The History of the Jock Doc

I was asked a couple of times how long I had written this column.  I have to admit, I'm not exactly sure.

It's somewhere around 30 years.  It all started when The Daily Times Sports Editor Gary Turner asked me to write a piece for the newspaper addressing questions about sports medicine. 

I recruited Dr. Bob Haralson, the founder of Maryville Orthopedic Clinic, to join me and we took week about answering questions that we got from readers and some that we created ourselves.  It was called The Jock Doc.

We floated along like that for a couple of years and then Dr. Haralson turned it all over to me and it became a column.  For a long time, it appeared a couple of times a month.

In about 1990, it became a weekly feature and sometime in there was moved to Sundays.  It has remained focused on sports and athletic health care but the good folks at The Daily Times have given me the latitude to preach about a wide range of topics. 

I've generally avoided religion and politics but even those have been touched through the years.

What all that means is that I have produced a 900 word essay every week, 52 weeks a year, for 25 years or so.  From somebody who wasn't a particularly good English student in high school

Well...no...the truth is, I hated English.  And hated writing essays even more.  I've told the story here before about Dr. Barrett, the UT English professor that changed all that (although my senior English teacher in high school, Edward Headlee, planted that seed).

In a nutshell, Dr. Barrett brought me in to his office and asked me why I was such an underachieving student in his class.  He saw something in me that I didn't know I had.

And if you've followed my column through the years, you know that my high school football coach did pretty much the same thing.  He was the person that gave me the confidence to seek success that has served me so well since that day when he told a bystander to football practice "if he works at it, he can be a good one."

So here I sit, pondering 30+ years of writing a newspaper column.  Make no mistake, it is a labor of love.  And I have no plans to quit.

But I've reached the conclusion that we all have an overwhelming obligation to see the good in people, the skills they have, the traits they possess and then to tell them about it.

This is my place to do that.

My personal goal in this space is to be uplifting and positive.  Sure, I might occasionally speak out against injustices and I do have particularly strong feelings about smoking and other bad health practices, but I try to couch even those in positive ways.  I believe if that you are going to point out a problem that you should be ready to provide a solution.

Thinking about your own sports experiences, who were your favorite coaches?  Those that yelled all the time?  That never had a good thing to say?

Or maybe it was that coach that knew when you needed a boost.  Who might have been demanding but who saw things in you that you didn't even know you had.  Who were a positive influence on you.

Those are the best coaches out there, in my opinion. 

Be a positive influence in somebody's life.  Every day.  The world will be a better place.