The Brawning of America

Jacques Strapp, your basic casual athlete, stumbled into the doctor's office one summer day in 1972. The other patients in the waiting room stared as he tried to pick up a copy of Newsweek and found he didn't have the strength. Groaning like an Edsel on its last mile, Jacques collapsed into an orange-vinyl chair.

He was a physical impossibility. He had two broken ribs from a pickup rugby game, a wrecking ball for a knee left over from high school football and a torn rotator cuff from pitching ponyleague batting practice. His legs were full of shin splints because he jogged on sidewalks all the time. He had four pulled muscles, a sprained ankle. tennis elbow, runner's knee and a common cold. The doctor treated him according to the conventional wisdom of the day and Jacques died within the week.

In 1972. sports medicine was left field. It was a stepchild to the "more important" medical disciplines--a side line for coaches. trainers and general practitioners, who were as likely to screw things up as to cure them. Sports were primarily the province of professional athletes. The rest of us leaned back with beers and watched.

But in the past decade, sports have razed the American consciousness. Today, there are 36,000,000 joggers and 32,000,000 tennis players in this country. One out of four shoes sold these days is an athletic shoe. There will be 500 or more marathons held this year from sea to shining sea. (For the statistically minded, 500 marathons add up to 13,109 miles of marathon courses--enough to stretch from New York to Los Angeles four times, with a jog to St. Louis to spare.) Overall. U.S. participations sports now draw nearly 600,000,000 competitors. Since there are only about 231,000,000 Americans, that means hordes of us must be multiple threats.

And sports medicine, a young and developing discipline that trailed the field ten years ago, has caught up. The past decade has seen remarkable improvement in our understanding of the body and of the meaning of fitness. Most of the new developments have come through the study and training of world-class athletes; now the results of that work are turning even everyday jocks inside out.

If Jacques were still playing today, he could stave off many of his maladies with current training and conditioning methods and could treat with unprecedented efficiency the injuries that did strike. He could, in short, become a finely calibrated competitive machine--no longer an Edsel, perhaps a Porsche.

But there have been a lot of gears turning in the past few model years, and before moving up even to Chevy status, Jacques would up even to Chevy status, Jacques would have to overhaul his knowledge of sports medicine, going all the way back to the age of the Model A.

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Many experts date the birth of modern sports medicine from an effort 49 years ago to forecast the first sub-fourminute mile. At that time, with the world record standing just under 4:10, the sporting intelligentsia began to consider the possibility that somebody might be able to break through the magic fourminute mark. Exercise doctors, track trainers, dietitians and even meteorologists got their heads together and plotted the conditions under which they believed it could happen.

It would take place in Scandinavia, they decided, where the ozone gives runners a lift. It would be twilight. The wind would be still, the temperature around 68 degrees. The race would be run on a dry clay track with a big crowd screaming emotional support. And the key to the whole thing would be cautious pacing--the runner would start slowly and increase his speed quarter mile by grueling quarter mile.

Roger Bannister kicked those speculations into oblivion on his way to the tape in 1554. He ran successively slower quarters on a wet cinder track in a 15-mile-an-hour wind before a handful of people in Oxford, England. But it's beside the point that those "experts" threw about as many strikes as a Wiffle Ball pitcher in a hurricane. What matters is that the epic breaking of the fourminute-mile barrier turned the attention of specialists in various fields toward evaluating--and improving--sports performance.

When all the old bodily tried-and-truisms began to be questioned half a century ago, one of the rustiest old saws was that athletic injuries should always be immobilized while they healed. Every school nurse knew that. But Dr. Hans Kraus, one of the founding fathers of sports science, began to have doubts back in the early Thirties, when he talked with an Austrian coach who came from a family of acrobats. The coach insisted that doctors didn't know how to treat sprains and strains, while Dr. Kraus--toeing the standard line--maintained that immobilization was the only way to heal such injuries. The coach, though, had grown up with circus people, who didn't eat if they didn't work--people whose rehabilitative techniques were born of necessity. Their method of treating sprains and strains was to soak a towel in alcohol, wrap it around the injured area and expose the towel to steam. The injured area would become numb enough to move without pain, and after a day or two, the acrobats could tumble as recklessly as ever.

When Kraus tried that treatment on two of his patients who'd suffered severe ankle sprains skiing, they were back on the slopes in three days. He gradually refined the practice, and he now uses ethyl-chloride spray instead of alcohol as the anesthetic of choice. But the point of the practice is the same today as it was 50 years ago: Minimize pain so the injured joint or limb can be moved as soon as possible.

These days, it's well established that immobilization causes muscles to atrophy and often brings about permanent loss of strength. Immobilization is seldom recommended even for major injuries--muscles and joints heal faster when they're moved. But if Kraus has been shouting "Mobility for injury!" since the Thirties, why is it only now that there are other sports medicos to listen?

The reason is simple. Before the Sixties, there was not enough money in professional sports to motivate research aimed at improving the training and treatment of athletes and, ultimately, their performance. Pro teams were run on shoestrings and athletes came relatively cheap. American sports, in short, had yet to become big business.

Things changed with the ascendance of pro football in the early Sixties and with the influx of television money that multiplied the stakes of the game. All of a sudden, owners realized that they were paying huge salaries to hulks who spent too much time sitting on the side line in casts. Shortly thereafter, baseball and basketball owners, who paid their athletes even more, came to the same realization. So the heat was on team trainers and doctors to find ways of getting players back in action fast. They borrowed techniques from other medical specialties and created new treatments for injuries endemic to athletes. And they soon figured out that an ounce of prevention was worth 500 mg. of Butazolidin. It's great to heal Walter Payton's knee in two weeks, but it's even better to keep him from being hurt in the first place by conditioning his body to resist injury.

When the tennis and jogging booms erupted a few years later, there was already some knowledge directed toward keeping the athlete healthy. Soon, the aforementioned millions of casual competitors were working out and getting hurt. The still-new field of sports medicine began to expand to serve the high-volume fitness phenomenon as well as the big-money athletic elite.

To get an idea of just how sophisticated sports medicine has become at its highest level, take the case history of a modern major-league ballplayer--Jerry Remy of the Boston Red Sox.

Obtained by Boston in 1977, Remy hadn't suffered an injury beyond the usual second baseman's bumps and bruises since 1971. But in 1979, during the Sox' first home series against the New York Yankees, Remy slid into home plate and twisted his left knee. It swelled immediately and he had to be carried from the field.

In order to speed the recovery of mending Red Sox players, Boston retains the services of Sports Medicine Resource, a one-stop remediation center for all sports injuries. Dr. Williams Southmayd, medical director of S.M.R. and co-author of Sports Health, recalls details of Remy's case in language that reflects the advanced technology of modern sports medicine:

"Our initial examination showed that Jerry had sprained the ligaments in the knee. We put an immobilization splint on it and he came around nicely but still had some discomfort, so we then did an arthrogram." (In case you don't read Aristophanes in the original, arthro is Greek for joint; an arthrogram is a diagnostic test in which dye is injected into a joint and coasts the surface of the cartilage--the shock-absorbing tissue between the ends of bones. If there is torn cartilage, the dye will seep down into the tear and will like a valley on an X ray.) "The arthrogram looked fine," says Dr. Southmayd. "It didn't show any damage. So Jerry went into the 1980 season healthy, but he re-injured the knee going for a fly ball. I aspirated the knee--put a needle into it--and drew out some bloody fluid. That indicated a fairly serious injury."

Because he suspected trouble, Southmayd did a direct examination of Remy's knee. He inserted an arthroscope--a metal tube the size of a ballpoint pen--into the joint. The arthroscope uses fiber optics to illuminate the inside of the knee and throws the image onto a TV screen. The picture told Southmayd what he needed to know: Remy had torn the cartilage away from its moorings on the bone.

Southmayd regrets that at the time--only two years ago--he was not yet able to perform arthroscopic surgery. That would have allowed him to operate inside the knee without making a major incision. Instead, he simply opened the knee and went right in, removing the fragments of torn cartilage.

For two weeks after the operation, Remy was on crutches with his leg out straight in a supporting splint. The S.M.R. staff put him in a whirlpool bath and moved the leg gently as it floated among the bubbles. "Then we started working Jerry on the Cybex machine," recalls Southmayd, "against very little resistance. The Cybex is a very sophisticated muscle-testing and strengthening apparatus that works through a computer and records muscle activity on a graph. It was used exclusively for the next month, with increasing resistance to the knee, until Jerry's left knee was almost as strong as the other one.

"Two months after surgery, we put Jerry on the full circuit of Nautilus machines to bring up the strength throughout his musculature but with concentration on the leg-exercising machines. At the same time, he went on a jogging program; then, later, he began running quarter miles until he could sprint again. To go at a sprint, you need almost full motion."

Remy spent the rest of the 1980 season recovering but returned to action the following spring and was playing well as the season opened. Early in the summer, though, he twisted the knee again and had to go back to S.M.R. for another aspiration of the joint. This time, the fluid was clear. It turned out, however, that he had chipped a bone inside the knee. By then, Southmayd could do microsurgery, using the arthro-scope. He inserted the scope and drew out the chip, using tiny scissors and forceps, watching the TV picture to guide him during the operation. There was no need to make another major incision in the second baseman's knee.

"After the arthroscopic surgery," Southmayd says, "we could eliminate two months' recuperative time. We were that far ahead of where we had been right after the major cartilage-removal operation." Instead of taking a total of three months for him to regain playing strength, this time it took Remy two weeks. "It's fair to say that today--with the arthroscope, fiber optics, the Cybex, the Nautilus and what we know about conditioning--we can often rehabilitate major injuries in half the time it would have taken even two or three years ago."

When Remy's contract came up for renewal last winter, the Red Sox called upon S.M.R. for assurance that their infielder was physically sound and worth the money they intended to pay him--and Southmayd was confident enough (continued on page 184)Brawning of America(continued from page 150) to give it. Remy is now pivoting on the double play as well as he did before the two injuries that once might have ended his career. Before spring training opened this year, he signed a five-year, $3,000,000 contract to play second base for Boston.

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Today, if we wanted to, we could all have our knees 'scoped, poked and put on television. Rehabilitative techniques--as well as training and preventive measures--that were revolutionary eight years ago are old news now. It has taken a turbulent decade for new ideas to trickle down to the man on the street, the same way it took Teflon 15 years to go from the fire of its military uses into the frying pan. Lately, however, the trickle-down has become a faucet turned on full, and it's changing the way we live our competitive lives.

A half century ago, when Hans Kraus decided to become a sports doctor, he had no niche in which to ply his trade--his New York City private practice was one of the few havens in the world for the bone-weary athlete. Today, thanks to the high stakes of professional sports and to the scientific approach that the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern-bloc countries have taken to Olympic competition, there is a tremendous volume of sophisticated research that all athletes can use to their advantage.

Sports medicine as a field has burgeoned so much that it now subsumes forms of study that have nothing to do with medicine--any new datum that bears on competitive performance is gobbled up by someone intent on using it to run faster or jump higher. Today's athletic trainer, for instance, is no cigarchewing father figure cheering on the side lines. He even disdains the word trainer. He opts instead for kinesiologist or exercise physiologist or--calling to mind a sports version of Mr. Goodwrench--biomechanic. From Rutgers to UCLA, sports medicine is proliferating as an academic discipline and a realm for research, and the new trainer almost always has "Dr." in front of his name.

If he's a kinesiologist (a student of muscular movement), he might be Dr. Marvin Clein of the University of Denver, putting his puffing jock subjects through their paces on a treadmill. Dr. Clein quantifies an athlete's ability to accumulate oxygen debt during high work loads--maximum oxygen intake relative to body weight determines the amount of work a body can sustain over a period of time. Clein's athletes nod their heads, gasping, when told this, then take off on individualized performance-improvement programs.

If he's a biomechanic, he might be Dr. Gideon Ariel. Dr. Ariel, who used to toss the discus for the Israeli Olympic team, now breaks down athletic performance into all its component parts for Computerized Biomechanical Analysis, Inc., at Amherst, Massachusetts. His computer turns high-speed film of an athlete's motion into a series of blue-green stick figures that reproduces every movement made by the body. Then Ariel suggests ways to cut out all superfluous motion. He once made a computer model of Al Oerter, who had thrown the discus 212' 6 1/2" in the 1968 Olympics, and found that Oerter was throwing some of his force into the ground and the air. After Ariel pointed out ways to cut the fat from Oerter's motion. Al went out and threw the discus 221' 4".

If the model of the modern trainer is an exercise physiologist, then he might be Dr. David Costill of Ball State University's Human Performance Laboratory. Dr. Costill studies the muscular mechanisms of the body and their effects on athletic performance. He takes snippets of muscle from wincing athletes and peers through a microscope at the tissue. His verdict may determine whether or not a runner will ever be capable of completing a marathon in less than three hours. It was Costill who refined the understanding of fast- and slowtwitch muscle fibers. A high percentage of fast-twitch fibers generates speed; a high percentage of slow-twitch, endurance; an average person has about half of each. Costill discovered that marathon world-record holder Alberto Salazar has an incredible 92 percent slow-twitch fibers, which is one reason why he keeps running while the rest of us collapse on the sidewalks of New York.

Costill also puts cardiac candidates on an exercise routine to strengthen their heart muscles and conducts research that suggests, among other things, that great athletes are born and not made--most characteristics that determine athletic potential are genetic. But he also insists that "people have a responsibility to perform up to their potential, whatever it may be."

While the academic load is carried by such researchers as Clein, Ariel and Costill, the modern form of old-fashioned training and conditioning is under way at such places as Manhattan's Sports Training Institute (S.T.I.). Started in 1975, S.T.I. occupies what was once a 49th Street seminary. Now stockbrokers, lawyers and cabdrivers work out in a gym where potential priests once took set shots. Every client has his own taskmaster for thrice-weekly sessions of 45 minutes each--there are no procrastinators smoking cigarettes on the exercise machines. The phrase mostoften heard floating over proprietor Mike O'Shea's awesome array of Nautilus machines is not an encouraging "Almost through" but a growled "Five more!" S.T.I. is a paradigm of what's to come in the next wave of sports-conditioning centers.

A model of the kind of one-stop service station that's becoming available for injured athletes is Boston's S.M.R., where Jerry Remy had his knee repaired. Although most of the Red Sox and many Celtics and Bruins are habitués, three out of four S.M.R. patients are recreational athletes who receive the kind of sophisticated clinical attention only a Carl Yastrzemski could have had a decade ago.

What's the thread that connects the work of kinesiologist Clein with that of the Sports Training Institute and all the others? It's sports science's central concern--making each body the best it can be. All the sports-medicine centers across the country (and there is now at least one in every state) represent the current state of the art; their purpose is to help us refine and sophisticate our concept of fitness.

Fitness used to mean the ability to walk up a flight of steps without puffing, and maybe bowling once a week to keep the old thumb in shape. Today, it means the optimal development of strength (both muscular and cardiovascular), flexibility and endurance for the specific activities in which an athlete participates. It includes practical application of all that we've learned about the chemistry and mechanics of the body, and it can result in fine-tuning that machine closer and closer to perfect performance.

If you're one of the millions of casual athletes in this country, fitness for you may be easier defined than achieved. But due to the recent trickle-down of sophisticated techniques from the rarefied reaches of sports medicine it is within your grasp. How can you be fit and perform to potential? By taking advantage of the trickle-down, that's how. The six-part fitness program that follows is a synthesis of some of the crucial points that have emerged from research and from training elite athletes in the past ten years. It can bring you close to your potential in the specific sports you want to play on an investment of one and a half hours of hard work a week. Follow the next half-dozen steps and you'll be out of the blocks on the path to your potential.

1. Choose a sport for the rewards it offers. It has to be something you enjoy, so you'll keep it up, but it has to make demands on your strength and stamina as well. Larry Holmes's training regimen won't do you any good if you fail to stick to it, but neither will thousands of free throws or walks in the park ever redefine your body.

Over the past decade, scientists have quantified the demands and benefits of various athletic activities. Running, bike riding and swimming, it is now established, are about the best general-conditioning activities (see chart on page 187). Jumping rope is great, too. All four exercises contribute to weight loss, cardiovascular strength and muscle development. Skiing, racket sports and calisthenics provide the same benefits, but not as quickly.

Nonstrenuous sports, the ones in which you can wear the same shirt over and over and still not smell bad, don't contribute much of anything to fitness. Golf won't condition you unless you run to your drives and swim all the water hazards. But anything that makes you sweat will train your body. Pick a sport that stretches your capabilities and then push yourself.

2. No good athlete starts cold. Modern kinesiology has demonstrated again and again that muscles are like Silly Putty: They're pliant and virtually indestructible when warm, hard and brittle when cold.

Ken Sprague, one of the heavyweights in the world of weight training, points out that there are three major advantages of warming up before competition: "During warm-up, as body heat increases, muscles can contract faster and with more force. Ligaments and tendons become more pliable. Nerves conduct impulses faster."

So, in order to prepare your muscles, warm up specifically for the sport you're going to play. Simulate the motions you'll make during play, gradually increasing speed and intensity, introducing your muscles to the demands of the coming activity. Bjorn Borg starts out with easy, smooth ground strokes and carefully accelerates the velocity of his swing. Phillies reliever Tug McGraw, not a total flake, always begins a warm-up by tossing lobs that wouldn't fan your grandmother. Larry Bird does an extended dribbling exercise, a ball in each hand, to prepare himself to handle the ball on either side. Then he slams a series of passes against an overturned trampolin, spins and shoots off the bullet passes that come back.

Begin your warm-up with stretches. A good stretch lasts at least 20 seconds; it isn't painful but does elongate the muscles enough to be uncomfortable. Stretch for 15 minutes--it takes at least ten to bring blood into the muscles and eliminate stiffness in their fibers.

3. You've gotta have heart. When you exercise, work hard enough to raise your pulse rate to 120 beats per minute--the generally accepted level at which cardiovascular conditioning begins for most people. Reliable research indicates that two hours of exercise at 100 bpm will not do you as much good as half an hour at 120 bpm.

You'll breathe deeply and perspire freely at that level. If you're gasping or feel near collapse, slow down--you are probably well past the 120-bpm threshold. But a little muscle pain is a good sign: It means you're depleting glycogen in the muscles. Glycogen is the starchy fuel that muscles convert to glucose for energy--the more often you deplete it, the more your muscles retain the next time. That increases endurance.

Not only will a 30-minute workout three times a week at 120 bpm improve your athletic performance, it will also add to your life expectancy. S.M.R.'s Southmayd says this kind of exercise "can prevent the ultimate injury--death from heart disease."

You'll feel fatigue and stiffness after any good workout. The point, after all, is to ask more of your body than it's accustomed to giving. A little soreness the next morning is nothing to worry about, either--"No pain, no gain," as they say in the weight room. But if you wake up feeling like a sentient bruise, cut back the intensity of your workout by about ten percent.

4. Mobility is the best medicine. "Down time" is counterproductive to fitness. Whenever you're on the side lines, your body is only depreciating, so you need to get back in action as quickly as possible. When you get hurt, begin your own treatment as soon as the yelling stops.

A passable tennis player--the office jock at this magazine--suffered two severe wrist sprains during his four years of collegiate competition. The first time, he finished out the match before looking for the trainer, who had him put his hand in a whirlpool for an hour, then immobilized it in a sling. He missed three matches. The next time it happened, he left the court immediately and wrapped the wrist in ice. He was back double-faulting against Notre Dame the very next afternoon.

Get your treatment started the moment you know you're injured. The prevailing method goes by the acronym RICE. No, RICE is not Boston's left fielder. It stands for rest, ice, compression and elevation.

Rest: Continued strain on the injury exacerbates the problem. Stop what you're doing and look for an icebox.

Ice: Ice reduces swelling and retards blood seepage into the area by making the blood vessels contract. The more blood that gets in shortly after damage, the longer an injury will take to heal. Slap on a commercial ice pack or a towel full of ice cubes.

Compression: Compression also inhibits swelling. Wrap an elastic bandage over the ice and around the injury. If the area gets numb or more painful than it was initially, loosen the wrap.

Elevation: Place the injured part above the level of your heart to drain excess blood and fluid from the damaged area. Leave the ice pack and the bandage on for half an hour, then remove them. Apply heat to bring blood, with the oxygen and the nutrients necessary to healing, back into the area. After 15 minutes of heat, reapply the ice and the bandage.

If you follow RICE for three hours (there's no such thing as minute RICE), you'll hold pain and swelling to a bare minimum and be on the way to a fast recovery.

Any injury that causes severe pain, that involves a joint, that persists for a week without significant improvement or that makes it impossible to move a limb should be diagnosed by a doctor. Even in those cases, though, RICE will minimize recuperative time and help you regain full strength.

During the entire period of rehabilitation, from moments after the injury to the next full workout, gently exercise the affected area. Immobilization begets stiffness, weakness and slow recovery. Many doctors will still recommend complete inactivity, but many doctors still harbor secret beliefs that the world is flat. Even fractures and tears can be lightly exercised while they're healing.

If your injury is major, it's a good idea to include the Cybex machine in your rehab program. Pro athletes on the mend routinely strain against the Cybex; now many fitness centers have them for casual jocks to use.

Electrostimulation of muscles is another newly available and significant procedure. If you must be in a cast, a sports doctor can now cut a hole in the plaster and contract the muscles around the injury by sending pulses of electric current through them. In that way, you can hold off the decaying effects of atrophy and save weeks of retraining. As with arthroscopy, the goal of electrostimulation is to restore strength by quickly restoring mobility. The fact that such procedures were not in use ten years ago probably sent countless pro athletes into early retirement. Now both electrostimulation and arthroscopy save months of down time for severely injured athletes--amateur and pro alike.

5. Don't swallow everything you've heard about nutrition. While it remains the least advanced branch of sports medicine, the study of nutrition has added a few new guidelines to the old balanced-diet and four-food-groups verities. Nutritionists now tell athletes to eat frequent small meals instead of three large ones each day, in order to maintain stamina and energy throughout the day. An athlete should also eat carbohydrates in preference to proteins. Those starches and sugars are the body's primary sources of energy (glycogen is a carbohydrate). Protein is essential, but Americans generally get three times as much as they need in their diets. Distance runners have known for years that spaghetti is a better prerace meal than steak.

While Reggie Jackson may have had his name on a candy bar, he'd have trouble getting the ball out of the infield if he ate one in the on-deck circle. Eat hemlock; eat poison ivy; just don't eat a lot of sugar. Snarfing a candy bar for a lift is like snorting cocaine to heal your nasal membranes. The Human Performance Lab's Costill has shown that a shot of refined sugar will spike your blood-glucose level for a fleeting few minutes, but the insulin your pancreas releases in response will overcompensate. The glucose level will drop lower than it was before. You may feel lightheaded, shaky and hungry, and your performance will suffer.

Another interesting Costill study suggests that two cups of coffee shortly before competition may improve performance by as much as 19 percent. It's worth a try; just be sure you aren't drinking decaffeinated coffee, since it's the caffeine that does the trick.

6. Going all out every day isn't the way to go. When you train, you should do light and heavy workouts on alternate days. Even the most casual of competitors can attain and maintain optimal conditioning with a relatively simple minimal maintenance program such as this:

Three times a week, work out for at least 30 minutes at some activity that keeps your pulse rate over 120 bpm. Warm up beforehand and warm down afterward, reversing the order of your warm-up.

On the four other days, run or work out for at least 15 minutes. Don't push your pulse to 120; just work up a light sweat and remind your body that there are no days off. One good "easy day" plan is simply to warm up and then warm down--that way, your muscles will be specifically trained for the demands of the heavy days.

Stretch every day, twice a day if you can. If you allow the muscles to tighten between workouts, it will take longer to prepare them for competition and you'll be more susceptible to injury.

Finally: During one heavy workout a week, push yourself hard, close to exhaustion. Don't try to do it for the full half hour, but make sure you spend a minute or two on the cutting edge of your capability. That will deplete some of your glycogen stores and cause a minor shortage of oxygen in the blood, which, in turn, will widen your blood vessels and improve circulation. And it will enable you to experience the limits of your body's capacity for work--a quantity that's going to increase dramatically in far less time than you think.

That's it. An investment of one and a half hours a week at 120 bpm can turn you into a fit, well-conditioned athlete. You may not threaten Coe and Ovett in the 1500; you may not get your picture on a box of Wheaties; but you will become the best casual athlete you can be. Even in inflationary times, that's quite a return on such a small investment.

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As we rush into an era of participation, the future of sports medicine looks even more kinetic than its present. In our lifetime, toddlers may well be evaluated and trained for the sports to which they're best suited--a youngster with only 40 percent slow-twitch muscle fibers, for example, will never be encouraged to go out for cross-country. We may choose to gene-splice future athletes tailored to certain sports--the perfect N.F.L. center might have the body of a bison and hands on his ankles to snap the ball. And it is likely that within the next 50 years, a man will run the mile as fast as a man can possibly run the mile. The time should be around three and a half minutes. At that moment, the human animal will achieve a kind of perfection.

In the even nearer future, look for sports medicine to have a greater and greater effect on the casual athlete's life. Look for high technology in doctors' offices and high school phys-ed departments. Above all, look for more truisms to be sideswiped in the rush of new knowledge.

Take a look at the Jacques Strapp of 1992. He's quite a specimen. He may not even compare with the international athletic elite, but, by God, he performs to his potential. On the field, he warms up before playing, knows his capabilities, plays as well as he can and is seldom injured. If he does get hurt, he gets off the field, doesn't aggravate his injury and is back in action before you can say "Jackie Robinson." He moves and feels like a strong, purring Porsche.

It's fall--Jacques is playing in a pickup soccer game. There's a nip in the air. He sneezes. Not even sports medicine can cure the common cold.

"It has taken a decade for the benefits of sports medicine to trickle down to the man on the street."