Woes of the Weekend Jock

From armchair athlete to bloody Sunday

FRIDAY NIGHT: He could hear them yelling "Slide! Slide!" Home plate was only a few feet away. So what if he hadn't played softball since college 20 years ago? So what if he now weighed 275 Ibs. ? He could do it. He knew he could. He slid ... They carried him off the field.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON: She had run two miles her first day of jogging, then three miles the second. Now she was going for six. All right, she felt a bit sore. But she was young, only 35, and in good shape ... Next day she had to go down the subway steps backward on her way to the doctor.

SUNDAY MORNING: He was 50, but he wasn't going to let any 17-year-old beat him, especially his own daughter. He'd taught her to play. O.K., so he only hit on weekends, and she played every day. If he just stretched a little more on his forehand shots, he could put the kid away. He knew it. He stretched ... She got the car and drove him to the hospital.

Stirred by dramatic TV shots of derring-do afield, badgered by friends, family and physicians to stop smoking and start shaping up, armchair athletes all over America in far greater numbers than before are becoming the weekend warriors of sport. But the years, and the gin and the weed and the encroaching flab, have taken their toll. The net result can be painful, and sometimes lethal.

An estimated 12 million Americans were hurt in recreational athletics in 1963. By 1971 that figure had climbed to 17 million. Last year it reached 20 million. In hundreds of hospital emergency wards and physicians' waiting rooms they sit, these weekend warriors, with their tennis elbows; stress fractures; broken noses; tendinitis; dislocated shoulders, hips and fingers; strains and sprains; not to mention sundry bruises, abrasions, lacerations and concussions. "People should realize they simply cannot ask their bodies to do as much at age 30, 40 or beyond as they could at age 20," says Mount Sinai's Dr. Burton L. Berson, a New York City orthopedist who runs one of the many new sports-medicine clinics that have sprung up all over the U.S. to care for men and women wounded in the pursuit of health and happiness.

Some injuries are simply the result of the athlete's being a klutz. California Tennis Guru Vic Braden points out that neophyte tennis players quite often cut themselves opening a can of balls, regularly rap partners in the head during warmups, or slip and fall on balls dropped on the court. Even the experienced player occasionally comes to grief. Says Columnist Art Buchwald, who has been sporting a cast on his badly sprained left leg: "I was going for one tennis ball and slipped on another." And there are the freak accidents. Like the Kansas City, Mo., runner who was knocked to his knees, and suffered puncture wounds and scratches on his head, when he was attacked by a bird with a white underbelly and a wingspan of 5 or 6 ft., presumably an eagle or a hawk.

But the vast majority of injuries result from what doctors call the "overuse syndrome"--trying to push the out-of-condition over-30 body too far too fast. Los Angeles Orthopedist Sonny Cobble says simply that weekend jocks as a class tend to suffer from "an acute case of simplemindedness. Most of us have a tendency to remember our youth." Dr. Marshall Rockwell, who together with several partners operates seven Los Angeles hospital emergency rooms, reports that a majority of weekend athletes are middle class and "tend to be quite competitive." Adds Braden: "It's almost like when they finally get out there, they feel like they'll never play again. People don't know when to quit."

Nowhere is the fact that man's (or woman's) reach too often exceeds his/ her grasp so dangerous as in weekend sports. A full-blown heart attack can happen right there in the middle of the doubles court, as the determined jock refuses to admit fatigue or acknowledge warning chest pains and keeps playing.

But most sports-related injuries fortunately neither kill nor cripple. They merely incapacitate in various ways. Cyclists are prone to knee pains, numbness in the fingers from pressing down on low-slung handlebars, lower-back problems from the bent-over position, and, yes, simple but irksome saddle burns. There are also reports of a more unusual disability in men that has been traced to long hours of bike riding: temporary sterility.

Racket sports, such as squash and tennis, are prime offenders. In squash it is the confined quarters that often lead to unpremeditated mayhem. But both games involve cutting movement, sharp changes of direction and sudden stops that can cause injuries to knee and ankle. Says Berson: "The knee joint really wasn't designed for these movements." Ankle sprains are common, especially in women whose tendons and ligaments have been stressed by years of wearing high-heeled shoes. Then there are ruptures of the Achilles tendon. In the unconditioned, the unexpected force exerted by rapid movements sometimes causes the tendon, which runs from the muscle in back of the leg down to the heel, to snap and roll up like a window shade. At the net, tennis players often suffer orbital injuries --blows to the ring of bone surrounding the eye. Says Gilbert Gleim, a biomedical researcher at Lenox Hill Hospital's Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma in New York City: "The opponent slams the ball and our Saturday's hero catches it in the eye." Or gets to eat what Braden calls "a fuzz sandwich." The sport's most common ailment, of course, is tennis elbow. A player's forearm muscles may not be strong enough to hold or control the racket correctly, resulting in an improper swing. Small rips or microtears develop in the tendons of the forearm muscles near the elbow, and chronic inflammation ensues.

In softball and baseball, weekend jocks fracture ankles and dislocate shoulders sliding into bases, their leg muscles get strained from sprinting, and shoulder muscles tear from pitching. "Throwing one's arm out" is no mere figure of speech. Dr. James Purdy, emergency-room physician at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, recalls one softball player who threw the ball so hard he shattered his upper arm bone. A hard-hit ball can have a shattering effect of its own when hand-eye coordination fails.

Touch football, swimming, skateboarding, scuba diving, hang gliding, golf, skiing, riding, surfing, bowling, basketball, volleyball--all sports have their share of problems. But more and more injuries are the outcome of America's newest athletic addiction: running. Appropriately, the damage tends to occur from the ground up. A typical distance runner's foot strikes the ground 1,000 times a mile each seven to ten minutes, and the force of impact is about three times his weight. The shock wave travels from heel through ankle to lower leg, knee, upper leg, hip and lower back. Ill effects are legion. Every runner sooner or later is likely to suffer from a sprained or twisted ankle, knee inflammation, stress fracture of the leg bone, shin splints, hamstring pulls, low-back pain, heel pain or blood blister of the toes. Says Berson: "Our ancestors evolved by running barefoot across a grassy plain to escape saber-toothed tigers. The human leg is not designed for running long distances on cement."

It is years since sedentary jokers could get away with the line: "I get enough exercise acting as a pallbearer to my friends who exercise." Regular exercise can help make one healthier. The injuries result from the delusion that a few hours of sports are helpful. Eighty percent of the troubles could be avoided, doctors point out, with some simple precautions. According to Dr. Dinesh Patel, co-director of Massachusetts General Hospital's Sports Medicine Clinic, "Sixty percent of athletic injuries could be prevented by training and warmup, another 20% by proper shoes and prescreening for tight joints or other abnormalities." Doctors also recommend a complete physical (including the treadmill stress test) for anyone over 35 before any form of exercise is begun. In selecting a sport, weight, body build and general flexibility must be considered. Fat people should forsake jogging in favor of sports like swimming that mitigate the effects of gravity. Women are looser jointed than men, therefore less likely to suffer muscular strains and tendinitis, but are more susceptible to joint problems.

No matter what the sport, it should be worked into gradually with a warmup of slow stretches preceding activity. And if the body hurts, don't go on. Stop.

But when the worst happens, the injured amateur can now find skilled and sympathetic treatment at burgeoning sports-medicine clinics. Staffed by doctors and therapists, many of whom are athletes themselves, the clinics offer a wide variety of services. Besides orthopedists, there are often internists, cardiologists, nutrition experts, clinical psychologists and trainers available. In addition to treating injuries, the staffs do research (measuring athletes' bone thickness and percentage of body fat, for example) and function as coaches and equipment advisers. Sample tips: don't buy new sneakers before an orgy of tennis; a little fast walking is the best way to begin to jog; in running shoes, the rubber heel should be wider than the shoe itself, to distribute the weight stress over a wider area. Says George Veras, Lenox Hill sports-clinic assistant director: "Sports medicine is not a medical subspecialty; it's a conglomerate."

Treatment is fairly standard: fractures are set, separated shoulders popped back into place, broken ribs taped. Sometimes ice packs, whirlpool baths or anti-inflammatory drugs are prescribed. But the best remedy for the innumerable ills that those weakened on weekends are heir to, and the one that the doctors most often prescribe, is rest. The majority of sports patients are ready to take the advice, doctors report, with one exception. "Runners are fanatics," says Berson. "You can't tell a runner to cut back."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.