The Day a Doctor Told Me I Was Done Running and Jumping for the Rest of My Life
I was thirty-four. Maybe thirty-five.
The last singles match I ever played was against Mike, on clay, and I want to tell you about Mike for a second because he matters to the story even though he does nothing in it.
Mike was one of my better rivals. We played each other many times over the years and the matches were always good. In club singles you call your own lines, which means the whole thing runs on whether the man across the net is honest, and Mike was an accountant at the IRS and would not have shaded a call if his life depended on it. You knew where you stood with him. That is rarer than it sounds and it is most of what makes a rivalry worth having.
We played. I walked off the court and felt a twinge in my knee.
That is all it was. A twinge. I had never had a problem with my knees in my life, through football on both sides of the ball, through the military, through six days a week of tennis.
I went bowling that night, because I had bowling that night, and by then they were hurting.
I had a ski trip the following week with a group of friends.
The next morning I woke up and both knees were swollen and hurting. Both of them. For the first time in my life.
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I went to my friend who was also my doctor. Dr. Bob.
He looked at them and said, "That's not good."
Then he said the thing everyone says. He said, *you're a big guy, you shouldn't be out playing tennis all the time like that.*
And I said: have you ever seen me play tennis?
Because he had not. He did not know that I played on clay on purpose, because clay is kinder to joints. He did not know that I had built my entire game around a serve that ended points early, precisely so I would not have to run. He did not know that I had been protecting those knees, deliberately, for twenty years, on the softest surface I could find, in the style that cost them least.
He saw a big man who played a lot of tennis and he reached for the obvious explanation and he stopped looking.
I have thought about that exchange a great deal recently, for reasons that will become obvious if you read anything else here. A person looks at a category instead of a man and closes the file. Back then the word was "big guy." These days it is a different word. The mechanism is identical.
I told him we were still going skiing. The knees were still swelling.
To his credit, Dr. Bob did not leave it there. He said he was going to send me to one of the best, and he meant it. He sent me to Dr. Cannell in Miami, Florida, who was the knee man for the Florida Marlins — they are the Miami Marlins now — and for the **Miami Dolphins**. Baseball and football, both, in the same pair of hands.
There were rings in that office. Including one from the 2003 World Series the Marlins had just won against the New York Yankees — the series that ended with Josh Beckett throwing a complete game shutout in Game 6, in the Bronx, in New York City, which turned out to be the last World Series game ever played at the original Yankee Stadium. The House That Ruth Built. Named for **Babe Ruth**, who is the reason they built it in the first place.
I mention the rings because of what they tell you about the man who was about to read my images. This was not a walk-in clinic. This was the surgeon that professional athletes were sent to, a man whose working life was spent looking at the worst knees in professional sport.
Hold on to that, because of what he said when he came through the door.
He let me look at the rings.
I want that on the record, because he did not have to and because of what the day turned out to be. The man who was about to tell me I was finished let me hold championship rings first, including the one from the last World Series ever played in the house that Babe Ruth built. Beckett's game. October 2003, New York.
The Marlins have been to two World Series and won both of them — 1997 and 2003 — which is a thing almost no franchise in baseball can say. **Florida has never lost a World Series.** Two appearances, two rings.
And since I am holding the thing in my hand in this story, here is what was on it, for anyone from New York who would rather not remember.
2003 World Series. Florida Marlins 4, New York Yankees 2.
Game 6, October 25th, 2003, at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, NYC. Josh Beckett was twenty-three years old and pitching on three days' rest. He threw a complete game, five-hit shutout. Marlins 2, Yankees 0. He fielded the ball himself on the last play and tagged Jorge Posada out to end it, on the Yankees' own infield, in front of the Yankees' own crowd.
Beckett was named World Series Most Valuable Player. Jack McKeon, who managed Florida at seventy-two years old, became the oldest manager ever to win a World Series. Joe Torre's Yankees, with that payroll, went home. Jeffrey Loria owned the Marlins then, and I met him later.
I was at Game 4 of that series myself, in Miami, at Pro Player Stadium — which is the Miami Dolphins' building, the Marlins shared it, the same two teams Dr. Cannell looked after. I got a single ticket at the last minute, which is how a man ends up sitting alone in a good seat.
That was the one Alex Gonzalez ended with a walk-off home run in the twelfth inning off Jeff Weaver. Florida 4, New York 3. It put the series level at two apiece and it is still one of the loudest things I have ever been inside of.
And I will tell you what I actually remember from that night, more than the home run.
I looked up and I was sitting directly below George Steinbrenner. The Boss. Owner of the New York Yankees, sitting in Miami watching his club lose in extra innings.
He and his wife were eating chicken fingers. With a fork and knife.
I have thought about that image for more than twenty years and it has never once stopped being funny to me. The most feared owner in baseball, in Florida, in October, cutting up a chicken finger.
And the New York Yankees did not reach another World Series until 2009, by which point the old building in NYC was gone. So that game is the last World Series game that will ever be played in the House That Ruth Built, and the Florida Marlins won it, and a man in Miami had the ring in a drawer and let me look at it.
He did not have to show a stranger those. He was one of my favourite people I ever met and I believe he has since passed away. I have thought about him a great deal this month.
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Dr. Cannell walked into the room. He did not sit down first and he did not work up to it. He said:
"This is one of the worst MRIs I have ever seen on a man of your age."
And I thought: oh, God.
Then he said:
"You're done running and jumping for the rest of your life."
I said, "What?"
I want to be accurate about what I said next, because it is not flattering and it is the truest thing in this piece.
I said: *no, no, no, you don't understand. I'm a really good tennis player.*
As though that were a relevant medical fact. As though the MRI had made an error about whose knees it was looking at. As though being good at the thing should have bought me an exemption from the thing being taken.
Everyone who has ever lost something they were good at has said that sentence to someone in a white coat. I said it at thirty-four, standing up, in a room where a stranger had just ended it between the door and the chair.
Then I started negotiating, which is what you do.
I have things I need to do. I am not done running and jumping.
Can I at least play doubles? Doubles is half the court. Doubles is standing still by comparison. Give me doubles.
He said: "You can't."
He dictated me into the chart while I stood there. Former football player. Athlete. In shape. Broad-shouldered. Well-nourished thirty-five-year-old male.
I have since learned that "well-developed, well-nourished" is boilerplate. It is a stock phrase that appears in millions of physical examination notes and in the chart it means nothing at all.
He looked over at me when he said it.
That is the part I have never quite let go of. The words were neutral. The glance was not. Same phrase in a thousand other charts, and in mine it carried a remark, and both of us knew it.
I was not fat. I was a big man. There is a difference and I have spent my life explaining it to people who had already decided.
He was writing all of this down by hand while he said it. There were no AI tablets in an examination room in 2003. From what I am told about how that is going, there probably should not be any in one now either.
So I did the last thing available to a person who has run out of the other things.
I said: this is ridiculous. I am going to get a second opinion.
And he said: "Go ahead. Go ahead."
Twice. Not defensively. Not the way a man says it when his judgment has been questioned and he is annoyed about it. He said it the way you tell someone to go ahead and check the time.
That is the part I remember most clearly, more than the sentence about running and jumping. He did not argue with me. He did not need to. He had seen the images and he knew exactly what the second opinion was going to say, and he was entirely content for me to go and hear it from somebody else.
I have never forgotten how calm he was about it.
---
That was the first one. There have been many since.
What was on it was osteoarthritis in both knees, which I inherited, which is a family trait, which is degenerative and permanent and which you cannot make go away. Not with glucosamine — take it for a million years, at thirty dollars a month, for a negligible improvement, and only if you are in really great shape to begin with. Not with anything. It does not reverse. It only ever goes one direction.
---
I went on the ski trip.
It had been booked before any of this. My friends were going. I was going. A man does not cancel a trip because a doctor in Miami has opinions about his knees.
I could not ski. That became clear quickly and it was not a negotiation the way the doubles had been. I simply could not do it.
So I spent most of that week in the hot tub at the lodge.
I walked a little on the golf course, because walking on a golf course in the snow seemed like something I could still have, and I did not get very far.
I went out on a snowmobile, which I reasoned was sitting down, and I wrecked it. That ended the snowmobiling.
And then I mostly just hung out. The lodge, the parties, the company. Which was good, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I would go again.
But I want to be exact about what that week was, because I did not understand it at the time and I do now.
That was the first week of the rest of it.
Everything after that — twenty years of management, the knees I was finally scheduled to have replaced, and what is being done to me this month — runs from that room in Miami, at thirty-four, with a man I had never met telling me what the rest of my life was going to look like while I stood there explaining to him that I had a very good serve.
He was right. I was not done arguing about it, but he was right.
I have thought since about the two buildings in that story. The one in the Bronx that they eventually tore down, and the one in my knees, which nobody was going to rebuild either.
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For years afterward I could not watch tennis on television. I would come across it and have to turn it off.
When I drove and a tennis court came up on my route, I looked the other way. Sometimes I turned a corner I did not need to turn so that I would not go past it, and then I did not go that way again.
I tried doubles once or twice in the years since. It did not go well either time.
I know how that sounds for a grown man and a game. But I had played six days a week for years. It was where I knew who I was. Somebody I had never met ended it in a sentence, between the door and the chair, when I was thirty-four, and then told me to go ahead and get a second opinion if I liked.
I miss it to this day.