No Time Outs : Dr. Robert Kerlan Stays in the Game Despite Severe Arthritis

Elgin Baylor’s first appointment with Dr. Robert Kerlan ended before it started.

Waiting in Kerlan’s lobby in the early 1960s, Baylor peered through a doorway and saw the orthopedist hunched over, apparently in severe pain.

“He seemed to have a problem and couldn’t even help himself,” says the former Laker star. “I told the receptionist I was there for a cold and had come to the wrong doctor. And I left.”

When other doctors could not free his knees of pain, Baylor returned. “Once we sat down and talked, I was very impressed,” he says.

Kerlan’s treatments worked, says Baylor, now general manager of the Clippers, and the two became good friends.

Over the past four decades Baylor’s story has been repeated countless times. Kerlan has rebuilt the muscles of some of America’s most powerful and graceful athletes, despite suffering from arthritis that has ravaged his own body.

At 70, the tall, funny, impatient physician has developed a sports medicine empire in Inglewood, treating thousands of weekend athletes as well as the Dodgers, Angels, Rams, Lakers and Kings.

His patients could fill a sports Hall of Fame: Baylor and other Laker greats Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; ex-Dodger Sandy Koufax, ex-Ram Merlin Olsen and former jockey Willie Shoemaker.

Such success comes despite the fact Kerlan developed arthritis 50 years ago, and his condition has progressively worsened. He needed crutches periodically in the late 1960s and permanently starting in 1977. He walks with his head and shoulders hunched and stiffens if he sits too long.

Described as strong-willed by his family, Kerlan has always tried to work twice as hard to show people he can carry the same load as any other doctor. He’s always thinking up ways to anticipate and adapt to problems his condition might create.

And he is resilient. He is scheduled to return to his practice today after his fourth arthritis-related hip replacement. During his recuperation, he says, he had the time to do something he rarely does--he reflected on the irony of his situation as a healer himself racked by pain.

“The only (other times) I think about it is when I go into a stadium on the road. Here I am walking on crutches, and it seems like I’m barely able to get around, and someone asks, ‘Who are you?’ I say I’m a doctor who takes care of the Rams or whatever team I’m with. Oftentimes I get a double-take.

“It’s the same feeling I get when I walk into a room at the clinic and a (new) patient says, ‘My God, what happened to you?’ . . .

“I guess when somebody makes you stop and look at it, it is kinda funny.”

*

Although he graduated at 16, Kerlan earned nine letters at Aitkin High in rural Minnesota. He picked up another in basketball as a 6-2 freshman at UCLA in 1939. Then he quit sports to concentrate on academics, transferring to USC for undergraduate classes and medical school.

While completing his studies in 1944, he began to experience back pain. An exam for the World War II medical corps revealed a form of rheumatoid arthritis that affects the spine, shoulders and hips. The medical corps rejected him, and Kerlan began an internship at County-USC Medical Center.

Entering his residency, Kerlan asked his adviser if he should continue in his first love--orthopedics--or switch to radiology, which might be less demanding.

“He suggested that I go ahead with orthopedics,” Kerlan says, and adapt where necessary.

It was good advice.

After his residency, Kerlan pursued his love of sports by working with a local minor league baseball team. That led to a job as the Dodgers’ physician when the team arrived in 1958.

Other teams heard about his work, and by 1967, Kerlan and his new partner, a young orthopedist named Frank Jobe, had added the Lakers, Angels and Kings.

As the practice flourished, Kerlan wanted to prove he could handle as many patients as other doctors.

“I’d get up early and cover patients in hospitals, operate two or three mornings a week and go to the office and see patients until 6 p.m,” he says. “Then I’d go to one stadium or another.”

For several years he was the only doctor covering about 240 home games of local teams.

While trainers cared for strains and scrapes, Kerlan treated serious injuries and referred illnesses to specialists.

“In 1959, when we won the pennant, Dr. Kerlan was our Most Valuable Player,” says Buzzie Bavasi, former Dodgers general manager.

Kerlan carefully treated Gil Hodges, Duke Snider and other older stars who accompanied the team from Brooklyn, prolonging their careers.

“He made us realize there was such a thing as sports medicine,” says Bavasi, now retired in La Jolla. “He was very popular. The players knew that because he was in pain, he understood their pain.”

Today the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic has 17 doctors, 11 fellows (graduate orthopedic surgeons) and two residents. Many say it ranks among the top five sports medicine centers in the nation.

“It’s not just their surgical abilities, which are great,” says Phoenix doctor H. Royer Collins, past president of the American Orthopedic Society of Sports Medicine. “It’s their diagnostic abilities and their judgment of what needs to be done.”

During his residency, Kerlan had met Rachel Frauenfelder, a nurse. Married 43 years, they have three children and nine grandchildren.

Although Kerlan says it would only bore others to discuss the pain he suffered building the practice, his family says the illness has pervaded his life.

“I remember he used to take me to elementary school,” says his daughter, Kerry Cline, 34, of Santa Monica. “My mother used to help him get in the car. He would cringe from the pain, and I could hear this popping and cracking from his hips before he had the replacements.

“It’s still painful,” she says, sitting in her parents’ Brentwood home overlooking the Riviera Country Club. “He takes medication for it all the time.”

Kerlan used the disease to teach his children a philosophy of life. “I have the same kind of arthritis he does, but not to the same extent,” says Kerlan’s other daughter, Kimberly Higgins, 40, of Rancho Santa Fe. “I was still in college and having a flare-up. I was in so much pain that I could hardly take a step. I limped into the kitchen one morning. I said, ‘I hurt way too much. I can’t go to school today.’

“He said, ‘Oh, yes, you will. You can never, ever give in to this. You have to be in charge. You have to be stronger than this disease.’ ”

His patience with the disease contrasts with his impatience in other aspects of life.

In the sixth and final game of the Lakers’ triumphant 1985 championship series against Boston, the Celtics’ Larry Bird collided with Michael Cooper. A referee called a foul on Cooper. Kerlan, sitting on the Lakers’ bench, thought the fourth-quarter call should have gone against Bird.

“I had crutches with me,” he recalls. “They had big rubber tips. I took both of them and struck down hard between my feet in disgust. The next thing I see is my crutches flying through the air toward the free throw line.”

Referee Earl Strom came over to him. “He said, ‘I can’t believe it, doctor. I just can’t believe it,’ ” Kerlan says. “He was talking about the crutches, but I was still thinking about the call. I said, ‘I just can’t believe it either.”

*

Kerlan seeks relief from pain through medication or exercise in a hot tub, but seldom makes concessions to the disease.

One adaptation came in 1968 when he gave up surgery. “My hip got to the point where I could not tolerate standing for that long,” he says. After three hip operations, he began using crutches permanently in 1977.

Despite the crutches, he manages to maintain his regular routine, even on road trips with the teams.

“It’s easy,” he says. “A guy could be in worse shape than I am and make the trip. People think (it’s tough) going all the way to New York. Heck, where you’re going is up and down some stairs from your car to the plane and vice versa.”

Kerlan is so adamant about remaining active that he barely slowed down after being resuscitated from a near-fatal heart attack in 1979.

“He died four times,” cardiologist Robert H. Goldman says. “We were able to save him because we got him early, No. 1, and No. 2, I happened to hit on the right drug (bretylium) after the standard treatments didn’t work.”

“He made me promise to get him better to go to the 1980 Super Bowl.”

Kerlan attended the game and watched the Rams lose to Pittsburgh.

Today, Kerlan sees fewer sports events than he used to--about 50 a year--serving primarily as a consultant to younger physicians.

For about five years, he has worked three mornings a week and seen 30 patients--compared to a peak of 200 in the mid-1960s. He likes treating patients and teaching medical fellows and will continue at the office “until I feel I’m not capable of doing a good job,” he says.

“He still does the maximum he can,” says Jobe. “I keep going back to his brain because that’s the key to his existence: his ability to communicate and to think. And he keeps in touch with many people by phone because that’s a very easy way for him to stay in touch.”

Kerlan says his practice never suffered because of his disease. And, he says, medical advances should enable most people with arthritis to enter the professions they want.

Patients who wouldn’t come to see him because of his arthritis would “have to presume that my brain wasn’t workin’, along with my hips. I haven’t had that problem. So,” he says, “I’ve been able to enjoy this situation, as much, I think, as anyone can.”