The Doctor Will Save You Now
When their careers are hanging by a tendon, the world's greatest athletes turn to him. A profile of Dr. James Andrews as he enters the twilight of his orthopedic career.
ESPN THE MAGAZINE / SEP 2013
The doctor opens the door to Exam Room 2. Perched on the table is an 18-year-old male, flanked by nervous-looking parents. He wears shorts and a T-shirt and has a mop of tussled strawberry blond hair. He was once a phenom, albeit a local one. At 14, his fastballs went 80 miles an hour. Then one day, during a practice session just before the start of his freshman season in high school, he felt a "bad twinge," "just kind of a pop," and he hasn't taken the mound since. Now, he tells the doctor, he wants to try out for the baseball team at the college he'll attend in the fall, his goal a scholarship and then who knows. So he has traveled here with his parents, to the clinic of the celebrated orthopedist, to see if the doctor can heal whatever it is that ails that doubtful right shoulder -- to see if the doctor can save his dream, which is why they all come to see Dr. James Andrews. "I don't want to let it go," the boy says.
As Andrews likes to do whenever a mother is in the room, he addresses her. "Here's the big question for y'all, Mama," he says. "If he decides he's just gonna go to skoo and be an engineer or whatever, you don't necessarily have to operate on this. Professional players we see when they're retirin', with even worse shoulders than his — we don't operate on 'em."
The doctor's distinctive Louisiana drawl has compelled at least one patient of Northern origin to nickname him Foghorn — as in Foghorn Leghorn, the Looney Tunes rooster. Over the decades, though, his accent has proved a highly useful clinical tool. Slow and informal, it soothes the frayed nerves of his patients. It carries along on its easeful waves the reliability and trustfulness of the old country doc of American lore. You close your eyes when you hear that drawl, you see the Norman Rockwell pictures. It distracts the listener from the core, uncomfortable truth -- that when an athlete is listening to Dr. James Andrews, he's listening to his best last chance….