Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images
Cody Bellinger was one of the many people who helped themselves to some chicken wings while watching Florida and Houston face off in the national championship on Monday. However, he won’t be eating them for a very long time based on what he had to say about the bout with food poisoning that forced him to miss a game.
One of the most surprising revelations to come out of The Last Dance was the fact that Michael Jordan’s legendary “Flu Game” was not actually caused by that particular illness but was purportedly the byproduct of a questionable pizza he had delivered to his hotel room in Utah before the Bulls faced off against the Jazz in Game Five of the NBA Finals in 1997.
There’s only so much professional athletes can do to ensure they won’t befall a similar fate given the nature of a career where they spend around half of their season on the road, as there are plenty of occasions where they’re essentially required to have food sent up to their room in situations where there aren’t really any other options to adequately fuel up.
Yankees outfielder Cody Bellinger presumably could have headed to a restaurant in Detroit the wake of his team’s 6-2 loss to the Tigers on Monday when you consider the matinee ended in the early evening, but he opted to lay low and chill in his hotel room to watch the final game of March Madness.
According to ESPN, Bellinger decided to order some chicken wings sans any sauce or rub, and while that’s usually a pretty safe order if you’re not trying to irritate your stomach, that did not turn out to be the case for a man who was ruled out of Tuesday night’s contest due to the food poisoning he blamed on the presumably undercooked poultry.
Bellinger returned to the lineup when the two teams kicked off the final game of their three-game series on Wednesday afternoon, but noted he’s in no rush to have any chicken wings in the foreseeable future while recounting the fallout before the contest, saying:
“They were good coming in. But I woke up at 4 a.m. sweating and just started throwing up for a few hours. It was a tough morning.
I can say I will not eat wings for five years. I swear. Because the thought of it right now makes me sick.”
No one deserves that fate, but it’s good to hear he was able to make a fairly speedy recovery.