An old doctor lends a hand at high school football games

The old doctor stands on the sideline, off by himself, watching and listening.

Sometimes he can see torn ligaments in the way a quarterback falls to the turf. Or hear a potential concussion in the clatter of helmets and shoulder pads.

“I watch a game differently than most people,” he says.

When a lineman comes up limping, Dr. Jerry Bornstein makes room on a bench that will serve as his examining table beneath the dull glow of stadium lights. His fingers poke at the player’s sore hip, eliciting a groan. He must lean close to ask questions over the blare of a nearby marching band.

For five decades, the 79-year-old Bornstein has spent his Friday nights volunteering on the sidelines at Los Angeles high schools. Something more than charity keeps him going, this semiretired orthopedic surgeon who once played fullback and never quite got football out of his system.

He grins: “People think I’m crazy.”

In an era of budget cuts and teacher layoffs, Bornstein does more than give his time. He has assembled a crew of 60 or so medics — mostly athletic trainers and emergency medical technicians — to care for injured players at games throughout the city.

“At a lot of schools, there’s not a lot of money,” said Jim Rose, the coach at Birmingham High in Van Nuys. “He makes a huge difference.”

Bornstein showed up at Birmingham on a recent Friday to supervise one of his new medics. The home team faced a stronger, faster opponent in Corona Centennial, and each booming collision seemed to inflict new injury.

There was no time to linger over that bruised hip. Bornstein gave the lineman a quick pat and a kind word, as he often does, then called out to the medic.

“We need some ice for this,” he said.

Bone and muscle are easy. It is the possibility of catastrophic injury that worries him.

“I’m waiting for the unconscious kid,” he said. “I’m waiting for the kid who gets up and takes a few steps, then keels over dead.”

It makes sense that a former athlete might gravitate toward orthopedics, fascinated by tendons and ligaments.

In the late 1950s, while still a resident at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, Bornstein began hanging around games at his alma mater, Fairfax High, and volunteered to serve as team doctor. The school gladly accepted, even if his former coach, Frank Shaffer, remained skeptical.

“Maybe it was because I could never find the three-hole when I was a fullback,” Bornstein said. “I’d examine a kid and go up to the coach and say, ‘Joe’s got a sprained ankle.’ Then I’d turn around and Shaffer would be checking the kid himself.”

Bornstein felt good about helping athletes on teams that did not have medical staffs looking after them. Patrolling the sideline kept him connected to football, and the adrenaline rush of performing under pressure exhilarated him.

One night early on — the seasons tend to blur — a player fell screaming in pain with a bone sticking out of his shin. Bornstein had to quiet those screams before splinting the leg.

“Let’s relax,” he recalled saying. “Let’s get this done.”

His personality — casual, friendly, talkative — had a way of calming players, getting them to answer questions as if they were in a doctor’s office. If they resisted, Bornstein learned to ice them down and return five minutes later when they were more cooperative.

Friday nights also taught him to make do with scant resources.

When a player badly fractured his arm, Bornstein enlisted a bystander to help work the bone into place, then fashioned a splint from tape and a handful of wooden tongue depressors.

Looking for a way to immobilize broken hands with the proper curvature, he had players grip a tennis ball and then he wrapped the ball and fingers in tape.

“Use whatever you’ve got,” he said.

At the Birmingham game, he showed a few tricks to first-year medic Emma Hartel, teaching her how to test a painful shin, to distinguish between a fracture and a deep bruise.

“The man knows everything,” said Hartel, an EMT who works for an ambulance service. “It’s ridiculous.”

The Birmingham team trudged quietly into its locker room at halftime, having fallen behind, 41-0. For Bornstein, those few minutes offered a chance for follow-up examinations.

First, he pulled the coach aside to ask about the injured players: Which ones tended to complain and which might downplay their pain? This information was crucial because, with no X-rays at his disposal, he needed to gauge what the teenagers told him.

A lineman with a sore knee lay down between rows of P.E. lockers, letting the doctor tug and pull at his leg. His face twisted with pain but he barely said a word.

Bornstein began digging around with his fingertips again, searching for a particular ligament that should have felt hard and thin as a pencil. An assistant coach stopped by to get the bad news: The ligament felt mushy, and it was perhaps torn.

As Hartel wrapped the leg in ice, Bornstein walked outside to a silver SUV — the license plate read “Jok Doc” — that serves as his roving office.

He retrieved a medical form from a pile that included the tennis balls for fractured hands and a roll of bubble wrap for immobilizing arms and legs. There was a strip of foam rubber from a package his wife, Ellen, had received in the mail.

“Don’t throw that away,” he recalled telling her. “If I get a shin contusion, I can use that as padding.”

Over the years, Bornstein has watched athletes grow bigger and faster, and injuries become more prevalent. Despite his love of football, he now believes it would be safer with a simple change: Take away facemasks.

Players feel invincible with their mouths and noses encased in steel bars. He points to rugby as a contact sport that makes more sense.

“They’re not hitting each other with that reckless abandon,” he said. “But nobody wants to hear about my idea.”

There is no way to tally all the swollen ankles, all the sprains and bruises. The best that Bornstein can do is estimate he has worked about 1,000 games over the years.

That adds up to a lot of Friday nights away from home.

“Occasionally it creates a problem,” Ellen said.

When his two daughters were young, they tagged along to games, hanging out with the cheerleaders. When they grew up and became cheerleaders themselves, he worked for their school’s team.

There was no shortage of action, not with a game that — according to national studies — accounts for almost three times more injuries and significantly more deaths than any other high school sport.

At some point, it became apparent that one man could not satisfy the growing need for sideline care on campuses struggling with slim budgets. Bornstein, who had established a private practice in the San Fernando Valley, set out to recruit help.

The Los Angeles City Section, which governs athletics at more than 100 schools, began relying on him as a volunteer medical advisor. Officials paid the medics — $77 each varsity game, the same as head referees — and covered them against malpractice.

The work is easier now that Bornstein’s daughters are adults. Instead of following a particular team, he circulates as a supervisor, keeping a cellphone handy to answer calls from his crew. Ellen helps with a computer spreadsheet to keep track of weekly assignments.

If nothing else, she says, football gives her husband something to do with himself now that he is mostly retired. Besides, she adds, he is not the type to give up old habits.

“Pretty darn pig-headed,” she said.

His devotion has earned him a second family across the city.

School administrators came over to chat at the Birmingham game, and referees waved hello. The coaches addressed him by his nickname, “Doc.” They have learned to trust his opinion, perhaps because some of them were treated by Bornstein when they were in high school.

“I had some broken fingers,” said Rose, the Birmingham coach who played at Monroe High. “He took care of me.”

By the fourth quarter, the Birmingham sideline resembled a battlefield hospital with bodies slumped on benches or lying on the turf. Bornstein was working on a separated shoulder — more poking and prodding — when Hartel rushed over to say: “We’ve got another one.”

A linebacker with a twisted ankle.

Sports medicine has changed over the years. The art of detecting torn ligaments has improved, and researchers now understand the lingering effects of concussion.

“We used to call it ‘getting your bell rung,’ and we’d send you back into the game when your head cleared,” Bornstein said. “It’s a miracle we didn’t kill somebody.”

The rough night at Birmingham ended with the home team losing, 48-8. The final report: Seven players knocked out of action, a couple of injuries potentially serious.

It was not a pretty picture, but Bornstein had a more important score in mind. He had escaped yet another game without losing an athlete.

Every kickoff revives the same fears that football can turn fatal at any moment. “Am I ever calm and relaxed out there?” he asked. “No, I’m not.”

Packing up and heading for home, Bornstein figured that, like so many Friday nights before, he might need a glass of Scotch to fall asleep.

david.wharton@latimes.com

twitter.com/LATimesWharton