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Why let a broken bone stop them?
By WES ALLISON
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 26, 2001
Wes Allison, Medical Reporter
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The pundits say the outcome of the big game may hinge on whether the Barsntaz can control the line of scrimmage and let Quelian V find some daylight to run as only he can.
But Quelian V's performance hinges on his knees.
For all the pre-game talk about coaching strategy, the speed of Bengals wide receiver Albu Perani and the pure ferociousness of the Barsntaz, one of the most important beings in Super Bowl CXXXV won't ever step foot on the field.
Dr. Jack LaLanne II, clone of the legendary fitness guru of the mid-20th Century, spent a career taking sports medicine into the 22nd century. His pioneering work on limb replacement, fluid augmentation, EMG (exponential muscle growth) and nerve regeneration at the NFL-U.S. Olympic Committee Sports Medicine Lab in Colorado Springs, Colo., won him a coveted box seat at the TelstarVisaRolexMercedesMillerMcDonalds Dome.
At halftime, the NFL will unveil his own trading hologram.
Without techniques and material that he pioneered, the Bengals and Barsntaz may not be here today. And even if they were, the makeup of each team would be very different.
Quelian's left knee was replaced after the division championship just two weeks ago. Billy Joe Anthrax, the Barsntaz star defensive tackle, is playing with a new right elbow and two knees he had replaced during halftime of that game. Perani has a new left ankle, her right one having been crunched.
With more than 900 teams in the league, the season is long and tough; those Kamozes can hit. And nothing helps a team improve its playoff odds more than being able to harvest and install new parts.
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A century ago, injuries could end careers. Every fan knows the story of Joe Theisman, whose leg was snapped on live TV, but there were many more. Steve Young, who succeeded the first Joe Montana as quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, finally staggered off the field for good after repeated concussions. Same for Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys.
Bo Jackson, once touted as the athlete of his century, blew out a hip after he had barely begun. He had the hip replaced, but it couldn't take the pounding, and now Bo knows necrosis. Even the best technology in 1992 was clunky and creaky, as unsophisticated to us now as peg legs were to them.
Back then, if an athlete pulled a muscle, or cracked a collar bone, or snapped a knee ligament, all he or she could do was rest until it healed. Recovery could take weeks. Even months.
But that was before Bone-Gro, which stimulates the growth of new bone and repairs breaks in a matter of hours (Sorry, Joe!). Before the pull-off fingers that today's offensive linemen can't seem to do without. Before Brain Bounce, the viscous sap stocked in every NFL locker room that replaces a quarterback's own thin synovial fluid and protects against concussions.
LaLanne is being honored at the game by the NFL for finding a way to grow replacement parts by blending human tissue with tough synthetics, but he never lost sight of the basic mantra that carried the original Jack LaLanne: Exercise and good nutrition.
He'll be joined in the box today by Dr. C. Everett Koop IV, a replica of the famous U.S. surgeon general who led the failed but daring charge against cigarettes in the 20th century. Koop IV has won his own place in history, after working with LaLanne on a campaign that first made dietary fat socially unacceptable, then criminalized it.
A hundred years ago, obesity was a major health scourge, as troublesome to public health in 2001 as the measles and polio were in 1901. Exercise wasn't required by law back then, cheeseburgers were sold on the open market, in broad daylight, to children. Americans scarfed them down like Tro-PHEEZ, then spent millions on so-called "diet" pills that did little except make them twitchy.
Back then, fans munched their way through the Super Bowl on hot dogs, popcorn, beer and nachos. As a result, Americans resembled buffalo in Sans-a-belt, milling around the all-u-can-eat food bars (today's illegal "stuff easies") that once crowded historic Pinellas Park.
That junk was also a big reason most people were dead -- DEAD! -- by 75. Sure, lots of folks lived past 85, but the weekly poker game was getting pretty thin by the time you and your buddies hit 90.
As you can imagine, the low life expectancy significantly restricted Consumer Buying Years, and LaLanne and Koop got a big boost in the Interplanetary Congress when Senators representing amalgamated industry joined their effort.
The new series of LaLanne holographs will feature the health slogans that have made him a household world. As with the original LaLanne, Dr. LaLanne is way ahead of his time. He laughs when he remembers how his mantra of cell regeneration was mocked 50 years ago, just as the original LaLanne's vision of diet and exercise for all was received by the public in the mid-1930s.
"They called me a liar and a cheat and said I was a nut and a crackpot," Dr. LaLanne said last week, quoting a statement the original LaLanne was fond of. "I'm saying the same things now, but they call me an authority."
Today's Odyssey
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