Category: Professional Sports

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Gary Vitti, who’s cared for Lakers legends, nears end of watch

The Mercedes-Benz had a navy blue exterior and tan exterior, Gary Vitti reminded himself as he walked out of an LAX terminal and toward a job he wasn’t even sure he wanted.

He was happy being the head athletic trainer at the University of Portland, not to mention an adjunct professor, and had already tasted a bit of the NBA via two years as an assistant trainer with the Utah Jazz.

When he saw the Mercedes, Vitti jumped into it and was immediately negative, complaining about the traffic in Los Angeles.

The driver was Lakers General Manager Jerry West, who took Vitti a few miles east for a three-hour interview at the Forum. Then Vitti met Coach Pat Riley, who was direct, even a little intimidating, when he said, “You’re not ‘scarred’ yet. I can mold you into being the best.”

e Mercedes-Benz had a navy blue exterior and tan exterior, Gary Vitti reminded himself as he walked out of an LAX terminal and toward a job he wasn’t even sure he wanted.

He was happy being the head athletic trainer at the University of Portland, not to mention an adjunct professor, and had already tasted a bit of the NBA via two years as an assistant trainer with the Utah Jazz.

When he saw the Mercedes, Vitti jumped into it and was immediately negative, complaining about the traffic in Los Angeles.

The driver was Lakers General Manager Jerry West, who took Vitti a few miles east for a three-hour interview at the Forum. Then Vitti met Coach Pat Riley, who was direct, even a little intimidating, when he said, “You’re not ‘scarred’ yet. I can mold you into being the best.”

Vitti was 30 at the time and immediately drawn to West and Riley. It wasn’t long before he became the Lakers’ trainer, a job he will leave after next season, his 32nd with the team.

He’s been part of 12 trips to the NBA Finals, eight of them successful, and the players he took care of were as legendary as the franchise itself: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant among the many.

When Vitti started with the Lakers in 1984, he was only slightly older than most players. “Now I’m old enough to be their fathers and some, I guess, even their grandfathers,” he said.

Vitti, 61, remembered the good times and bad in an interview with The Times. He will remain with the team as a special consultant two more years after next season, but his traveling days will end, along with the team’s round-the-clock reliance on the NBA’s longest-tenured trainer.
He talks easily of the most memorable championships of his career, as well as Kobe Bryant’s future and another player’s injury last season that drove Vitti that much closer to retirement.

Many of Vitti’s anecdotes could serve as salves for Lakers fans at a time the franchise has struggled mightily, missing playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time since the 1970s and bottoming out with a 21-61 record last season.

“From a basketball standpoint, the greatest championship would be 1985, the first time we beat Boston,” Vitti said as he slowly consumed an open-faced gyro at an upscale Manhattan Beach restaurant near his home. “We lost to the Celtics the year before and should have beat them. A lot of my interview with Riley was him talking about that. He said to me, ‘We need to win.’

“The first day of training camp in 1984, they started talking about beating the Celtics in the Finals in June 1985. Riley was our GPS. He knew where we were. He knew where we needed to go.

“We went on to beat Boston in six games. On their floor. It broke the curse of the Celtics.”

The only championship ring Vitti wears is the one from 1987, another victory against Boston, though his ring selection doesn’t have anything to do with basketball. It was the year his first daughter, Rachel, was born.

His second daughter, Emilia, was born in 1991 but the Lakers lost to Chicago in the NBA Finals that year.

Vitti’s ring choice actually riled a former Lakers player.

“Shaq gave me a lot of heat. He wanted me to wear one of the ones once in a while that I won with him,” Vitti said, alluding to championship runs in 2000, 2001 and 2002. “I probably should have but I never did. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate what those teams did and what they were. It was just a different mentality. It wasn’t who I was. I was forged as a Laker in the ’80s, not in the millennium.”

So much has happened the last few years, so little of it positive. Vitti even called it “a nightmare.” Few would disagree, the Lakers continually losing Bryant and Steve Nash to injury, along with a slew of games.

“When somebody gets hurt, I blame myself. That’s the Laker way — you’ve got a problem, you go in the bathroom, you look in the mirror, you start with that person,” Vitti said. “The one that really affected me and maybe even affected this decision [to retire] was Julius Randle. All of his doctors and his surgeon are saying that nothing was missed, but the guy goes out there and breaks his leg the first game [last season]. That one really bothered me.”

Vitti is often an emissary between players and management. He recently met up with Bryant, with whom he shares a longtime bond.

“He was asking about our young kids, and I said, ‘You cannot believe how quick and athletic Jordan Clarkson is. He looks fantastic,'” Vitti said. “I said I personally thought D’Angelo Russell is going to be a star. He makes hard things look easy when he has the ball in his hands.

“Then Kobe said to me, ‘Well, then who’s going to play [small forward]?’ I looked at him and I said, ‘You.’ And with absolute, 100% confidence, he said, ‘I can do that.'”

Can Bryant, soon to turn 37, really do it? His last three seasons were cut short by injury and he became a part-time player last season, sitting out eight of his last 16 games for “rest” before sustaining a torn rotator cuff in January. He is under contract for one more season at $25 million.

When Nash retired, that didn’t mean he couldn’t play in an NBA game. The problem was how much time did he need to get ready for the next game.” Vitti said. “He had lots of issues that prevented him from playing an NBA schedule.

“That’s going to be the big question with Kobe, and we’re just going to have to feel it out. It’s been a while since he’s played. We just need to see.”

Vitti has one more year to worry about bumps, bruises and otherwise the rest. Then they become someone else’s headache.

He will spend more time with his wife, Martha, and two daughters, no longer logging 320 days a year of work.

“It’s not like we’re in the salt mine, making big rocks into little rocks, but we have to be there mentally and emotionally in my position. You can’t check out at the end of the day,” Vitti said. “You go home, your phone’s on, you talk to players, you talk to management, coaches, agents, you talk to all of their families because if somebody’s kid gets sick, they don’t call the pediatrician, they call me.

“I don’t know why, but they do. I’ve had athletes bring people over to my house unannounced — they got hurt playing volleyball on the beach or basketball at [nearby] Live Oak Park.

Then he smiles.

“This job,” he says, “really was all-encompassing.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

http://www.latimes.com/sports/lakers/la-sp-lakers-vitti-kobe-20150727-story.html

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Junior Seau’s Family Will Not Be Allowed to Speak at His Hall of Fame Induction

Junior Seau’s induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame was always going to be awkward, a chance to celebrate a marquee player known for his bone-crushing career while not dwelling on the injuries that might have precipitated his death.

When his induction was announced at the Super Bowl, his family rejoiced and started thinking about what to say at the ceremony in Canton, Ohio, on Aug. 8. Seau had told them that if he ever made it, he wanted his daughter, Sydney, to introduce him.

But the Hall of Fame does not plan to let Sydney or anyone else speak on Seau’s behalf. Instead, it will show a video commemorating his career, while avoiding questions about his suicide in 2012 at age 43 and the subsequent diagnosis of traumatic brain injury that doctors said they believed was brought on by hits to his head. Nor will the video mention the lawsuit that Seau’s family has filed against the N.F.L., which is trying to curb injuries in active players and address brain disease among its almost 20,000 retired players.

To the Hall of Fame officials, simply showing the video, which will not invoke Seau’s suicide, will keep the focus on his playing days. To his family still grappling with his death, though, the decision diminishes the tribute to one of the sport’s best linebackers and a highly regarded figure in Southern California, where he grew up and played most of his career.

“It’s frustrating because the induction is for my father and for the other players, but then to not be able to speak, it’s painful,” Sydney said. “I just want to give the speech he would have given. It wasn’t going to be about this mess. My speech was solely about him.”

The Hall said Seau’s brain injury and suicide had nothing to do with its decision to show only a video, but Seau’s death continues to haunt theN.F.L., which collaborates with the Hall on the induction ceremony and for years denied any link between repeated hits on the field and brain disease.

Typically, a video produced by NFL Network is shown for each inductee. For living inductees, a family member or a close associate then introduces the player on stage for what is often an emotion-filled speech.

In the past, for deceased inductees, presenters spoke, but Joe Horrigan, a spokesman for the Hall who has overseen the enshrinement ceremony for 20 years, said they often repeated what was in the video, prolonging an already lengthy ceremony. So a few years ago, the Hall eliminated speeches in these cases.

“There was an acceptance speech for deceased players, but it got redundant,” Horrigan said. “The honor is supposed to be for the individual.”

In 2011, no one spoke for Les Richter, a linebacker with the Los Angeles Rams who died a year earlier.

Seau’s video tribute will be five minutes, two minutes longer than for living inductees, Horrigan said. It will include parts of an interview his daughter gave to NFL Network before, she said, she learned that no one would be making a speech.

Not allowing any testimonials raises thorny questions because Seau’s death has cast such a long shadow over his stellar 20-year career, much of which was played in San Diego for the Chargers. The decision comes as the N.F.L. tries to repair the damage to its reputation after years of denying that playing the sport could cause brain disease.

The league agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by thousands of retired players who said they were misled about the dangers of concussions. Game rules have been adjusted slightly to reduce the chance of violent collisions, and neuro-trauma specialists now roam the sidelines. The league has committed to spending at least $40 million on concussion-related research.

The Hall of Fame has tiptoed past these issues and focused solely on players’ exploits in the gridiron.

“We’re not the N.F.L., but the Pro Football Hall of Fame,” said David Baker, the executive director of the Hall. “Our mission is to honor the heroes of the game, and Junior is a hero of the game. We’re going to celebrate his life, not the death and other issues.”

At times, the separation can feel artificial. The Hall is an independent nonprofit organization. But the N.F.L. is its largest donor and works closely with it to stage the induction ceremony, which is televised on the league-owned network. The league also organizes the Hall of Fame Game, the kickoff of the preseason, the day after the induction ceremony, and it moved its rookie symposium to Canton, in part so every incoming player could visit the Hall.

A spokesman for the league said that it was involved in many aspects of the Hall of the Fame weekend, including the production of the enshrinement ceremony, but that it left decisions about allowing any speeches to the Hall.

Seau’s former wife, Gina, was “very surprised” by the Hall of Fame’s policy to use only a video because she did not “think Sydney or any of us were going to use the Hall of Fame as a platform.”

Horrigan said the Seaus were given incorrect information about the ceremony before the Hall of Fame formally notified them of its policy on July 9, five months after they had learned Seau would be inducted.

But Gina Seau said she did not question the Hall of Fame’s motives and in the end agreed the focus should be on Junior and his legacy.

“It’s already difficult enough as it is,” she said.

The family’s dispute with the N.F.L. was another matter. After an autopsy showed that Junior Seau suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head hits, Gina filed a wrongful-death suit against the league on behalf of Seau’s two younger children, Jake and Hunter. Sydney and her brother Tyler, who are adults, joined the suit. They are seeking the equivalent of what their father would have earned, which could amount to several million dollars.

The case, though, was swept into the class-action suit brought by 5,000 retired players. In the settlement, which is being appealed, Gina could have received up to $4 million. The Seaus opted out, though, because the settlement did not address the children’s claims.The family’s lawyer, Steve Strauss, said that the league had declined to negotiate and that he was told by a representative to “take the deal.” The lawsuit should be separate from the settlement, he said, because Seau’s children sued as heirs and “are not party to the collective bargaining agreement” between the players and the N.F.L.

Strauss has asked the federal judge overseeing the settlement to allow the Seau lawsuit to go forward in state court in California, but the judge, Anita B. Brody, has indicated that she wanted to rule on any opt-out cases collectively, he said.

“We want to move forward,” Strauss said. “We have waited two and a half years.”

While the Seaus wait for a resolution to their case, they continue to wonder whether they could have done more to recognize and maybe slow Junior’s decline.

In retrospect, the signs of C.T.E. were there: the memory lapses, the mood swings, the suicidal tendencies.

In October 2010, Seau drove his sport utility vehicle off a cliff along the beach in Carlsbad, Calif., where it landed about 100 feet below. Seau said he had fallen asleep, but it came soon after he had been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence involving his girlfriend.

“I didn’t know the severity of it,” Gina said. “I didn’t want to acknowledge what it was, his first suicide attempt.”

After their marriage ended years before, Gina spoke regularly with Seau, and when she called him a few months after the Carlsbad incident, he seemed depressed.

“He said, ‘I had no idea how many hours are in a day, the days are so long,’ ” she said. “That was a completely obvious statement of a man who was scared. He had so many opportunities, and he couldn’t get there. He was stuck in a bubble.”

Seau’s family and many of his friends will travel to Canton for induction weekend, lamenting that Seau, a lively public speaker known for delivering upbeat messages and for poking fun at himself and the audience, would not take the stage. The Seau family is preparing for a bittersweet weekend.

“It’s been like planning a wedding party without the groom,” Gina said.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

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Providing eye care for professional sports

Sports have become a huge part of our country’s entertainment culture. This is especially true in Pittsburgh, which likes to bill itself the “City of Champions.” In many areas of the country, there is fanatical support for professional and college sports teams. Getting into a playoff, bowl game or March Madness can not only invigorate a city’s collective psyche, but also provide significant revenue to the local economy. In recent years, many teams and colleges have boosted the level of medical care to their athletes. This is a win-win situation for both the individual athletes and the team.

UPMC Eye Center provides eye care, both on and off the playing surface, to the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team and University of Pittsburgh athletic teams. Providing care to the players, coaches and administrators for a sports team can be an exciting venture. But like any aspect of one’s practice, it requires planning and commitment. Many more hours go into the process than just the time spent at the field or arena.

Providing eye care to the Steelers requires coordination with other medical professionals. The on-field medical team consists of two orthopedic surgeons, two neurosurgeons, two internists, one emergency medicine specialist (for intubation), one dentist and an ophthalmologist. The coordination of physicians is provided by the head athletic trainer of the Steelers, John Norwig, MEd, ATC. John has been with the Steelers for 25 years and received an award this past year from the NFL Physicians Society as the most outstanding athletic trainer. Like a practice, surgery center or academic department, there needs to be a dedicated leader at the helm.

The NFL requires an ophthalmologist to be at every game. Most team ophthalmologists do not travel to away games, so one is expected to provide care, if needed, to the visiting team as well. Serious injury, such as an orbital fracture, can occur during a game. One needs to be prepared to quickly evaluate players to see if they can continue in the game or if playing could result in further injury. An on-field emergency kit including proparacaine, near card, penlight, bandage contact lens, clear protective shield and antibiotic ointment is kept on hand. Players are encouraged to wear clear eye shields, but this is not required. Players are only allowed to wear tinted shields if approved by the NFL due to a documented eye condition that would cause glare.

Much more time is required managing eye conditions off the field. Most of this is pre- and postseason screening and refractive care. Before the season, undrafted players participating in the NFL Combine are given eye exams. Results of the exams are reviewed to see if a player should be brought in for further examination. Recently drafted players and rookies are all screened before preseason. This is done at the training facility because bringing 50 players into an office in 1 day is difficult. In a period of one half day, the players are given not only eye exams, but complete physicals, bloodwork and EKGs. Players who require refraction, contact lens fitting or complete dilated examination are brought to the office at a later date. Any players considering refractive surgery are operated on after the end of the season.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

http://www.healio.com/ophthalmology/retina-vitreous/news/print/ocular-surgery-news/%7B2f4bcf9a-7083-4882-bc77-647ab38ab37b%7D/providing-eye-care-for-professional-sports-teams-involves-commitment-beyond-game-day

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Mike Gapski helps blackhawks to stanley cup title

In the tense moments of Game 6 against Tampa Bay in the final of the Stanley Series, Chicago fans roared their support for the Blackhawks, chanting, “We want the cup.”

“Every second seemed like a minute, every minute seemed like an hour,” said Mike Gapski, 1982 UIC alumnus and head athletic trainer for the Blackhawks. “This was tough to win, and these guys were able to overcome every challenge that they were given and met it head on.”

Gapski, an athletic trainer for UIC sports teams after completing his physical education degree, joined the Blackhawks in 1987. “I don’t look at it as a job, I look at it as a fun time,” he said. The best things about being head athletic trainer, he says, are contributing to the championship and the people he works with.

“It makes it really easy to enjoy what I do. It’s nice to make sure that the players are well taken care of and to see that some of the things I do for them are beneficial and might help them extend their careers, play better in the game and just help the team win overall.”

This is the team’s third Stanley Cup in six years. The team won the championship in 2010 and 2013. Chicago celebrated the dynasty June 17 with a parade that ended at a rally in Soldier Field. The parade started at the corner of Washington Boulevard and Racine Avenue, headed east towards Desplaines Street and ended near Michigan Avenue.

UIC students and employees cheered along the route as players took turns raising the 35-pound cup. “I feel like the win instills a lot of Chicago pride,” said Shannon Mullally, resident director for Campus Housing. “It feels good when your city wins something.”

Campus Housing resident director Jacob Hughes said he was nervous watching the final game, but the team didn’t let him down. “They had a lot more shots on goal, they were playing with more heart and they were getting to a point where they were playing more ferocious.

So I had my moments of concern, but at the end of the day, I was like ‘no, they’re going to do it all.’” Gapski says the championship’s impact was worth the hard work. “The support was amazing. The magnitude of the trophy itself is unbelievable. It makes you feel good just knowing that you’re a part of it and that you have a role in something special.” After the long-deserved win, members of the Blackhawks organization are looking forward to another tradition — their very own day with the cup.

Gapski says he doesn’t know what he’ll do yet when it’s his turn with the cup, but he’s excited. “When you get it, you want to spread the joy to as many people as you can.”

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NFL GAME DAY ADVOCACY

NATA has partnered with USA Today Health and Human Services in a marketing effort to promote athletic trainers to NFL game attendees. This NATA advocacy ad will be featured in the gameday programs of the San Francisco 49ers, San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders, Denver Broncos and the New York Giants during the 2015-2016 season. Our message will focus on “Who is taking care of your kids?” and prompt readers to visit our public website scheduled to launch this fall.

Gameday programs are the official publication of the NFL teams and will be available for the entire 2015-2016 season. In addition to being available at the game, they are sold at newsstands, bookstores and other retail outlets. These publications are seen by fans, sky box and suite holders and corporate executives. This advertising opportunity is valued at more than $150,000.

We’re excited to use this opportunity to advocate to a brand new audience. The average NFL team has 600,000 fans at their stadium throughout the season, and an estimated 20 percent of fans receive the gameday programs. We expect the advocacy ad to reach more than 600,000 people.

Wondering how we chose the teams? NATA strategically placed ads in the gameday programs for the Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, San Francisco 49ers and Denver Broncos to raise awareness about the value of athletic trainers in states that have no athletic training regulation or regulation that is currently being challenged. The New York Giants were also selected based on the high gameday attendance and opportunity for growth in the profession. (Based on the AT Benchmark Study, only 27 percent of schools in New York have full time athletic trainers.)

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.nata.org/nata-news-blog/nfl-gameday-advocacy