Clinic Keeps Them in the Running

Laura DeNuccio wrote on her photo: “Thanks for saving my senior season.”

“Thanks for keeping my dream alive,” wrote Jeff Kramer of Weatherford, Texas.

Never heard of them? She was a goaltender for her high school hockey team in North Oaks, Minn. Kramer played football for Texas Tech.

Their photos are on the walls, desks and shelves of the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic, a world-renowned sports medicine center high in the Rocky Mountains.

Dr. Richard Steadman displays pictures of DeNuccio, Kramer and other regular folks among the many tributes from John Elway, Joe Montana, Greg Norman, Picabo Street and dozens of other professional athletes and celebrities whom his clinic has treated.

“The vast majority of people we see are ordinary folks,” Steadman said.

The clinic treated 1,666 people last year for everything from injured feet to shoulders. Patients go there for surgery and rehabilitation.

Steadman, a Texas native, got his first look at sports injuries on the playing field, first as a youngster and then as a lineman for Bear Bryant at Texas A&M.;

When he became an orthopedic surgeon after graduating from the University of Texas, he had his own dream about how to get injured players going again: Keep them moving.

He began testing his theory in his living room when he started working for the U.S. ski team in Lake Tahoe in the early 1970s.

The entire ski team “slept on our floor or our couch. We had seven people staying in the house at one time,” he said. “It was a madhouse.”

Every morning and every evening, Steadman made sure the skiers did their exercises. He didn’t want their injured muscles to atrophy. He believed that movement was the key.

In the 1970s, Cindy Nelson, a three-time Olympic downhill skier, became his first famous patient when he treated her for a broken leg, the third in her career.

“In the past, the doctor said put it in the cast and don’t walk on it. He [Steadman] opens up the cast [after a few days] and says, ‘Point your toes at the ceiling.’ I about fainted,” she said.

But she recovered faster than ever before.

In December 1983, she injured her knee eight weeks before the Olympics and thought, “I’m out.” Steadman had her up on skis in time to compete in the Olympics.

“It was really miraculous. I didn’t win a medal, but I felt I had just because I had been able to compete. He’s a pioneer in his field,” she said.

Veteran skier Marc Girardelli of Luxembourg had one of the worst knee injuries Steadman ever patched up.

“It’s extremely difficult to come back from an injury like that. Girardelli not only came back, he won the world championship five times,” Steadman said.

Steadman moved from California to Vail in 1988 and founded the Steadman Sports Medicine Foundation, in association with the clinic.

He believes his devotion to movement is the reason “every [injured] athlete performed at a better level” after treatment.

Nelson believes it is more than that. She says he is such a good listener and good athlete himself--skier, golfer, tennis player and former football player--that he has a natural affinity with athletes.

Steadman’s partner, Dr. Richard Hawkins, is a former university quarterback who specializes in shoulder and elbow injuries. A graduate of the University of Western Ontario, he is the Denver Broncos’ team doctor.

After he operated on Elway last year, the quarterback led the Denver Broncos to their first-ever Super Bowl victory.

Hawkins operated on Elway again in February and considers Elway’s decision to play one more season another vote of confidence.

Both doctors say their clinic’s No. 1 goal is to take the medical advances developed for the stars and make them available to the general public.

DeNuccio tore knee cartilage so badly in the summer before her senior year that Steadman had to remove it.

“Four weeks later I was on the ice again,” said DeNuccio, who will play goalie this fall when she enters her sophomore year at Rensselaer Polytech Institute in Troy, N.Y. “I am indebted to him.”

Kramer, then a highly recruited high school linebacker, came to Steadman after seriously injuring his knee skiing above the clinic on Vail Mountain in 1993. Later, while playing at Texas Tech, he injured his shoulder, and Hawkins repaired it.

The Steadman-Hawkins Foundation spends about $2 million a year on research, including trying to develop a method to regenerate damaged cartilage tissue in the knees.

The foundation also is studying ways to treat osteoarthritis, which afflicts nearly 21 million Americans.