AOSSM: A Look at the Individuals Behind the Society's Inception

Interview Transcripts

Learn more about the Society's history with these recollections captured from AOSSM members in the links below.

• Why was the Society needed?
  • “Well, there were a number of reasons, and I think the first one is there was a definite body of knowledge developing relative to sports medicine, and I think that O’Donoghue, who was our leader at the time, saw that there was a need for a special group to study these problems in greater depth and to provide a forum for expression of this information so it would be available generally to those who were interested.” –Les Bodnar
  • “In the early period, say in the late 1960s, there were a number of people who were taking care of athletes. Although we would meet occasionally at local and national meetings, there was little contact between us otherwise, and this actually worked to restrict many of the things we were doing.” –George Snook
  • “The sports society was needed because there were many members of the Academy that wanted to honor the sports committee of the Academy, which was chaired by Dr Jack Hughston. There was plenty of interest from the Academy membership and it became obvious that expansion of some sort was needed to accommodate all the people working in this area.” –Proxy Interview for Don O'Donoghue, MD (Deceased), conducted by Bill Allen, MD
  • “All that I think these people wanted was to have a way of getting together and discussing their issues, their problems, and the tremendous amount of concern about whether you treated a given injury immediately, how much time you could put off, and whether the treatment was operative or non-operative. And they all felt that we needed a forum, we needed a database, and we needed to be able to share what we had done—good and bad—to improve sports medicine for the athlete.” –Kay Clawson
  • “In 1964, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons recognized the importance of sports medicine and particularly injuries of the knee by creating a categorical committee on sports medicine. Jack Hughston was the chairman of that committee. It lasted for seven years and created instructional course lectures and a variety of other educational materials for the members of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. In 1971, that committee gave birth to the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine.” –Proxy Interview for Joe Godfrey, MD (Deceased), conducted by William Grana, MD, MPH
  • “I was just kind of a runny nose kid at the time, so what I did, I sat down and I wrote to everybody who had been on a program with the Academy and anyone who had published something on sports medicine, and in the letter, I said it seemed to us they weren’t getting very much exposure to sports medicine and it would be worthwhile to have a separate society dedicated to sports medicine.” –Proxy Interview for Don O'Donoghue, MD (Deceased), conducted by William Grana, MD, MPH
• What were the concerns of colleagues in the orthopaedic community?
  • “Many people felt that we were trying to carve out a particular niche of work that really belonged to the entire orthopaedic group, and I think they were correct about that; but it’s not that we were trying to carve it out, it’s just that we had a specific interest in the sports medicine aspect of it, and that information happened to fall, and I’m thinking mostly for example, about knee surgery. There was some animosity that we were trying to elevate ourselves in this regard, that we were superior in our knowledge and abilities to our brethren. It created some thoughts that we were trying to seize a particular advantage.” –Les Bodnar
  • “Not everyone believed it was a good idea. I thought the world of my professor, the chief of orthopaedics at Tufts, where I trained, but it took him 30 years to say, ‘You know, George, I am proud of you and what you have done.’ He had asked me at a meeting years earlier, ‘Why are you doing that? All you do is take these broken-down jocks, fix them together, and send them back to get broken down again’.” –George Snook
  • “There was a feeling that we were fragmenting the field of orthopedics, which is kind of interesting now.” –Bob Leach
  • “But that was a time when there were abundant quotes in the literature by very prominent orthopedic surgeons that Sports Medicine (A) was not necessary and (B) wasn’t really a specialty and why was it necessary… any orthopedist could do all that stuff.” –Jim Garrick
  • “We were considered “jock docs” and followers for the most part and looked down upon by many academics. It is kind of interesting watching through the years how well sports medicine has become accepted. Now every teaching department has a department of sports medicine. But initially, sports medicine, per se, was not very well accepted in the orthopaedic community as a whole.” –Stanley James
• In your mind, what were the important contributions that helped AOSSM get established and grow into the organization it has become today?
  • “It is the intensive research effort put in by members of the society to understand knee injuries and to develop techniques to repair ligament instabilities and cartilage injuries…These advances in knee diagnoses and treatments have been remarkable and very important, but the contributions of our members have extended in many other areas of sports medicine, from concussions to turf toes.” –George Snook
  • “I think that the push came from – from him [Don O’Donoghue]; it certainly came from Fred Reynolds who was the past president of the academy. He tried to move the academy into a more specialty-oriented program to bring in a wide variety of people that were sometimes not orthopaedists. They could be from other disciplines.” –Kay Clawson
  • “I think the biggest thing was it gave a home for people who originally were taking care of teams. You know, there wasn't very much office sports medicine, or not formally. So, I mean a lot of people were taking care of teams; and of course, if you looked across the country there were willing doctors who were orthopaedists often who were taking care of teams of one sort or another, I think that was a big thing.” –Jim Garrick
  • “The society always paused long enough and worked hard enough to see where we had been, what the problems were, and what was wrong with where we were and to examine this in an effort to determine where we should be going and how to get there. It was that measured approach and planning that allowed us to overcome any obstacles in our paths and to be successful in relating to those people who were most interested in sports medicine.” –Proxy Interview for Joe Godfrey, MD (Deceased), conducted by William Grana, MD, MPH

• What was the Nominating Committee process?
  • “As far as the nominating committee goes, I was on the first one. I am not quite sure how I got on it, but I sat there at the table with Joe Godfrey, Clint Compere, and Jack Hughston and wondered, ‘What am I doing here?’ But I didn’t question it. Of the early nominations, I would say the first 10 or 12—I don’t recall how all of them were decided upon—but it seemed that this was still the ‘old boy’ network. I mean you had people like O’Donoghue, Godfrey, Hughston, Les Bodnar, and others who were so well known.” –George Snook
  • “Don Slocum was doing the best, really the best basic research on athletes that could be done and that was being done at the time, and they wanted him to chair [the committee on research and education]. And he said, ‘That's nonsense. I’m down in Eugene, Oregon trying to take care of Oregon State and University of Oregon, both athletic programs, going back and forth. Nonsense, I don’t have time for that. Kay Clawson is at the University up there in Seattle full time, and he’s the logical one to chair that committee’…it goes back to the people around you that push you into jobs [that are] not really particularly what you do or what you were asking for, and it was the last thing I was thinking of.” –Kay Clawson

• What were the critical issues facing the early presidents and their boards?
  • “Number one was recognition. However, when you have the original AOSSM Presidents, such as O’Donoghue, Hughston, and Godfrey, leading the parade, you get noticed. On the other hand, there were some disagreements and controversies over who should control and be responsible for the sports medicine educational programs presented nationally…Another critical issue we faced in those early years was having the financial assets to fund research projects proposed by our members.” –George Snook
  • “For me, it was how do we get a fellowship started in sports medicine. It was how do we get our work published, and it was then how do we get the journal up and running.” –Kay Clawson
  • “As senior past president in 1983-84, Dr Allman was instrumental in AOSSM’s relationship with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Until that time, specialty societies had to have signed affiliation agreements with AAOS, but when it was time to renew the affiliation agreement, Dr Allman was strongly opposed to the renewal because of the restrictions that were in place—the most disturbing being prohibited from offering continuing medical education courses for our own members.” –Proxy Interview for Fred Allman, MD (Deceased), conducted by Ken DeHaven, MD
  • “[An] important area of challenge was the establishment of an acceptable uniform reporting system for injuries. This had to be a reporting system that began with the injury to the athlete and the first responder, who in many instances was the trainer. Because of the close relationship that developed over this first response and the coming together of the AOSSM and NATA, this challenge was met, and better recording systems were developed so the data on injuries could be analyzed and methods of prevention could be developed.” –Proxy Interview for Joe Godfrey, MD (Deceased), conducted by William Grana, MD, MPH

• How did the Membership Committee function?
  • “I don’t know how it functioned, but I do know that we had a great problem with ‘joiners’—people who joined just to get something else after their name: ‘I’m a member of the AOSSM.’ They might have attended their kid’s soccer game once and that’s about it. We had a requirement that members had to attend an annual meeting regularly and this took care of many of the ‘joiners’…” –George Snook
  • “The protocol at that time was for members to submit letters of recommendation to the membership committee and they would be considered. If approved, the list would be presented to the group and it would be voted on. If they were voted on favorably, they became members. There weren’t a lot of requirements at that time, it was just an interest and you had to know somebody that you could recommend that had a definite interest in sports medicine and felt would be a good contributor to the Society.” –Stanley James

• What motivated the Scientific Program?
  • “The really early programs, I think they felt that they were probably happy if they got enough papers to fill their very brief meetings…I think that originally Jack Hughston and probably a couple of other people primarily from that part of the world decided on the papers and then I think it quickly became more formal, but at first it wasn’t at all.” –Jim Garrick
  • “I have a letter from Les Bodner that I have just found from 1973 and it was to the founding members, and he said they were going to organize a meeting…Scientifically, it was a little lacking in good, hard data as we would say. But the people that were on the program had a tremendous amount of experience and, you know, a lot of the principles that they proposed at those early meetings still hold true.” –Stanley James

• What are the unique stories of the initial stages of AOSSM?
  • “When I tried to get in the society, despite the fact that I was taking care of the Celtics and three colleges and one professional soccer team, I was turned down. Art Ellison had turned me down and said he wasn’t sure that I actually had a real interest in sports medicine, that I did a lot of things. So it was sort of funny. It sort of seemed like I wasn’t going to make the grade, but eventually I did.” –Bob Leach
  • “I don’t know whether you remember, but at the time [1979] there were people who felt strongly that Jack Hughston should not be the editor, and that he wasn’t academic enough…I was to have an interview with Hughston and to see whether, you know, he should be editor. I am aware from what happened and things that happened afterward that there were some people who thought that we would meet and that I would think ‘You know, gee, he’s not the guy.’ The funny thing is, at the end of three hours of meeting in Atlanta, I thought that the only way the Journal could survive at that point was with him as editor.” –Bob Leach
  • “I am not sure exactly when it happened but Dr Hughston was on the sidelines with the Auburn team and got run into by some of the players as they ran around the end and in the process sustained a separated shoulder. To have it fixed, he went to Oklahoma City to have Dr O’Donoghue fix it. I thought this was rather presumptuous; I guess I don’t know strange [it was] on Dr Hughston’s part, but that’s how much he thought of Dr O’Donoghue.” –Proxy Interview for Don O'Donoghue, MD (Deceased), conducted by Bill Allen, MD
  • “[Don Slocum] was very good at setting people up sometimes. I remember one incidence he really set me up. I think we were at the sports medicine meeting in San Francisco and I had just happened to come by several ACL failures that I had slides on showing the failure histologically. Don asked me about the technique [Ken Jones] designed, and his technique was just breaking apart a patellar tendon over the anterior lip of the tibia and then attaching it underneath. Well, they failed as we knew they would. But I was on a faculty with Don and he was the moderator and he asked me what I thought of that technique. I said, ‘Well, I’ve collected about six or seven of these and they’ve all been failures. They just don’t work.’ I didn’t realize that Dr Jones was in the audience.”—Stanley James

• Who did you train and who trained you?
  • “My exposure to sports medicine was with Fred Allman at the Atlanta Orthopedic Clinic at Georgia Baptist when I was doing my orthopedic residency, and Wood Lovell was the head of the program. Fred had been a patient of my dad’s who was a pediatrician in Augusta, and Fred’s children had gone to see dad when he was in med school. So he kind of took me under his wing as far as sports medicine was concerned and he was doing the work for Georgia.” –Butch Mulherin
  • “The reason I got into sports medicine was the fact that I came out here to North Hampton when the orthopaedist who had been here before me had left and returned to Princeton. I had already made up my mind to work in Portland, Maine, with Larry Crane. However, Don Chrisman, who was working here in North Hampton and who knew my mother who was on the medical staff in North Hampton, convinced me to join him before I had verbally committed to Dr Crane. After about 2 years, the team physician at the University of Massachusetts retired, and Bob Gage, a general practitioner at Amherst, took over. He had been a U Mass graduate and was also a classmate of Don Chrisman at Harvard Medical School. He invited me onto the staff at U Mass to provide their student athletes with the same services and care that Don provided the Amherst students…I would have done it for nothing just to get into the football games free.” –George Snook
  • “Over the years, I have had the pleasure of a number of Thai orthopedists who have come here to the University of Missouri to do a fellowship in sports medicine. These young men have all gone back to Thailand where they have become prominent individuals. It started when I first came to the university in 1977 and one of the senior residents was from Thailand. He went back to Bangkok, where he was on the faculty at the medical school there, and it was shortly thereafter that he began to send some of the younger faculty here so they could broaden their education.” –Bill Allen
  • “[Fred Allman’s] undergraduate education was at University of Georgia, where he played guard on the football team. Medical school was at the medical college of Georgia in Augusta, and while going to medical school, he served as an assistant football coach for the University of Georgia. He did his orthopedic residency training at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He also had a very close relationship with Dr Marcus Stewart who did sports medicine at the Campbell Clinic in Memphis, Tennessee.” –Proxy Interview for Fred Allman, MD (Deceased), conducted by Ken DeHaven, MD
  • “I came to Eugene in 1967 primarily to join Don [Slocum]. I had heard about his interest in sports medicine when I was in training in Iowa. I developed a strong interest in sports medicine working with the teams back there. So, I specifically came out and interviewed with Don probably two years before I completed my residency, and I had a contract in the mail about two weeks later, so I signed it. I came out here in 1967. I was in practice with Don until he died in 1973. He was a great mentor.” –Stanley James

• Do you recall how the name of the organization and the original logo was selected?
  • “[The logo] was conceived by Don O’Donoghue and was designed by a member of his family—a niece I believe. I can remember at the time that there were two major things wrong with it: one, you have the runner running the wrong way on the track, and number two, the caduceus was not the correct emblem of medicine. These were eventually resolved.” –George Snook
  • “We discussed that the name of the organization should include orthopaedics as it does to this day…One of the small items came up [at the first Annual Meeting] and that was the insignia that is on our letterhead. I’m not sure who exactly drew this up, but Dr O’Donoghue presented it to the Board and the Board accepted it. He felt very proud of that, and it has remained as our insignia since the beginning of the organization.” –Proxy Interview for Don O'Donoghue, MD (Deceased), conducted by Bill Allen, MD

• What recollection of coaches and athletes do they have that reflects the early days of sports medicine?
  • I remember a coach named Victor Fuser (sic), who had coached Joe Paterno when he was an undergraduate at Brown. He once said, ‘Doc, in every football season there is one game that is won or lost by the coaching staff, and there is one that is won or lost by the medical staff’. He said, ‘I have never lost a game from the medical staff.’ I can remember saying to him one night, ‘Gee, when I was in high school, I wanted to be a coach so bad; I mean that was the be-all and the end-all. I wasn’t interested on being a doctor.’ ‘Doc,’ he said, ‘Let me ask you a question. How would you like to have you entire career depend on 60 adolescent boys for a period of 8 weeks a year?’ He said, ‘You have a problem, you tackle it yourself…you don’t have to worry about those 60 kids’.” –George Snook
  • “We had a superfine athlete gymnast, and I had been always interested in the gymnastics program even before I was in sports medicine. And this young man dislocated his elbow six weeks before the international competition in Prague, Czechoslovakia. And I was on the spot and everybody was watching, and instead of the traditional thing I reduced it and splinted it in full extension, and they let him work his arms and shoulders and everything else. He was able to compete. He didn’t win, but he was able to compete effectively six weeks after a dislocated elbow by the way I treated it. And so, the gymnastics people all started heading in and that helped tremendously in getting the hardcore football people behind the program.” –Kay Clawson
  • “Well I think one of the things that I experienced [was that] we didn’t have a whole lot of problems at Washington because of the way it was originally set up. That is, the athletic trainers really answered to us, and maybe because their salaries came through the university, they came through the Medical School. And so there were not a lot of confrontations (at least not that I recall), and because we knew that when we said something was medically appropriate, Kay (Clawson) and the medical school would back us, I don’t think anybody wanted to take us on.” –Jim Garrick