You want to talk about playing hurt and not making much noise about it? We can have some things with Shockey in there too and I never heard him use excuses.
Shockey played his entire second half of the season with turf toe in his rookie year. He never made a peep about it, only saying that there was a chance it was so severe he would need surgery in the off-season. Luckily, he didn't need it but it was still bad throughout the season where he put up the best numbers of his career possibly.
In his second season, he had a very bad knee injury against the Falcons. He continuted to try and come back even when it looked like we were done anyway so hard, he agravvated his injury. That's how motivated he was. You can't question his motivation.
2004 nothing much went on.
2005 he played the last month or two of the season with a broken sternum Not to mention he didn't say a word about it until the day before the Panthers game. Along with that, he played with a high ankle sprain against Carolina. I don't care how bad he did against them, he showed toughness and motivation there.
Oh and last I checked, Shockey had a very good game against San Francisco, just made that one bad drop that should never have been remembered if Fassel didn't consider the game over and changed our gameplan completely by putting in Dayne and running it to him not to mention our defense just flat out blowing it. Shockey should not be blamed at all for that loss.