THE DAWNING ERA OF SPORTS MEDICINE : THE EYES : Optometrist Is Working to Help Athletes Acquire Much Better Perspective

When Dr. Vincent White reads that a baseball player says he’s hot at the plate because he can “see the ball,” White takes that quite literally.

“You hear it time and time again,” White said. “Ted Williams said it. George Brett said it. When they had their major years, they said that they could see the seams on the ball. Now, I don’t know that that was really the case, but that was, apparently, what they perceived. They were picking the ball up right when it came out of the pitcher’s hand. To them, it was like a beach ball, and they could hit it.”

On the other hand, if someone isn’t hitting, White wonders if maybe that guy is not seeing the ball.

White, a Santa Monica optometrist who has worked with athletes from the Rams, Raiders, UCLA and Pepperdine, is developing a speciality in which he uses information he gathers through office testing and the use of videotape of a player’s performance to diagnose both the strengths and weaknesses of an athlete’s visual acuity.

There is a National Assn. of Sports Vision made up of specialists who concern themselves with fitting contact lenses, designing sports goggles and preventing and treating eye injuries. White goes beyond that. He has often worked along with Dr. Bill Vickery, who does fit lenses for local teams, because he serves a different need.

White does some therapy with the athletes he evaluates, but mostly he deals in information. “I give coaches, trainers and scouts a piece of information they’re not going to get anywhere else,” he said.

That information might influence whether a player is drafted, how his batting stance could be adjusted, whether a linebacker should play on the right side or the left side.

Most athletes have pretty good vision, and those who don’t have been fitted with glasses or contact lenses somewhere along the way. White is concerned, then, not with what an athlete can see on an eye chart across the room, but, rather, with how the athlete sees objects in motion, what his depth perception is, how well his eyes coordinate, how well he perceives what he sees.

“Do you know why crowds yell when an opponent is trying to shoot a free throw?” White said. “To distract? That’s right. But did you know that auditory perception does influence visual perception? That’s factual. Your vision will suffer if you let the auditory override in the part of your brain that is trying to interpret all the information.”

Some of the greatest athletes have the best powers of concentration, White says, adding, “Visual concentration is something that we can work on and improve.”

White, who is 6-6 and played both basketball and baseball, has worked with diagnosing children’s visual problems as they relate to a learning disability. In doing that he had to depend strongly on his own observations of the children rather than their ability to tell him what their problems were. In applying his optometry training to what he sees athletes doing, he has to rely on the same powers of observation.

“These athletes are people who don’t know that they have a problem,” White said. “They are so talented that over the years they have been able to adjust to, compensate for, whatever weaknesses they had. So I watch for a tilt of the head or a trunk movement.

“The kinds of things I’m talking about are usually slight, but with athletes at this level, they’re seeking any suggestion that will give them an edge. . . .

“It’s interesting. I deal with professional athletes who, on one hand, don’t want to admit any flaw and tell me that if the information on a flaw got out it could cost them lots of money, but who, on the other hand, don’t want to think that maybe someone else might be getting an advantage by working with me that they would like to get, too.”