The surgeon`s lounge at Centinela Hospital Medical Center was deserted except for Dr. Lew Yocum of the famed Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic.
As he stole a few minutes of solitude while awaiting a scheduled surgery, a voice on the speaker disturbed the stillness.
”A call for Dr. Yocum. Can you take it on line four?”
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Yocum replied: ”I`d be thrilled.”
He picked up the phone, listened, spoke briefly and hung up. Turning, he said: ”Ellis Burks separated his shoulder.”
Burks, a Boston Red Sox outfielder, was injured in a collision with teammate Mike Greenwell in a game at Oakland. Yocum, physician for the California Angels, would examine him later that day.
The call was not the one Yocum expected, but Kerlan-Jobe physicians are being increasingly summoned on all fronts. The clinic`s sports medicine reputation has spread to Europe and the Far East. Dr. Frank Jobe, the Los Angeles Dodgers` physician, recently performed the same type of surgery on two pitchers from Japan that he perfected in the reconstruction of Tommy John`s arm.
The clinic has been characterized as baseball`s ”Magic Kingdom,”
largely because of the breakthroughs Jobe has made in research and treatment of injuries of the elbow and rotator cuff, four muscles that steady the top of the humerus, the long upper-arm bone.
His impact on baseball is profound. Few injuries are as menacing as a torn rotator cuff. It can end a career. Virtually all of baseball takes part in Jobe`s preventive exercise program. His guide, ”Shoulder and Arm Exercises For Baseball Players,” is baseball`s exercise bible. He thinks the program may have prevented many rotator cuff injuries.
No one could have foreseen the symbolism in a series of 1957 events when the Dodgers left Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles. Buzzie Bavasi, general manager, neglected to line up a team doctor and asked Bob Kerlan the day before the 1958 opener. The deal was struck, happily for Kerlan. He adored sports.
”It started, but it never ended,” Kerlan recalled. He later added the Angels, Lakers and Kings as clients. He was on duty at 244 games a year. This, coupled with a teaching load at Southern Cal and his own practice, made for very full days.
Jobe, raised in Greensboro, N.C., took his medical training in the area. Jobe`s assets are his hands, the kind that make a surgeon special.
”Frank was mature,” Kerlan said. ”He stood out, not only because of his skills.”
In 1965, Jobe asked Kerlan if he wanted some help.
”I said, `What do you want me to pay you?` He said, `I don`t want any pay.` I said, `That`s the right answer. You`ll be plenty busy from the work I`ll be giving you,”` said Kerlan
Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax was the first of a number of well-known athletes whose careers, hanging in the balance, were rescued and extended by Kerlan. After Koufax came the Lakers` Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain.
Koufax`s ailment was an unusual arthritic condition in his elbow. Baylor suffered from calcification in his quadriceps. Chamberlain suffered a ruptured tendon in a knee.
”You become an overnight expert. The truth of the matter is if you get outstanding athletes who have something wrong with them, they make a great doctor of you,” Kerlan said.
Jockey Bill Shoemaker, Dodgers pitchers Johnny Podres and Don Drysdale and Lakers guard Jerry West were Kerlan patients.
Kerlan, 67, is in his 40th year of practice. He has given up surgery because of arthritis. Jobe is 64.
As Jobe began to focus on the shoulder, Kerlan`s vision was of a clinic with staff expertise in many areas of the body. He knew what he wanted: the best surgical hands he could locate; they ultimately have given the clinic the reputation it now holds.
”The more prominent our physicians become, the better I like it,” said Kerlan. ”I just bask in their reflective glory.”
Kerlan turned the Dodgers over to Jobe, the Angels to Yocum and the Lakers and Kings to Dr. Steve Lombardo. Another clinic staffer, Dr. Clarence Shields Jr., is the Rams` physician. When Danny Manning, the Clippers` top pick in 1988, needed reconstructive knee surgery, he was steered to the clinic by Baylor. Lombardo did the repairs.
Baseball injuries in bygone eras weren`t given the respect they are today.
”A player would hurt until he couldn`t stand it, then he`d just leave baseball,” Jobe said.
Jobe said: ”Now that there are $2 million guaranteed salaries, baseball can`t say to those who are hurt, `Why don`t you go get a job down at the boiler works?` A physician has to do what he can to try and fix them up.”
Injuries are increasing at an alarming rate; so much, St. Louis Cardinals trainer Gene Gieselmann noted, that a record number of players went on the disabled list this year.
”There is overuse,” Jobe explained. ”When you`re throwing a baseball, you throw it to the maximum your joint will tolerate. If you go beyond that, you get micro-tears in the tendon. When there are enough of these, the tendon begins breaking down faster than Mother Nature builds it up.”
On checking the spread of injuries, Jobe says: ”Baseball needs a structured training program with lots of instruction regarding mechanics and technique.”
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On weight training, Jobe says: ”Baseball demands a different type of training than football. Baseball needs a highly supervised program using light weights in multiple repetitions. Some teams have hired former football weight people. I think that`s a mistake. You bulk up players, and they don`t play as well. The end result is worse than if you had not done anything at all.”
Baseball`s beauty is in its unhurried pace. It is the bursts of explosive action that stresses tendons to the limit.
On the heels of Jobe`s discoveries has come a conditioning program for the trunk devised by Dr. Bob Watkins, the clinic`s back and spine specialist, that could alter beliefs about fitness levels and training in many sports. It teaches balance and coordination and strengthens the abdominal region in such a way as to protect the body while improving performance.
Watkins` program was used by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana in his rehabilitation after back surgery. Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser gave it and Jobe`s exercises credit for his sensational 1988 season. St, Louis` John Morris is convinced it saved his career. Golfer Payne Stewart was introduced to the program in January.
The biomechanics lab, born of a Jobe suggestion 12 years ago during a weekend think-tank retreat, is conducting 25 studies in sports such as running, tennis and swimming. The lab has evolved into a world center for research in an academic atmosphere. The U.S. Olympic Committee draws upon its findings.
Startling information was uncovered regarding the importance of the rotator cuff and arm and hip muscles in golf in tests done on pros Tom Kite, Tom Purtzer and Gary Koch. U.S. javelin thrower Tom Petranoff, a lab subject, says findings were critical in his world-record performance of 327-2 in 1983. ”What we`ve taught golf is that fitness is important,” Jobe said. ”We always thought of golf as a game you could play with a cigarette dangling from your lips and a drink waiting for you at the end of the round. But when your living depends on it and one stroke can be the difference between $18,000 and $28,000, conditioning becomes extremely important.”
Due for completion this year is a study of 22 muscles that influence the fastball. This is to be followed by a look at the muscles that govern the curveball and an examination of elbow injuries. By combining these results with facts about the rotator cuff, ”we will have brought it all together,”
said Marilyn Pink, lab director.
Because sports medicine is still a young science, the recreational athlete as well as the pro will benefit in years ahead from the lab`s information.
Patients who are not athletes-stroke victims and those who receive hip replacements-already are profiting. The lab is gathering useful conclusions on gait and stride patterns of these people as they recuperate.
”Our goal is to safely return patients to full potential,” Watkins said.
Kerlan said: ”We`ve only scratched the surface. Like anything scientific, we`re way behind. We`re in a Future Shock situation in everything but medicine, but that`s because we`re dealing with human life. We cannot experiment as they can in astronomy or physics. We have to go slower. We`ll do things in vascular and nerve areas that will seem to us amazing.”