 70. Lucas Glover,...

Fracture Reviewed on PlayStation 3. Also available on Xbox 360. One player; up to 12 players online. Rated Teen for animated blood, mild language and violence. $59.99. ** Most people assume that a global-warming apocalypse would send the east and west coasts of the U.S. into the depths of the ocean. But the makers of Fracture - an ambitious but ultimately ho-hum first-person shooter for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 - have other ideas. This being a game set in the future, new technology has allowed for the Earth to rise and fall at the whim of man. It's good news for San Francisco and Washington, but apparently the Midwest is a wasteland as a result.

Louisville, Ky. -- Dr. Larry Bramlage, the on-call veterinarian at Churchill Downs for Kentucky Derby weekend, revised his initial diagnosis on the Michael Matz-trained Chelokee yesterday. The horse, injured when he took a misstep in a Grade III race here on a sloppy track, did not break his leg. "There was a lot of swelling immediately after the injury," Bramlage said. "When you see an injury like that, you immediately think there is a fracture. But in this case, it was not a fracture but a dislocation."

Despite chronic back problems over the last year, Westminster junior Amber Nichols has been a key player for the field hockey team. Playing alongside younger sister Lindsay, the midfielder fights through the pain to consistently win balls, then advance them upfield. Her efforts helped the Owls outscore their opponents, 19-0, through the first six games of the season. Off the field, she is an honor roll student who's interests include the arts and nature. You've suffered through some injury problems over the last couple seasons.

Yearly infusions of the bone-strengthening agent zoledronic acid in elderly people who have suffered a hip fracture reduced deaths by 28 percent and new fractures by 35 percent over two years - the first time any treatment has been shown to reduce mortality in such patients. Researchers reported in May that the drug, sold under the brand name Reclast by Novartis, significantly reduced the incidence of fractures in patients with osteoporosis. But the new trial is the first to study people who have already suffered a fracture, said Dr. Dennis Black of the University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.

PHOENIX -- It hit Miguel Tejada as he lay in bed Thursday night, his fractured left wrist throbbing, his mind struggling to grasp a reality he had never confronted in his major league career. "Right now, I can't help this team," Tejada thought to himself. With that in mind, Tejada submitted to a trip to the 15-day disabled list because of a fracture in the radius bone that occurred when he was hit by a pitch by the San Diego Padres' Doug Brocail on Wednesday night. Tejada watched last night's game against the Arizona Diamondbacks from the dugout, his streak of 1,152 consecutive games played, formerly the longest active streak in the majors and the fifth longest all time, now a memory.

Capsules by film critics Michael Sragow and Chris Kaltenbach unless noted. Full reviews are at baltimoresun.com/movies. Are We Done Yet?, -- with Ice Cube as the leader of a city family that moves into a country fixer-upper that refuses to be fixed, has some possibilities but consistently mistakes annoying for funny. Most of the laughs are handed to John C. McGinley as Chuck, the unctuous real-estate agent who's also the only licensed home improvement contractor in town, not to mention the building inspector.

Capsules by film critics Michael Sragow and Chris Kaltenbach unless noted. Full reviews are at baltimoresun.com/movies. Blades of Glory -- stars Will Ferrell and Jon Heder as figure skating's first all-male pairs team. It shouldn't take much to figure where the laughs in this film will come from: lots of groin jokes, lots of fey asides. Even figure-skating fans have to admit the sport leaves itself open to parody. And everything you'd expect from a figure-skating parody is there. Although the relentless crudity wears thin after a while, much of the movie, thankfully, is pretty funny.

Check the most recent entries on actor Ryan Gosling's career dance card: Young heartthrob in a treacly romance that critics loathed and the public loved. Cokehead teacher in one of the cheapest and most depressing indie films of 2006. Cocky district attorney opposite murderous Anthony Hopkins in a police-procedural genre movie opening today. "If anything, I've been painted with this `independent, brooding actor' brush," said Gosling, who was nominated for a best-actor Oscar in January for playing that addicted instructor in Half Nelson.

A few truths to be gleaned from Fracture, the new cat-and-mouse thriller starring Anthony Hopkins as a really smart guy who kills his wife and Ryan Gosling as the assistant D.A. charged with bringing him to justice: 1. Hopkins could spend the rest of his career channeling Hannibal Lecter, playing riffs on the criminal who's so much smarter than everyone else, though we hope he won't coast like that. Still, he is so good at the type. Fracture (New Line Cinema) Starring Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling.