Somebody once said that if you didn’t break a single bone or get a bad cut somewhere on your body when you were a kid, you didn’t play hard enough.

My buddies and I emptied our mothers’ Band-Aid boxes about once a year. Our moms dabbed Mercurochrome on our cuts and bruises that left us wincing from burns and stained our skin red. We had cotton balls shoved up our bloody noses from playground fights or getting hit in the face with a ball or some other kind of projectile.

I suffered my share of childhood calamities, the first of which I have no recollection. My older sister swung a baseball bat and accidentally broke my leg when I was 2 years old.

When I was about 7, the neighbor boy threw a rock at me that deeply slashed the skin above my right eye. No stitches, but perhaps there should have been. Mom patched it up and right outside I went to play again.

My worst injury occurred when I was playing third base during a junior high school baseball game. The batter hit a pop fly that was sailing toward the wooden bleachers just beyond the foul line. I ran over with my eyes on the ball. As the ball hit my glove, I tripped and fell face first into the corner of the bleacher. I rolled over onto my back.

“Got it!” I said, referring to the ball in my glove.

“Oh my God!” shouted Jimmy Flynn our shortstop.

With no ice available, no phones to call anybody, the coach gave me a rag to hold over my right eye and told me to walk home as fast as I could. I felt no pain.

I took one peek at the rag and saw a huge blood stain, so I pushed it back on my eye and walked home, about a half mile from the ball field.

Into the kitchen I stepped. “Mom? Where are you? I got hurt at the game.”

She came into the kitchen. I dropped my hand and the rag with it. She screamed and gave me a kitchen towel to change out with the rag. Mom didn’t drive. We waited for Dad to come home. By then, my head was pounding and I was feeling dizzy.

The doctor said the injury had closed my eye completely. No X-ray could be taken until the swelling subsided. Two days later, the X-ray revealed a splintered orbital bone had missed the back of my eyeball by a millimeter or two. My eye was saved, but my baseball career was not. The doctor said that another blow to my head could move the point of the fracture and I’d be blind in that eye.

Multiple battle scars came from bicycle mishaps. At full pedal speed, we weaved our bikes through road hazards and rocky paths. Somebody crashed. Bloody elbows, strawberry scraped legs and a broken finger or two were common bicycle bruises.

I broke my ankle in a basketball game, causing a two-week maneuver with crutches through the school hallways. We played no equipment tackle football on the high school field. I’d come home with welts all over my body and a painful swelling from head-to-head collisions.

No, I wasn’t accident prone or particularly careless. My friends and I threw caution to the wind and put full force in everything we did.

According to some studies, childhood mishaps produce harming consequences. The National Library of Medicine reports that adolescent injuries “may ultimately lead to difficulty in coping with the injury, reduced self-confidence, and feelings of hopelessness among youth.”

While growing up, we knew a few kids who spent hours of their childhoods watching cartoons from their couches. They were “Momma’s Boys.” They had mothers telling them, “Be careful riding your bike. Don’t go fast. You might fall. You can play catch with a football, but no tackling. You could break a leg or split your head wide open. No tree climbing. No jumping off swings at the playground. Stay out of the woods. Poison ivy and snakes live there. No fighting or wrestling. Stay away from train tracks and busy roads.”

Talk about “reduced self-confidence and feelings of hopelessness.” These poor kids were afraid to do anything that involved a risk of injury and of course, what was our reaction? We made fun of them.

“Don’t take your hands off the handlebars when you ride your bike. You could fall off and die,” we’d say to Tommy Dowd. Our reverse psychology worked upon this kid whose mother wouldn’t let him come out and play on hot summer days, because he might get sunburn blisters or pass out from dehydration.

Six of us rode down the street hands free from out handlebars while Tommy gripped his bars tightly. Suddenly, he took his hands off the bars and pedaled as fast as us. We cheered him on until his bike hit a rock and off he flew into the wild blue yonder, landing hard on the street. Tommy broke his arm. He wasn’t allowed to come out and play until the cast came off and then he wasn’t allowed to leave his yard. To this day, I have believed he had psychological damage not from the accident, but from his mother.

Taking risks of injuries during childhood play prepared us for the different kinds of risks we’d face as adults. We refused to exist inside a Bubble Wrap.

So, who’s in with me for some no equipment tackle football? What fun that would be!

Don’t worry. We’ll all get hurt, but there’s an ambulance station right down the street from where I live.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com