Every blow you take: How Sting got a broken rib from Police drummer Stewart Copeland before rocking Shea Stadium

nypost.com:

hit Shea Stadium on Aug. 18, 1983.But it was a playful wrestling match with drummer Stewart Copeland that caused singer-bassist Sting a painful pre-show injury before the trio took the stage at the former Queens home of the New York Mets 40 years ago. “Infamously, I cracked a rib of his after the soundcheck at Shea Stadium,” Stewart — whose new book “Police Diaries,” out Thursday, traces the group’s early years — told The Post.“We’re there horsing around, Sting grabs my New York Times, and I grab it back.

Pretty soon we’re wrestling for my New York Times, which by now was unreadably tattered anyway, but I was gonna get my goddamn newspaper back and applied a knee to his ribcage.

And he’s yelling, ‘Ow! Damn!’”Although the epic show — featuring two more Rock & Roll Hall of Fame bands, R.E.M. and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, as opening acts — went on for the Police, they later found out that Sting had powered through a hairline fracture to his rib.“So we played one of the best shows we ever played that night with his broken rib,” said Copeland. “We killed it.”Still, the Police’s blockbuster tour behind 1983’s “Synchronicity” — their eight-times-platinum LP, which also included the hits “King of Pain” and “Wrapped Around Your Finger” — found the London-born band on the brink of a breakup.

In fact, they never made another album after their biggest-selling one, thereby going out on top when they effectively split up in 1986.By the time they got to their fifth album — after making their debut with the reggae-punk vibes of 1978’s “Outlandos d’Amour,” featuring their breakout classic “Roxanne” — Copeland says that it had become “hell on earth” for the Police as a band.“It was a very uncomfortable place — and we drove each other.