Game 74: Robert Kerlan - Peaches Brulee
In 1958, professional sports in Los Angeles was a novelty. It was an experiment made possible by cross-country jet travel and the hubris of wealthy East Coast titans of industry, the types living in Gilded Age-era brick mansions that crumble in earthquakes that wouldn’t shake the average Angeleno out of bed. Like the Gold Rush did just over a century earlier, this mad dash to California ballooned both the wealth and cultural cachet of the state. The injection of the Dodgers and Giants into the heavily-populated and sports-starved coastal cities of California would usher in a new era for professional sports as a multi billion industry. But when the Dodgers moved to the L.A. Memorial Coliseum in 1958, there was little thought from sports teams about investing in the long-term health of the very source of their compounding wealth: the players.
Dr. Robert Kerlan, head physician of Showtime Lakers, along with his more famous partner, Dr. Frank Jobe, were the most successful and influential doctors in the history of sports. Today, their Kerlan-Jobe Institute at Cedars-Sinai is the most lauded sports medicine hospital in the world. When Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles’ and Drew Brees tore the UCL in his throwing hand, their teams called up Kerlan-Jobe. These two pioneers revolutionized sports medicine and saved the careers of countless athletes, especially through Dr. Jobe’s invention of the Tommy John surgery. And it all started because Kerlan, a man who suffered from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, could relate to the aches and pains of athletes that owners neglected for decades.
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Born in 1922, Robert Kerlan was a gifted athlete who lettered in nine sports at Aitkin High in his native Minnesota. He graduated early at 16 and became a star basketball player at a pre-Wooden UCLA, but soon left for rival USC to concentrate on his budding medical career. While at USC, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Kerlan sought to serve his country as a medical officer. It was during this same time that he started to notice severe pain in his back and legs whenever he tried to do any kind of physical activity. Initially, it was diagnosed as a slipped disc. But during a medical exam, an Army doctor discovered the real reason for his pain: rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic inflammatory disorder that causes the immune system to attack your body. The condition has no cure and gets worse as you age. It’s a life sentence that prevents someone from doing something as simple as getting in and out of a car without severe pain.
With the Army out of the picture, Kerlan refocused on his studies. Despite knowing that his body would degrade to a point where he would be unable to operate, he stuck with his specialty in orthopedics. After graduation, Kerlan opened up a practice in Crenshaw where he treated the ailments of “housewives and businessmen.” But he found himself drawn to Wrigley Field, not the Chicago Cubs’ home but the minor league park found at 425 E 42nd Place just south of USC. Kerlan realized that his practice in orthopedics, the study and surgery of the musculoskeletal system, applied itself perfectly to the embryonic practice of sports medicine. So he asked the owner of the minor league L.A. Angels if they needed a sports physician. Kerlan got the job and was paid handsomely for it: A free ticket for each home game.
By the decade’s end, Walter O’Malley brought the Dodgers to Los Angeles. Kerlan wrote to the team’s GM Buzzie Bavasi if he could apply for the job but sports medicine was still an afterthought in the minds of men who ran professional teams. Kerlan didn’t even get an interview until the day before their inaugural season in L.A. commenced. Buzzie thought the doctor would be preoccupied with treating heat-stroked fans blistered by the new-fangled idea of West Coast baseball. But by the end of the Dodgers’ 2nd year in 1959, which ended with a World Series victory, Bavasi was calling Kerlan the MVP. While the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise was new, they brought with them old stars from Brooklyn like Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, and Duke Snider with lingering injuries. No stranger to aches and pains in his joints, muscles, and bones, Kerlan treated these players with respect they had never experienced before in their athletic careers. Bavasi later told the L.A. Times that he single handedly made them aware of sports medicine. And most importantly, that his rapport with players was just as crucial as his medical knowledge. “He was very popular,” said Bavasi. “The players knew that because he was in pain, he understood their pain.”
When the Lakers came to town in 1960, Kerlan was hired right away as their head physician, a title he would hold for three decades. He had his work cut out for him right away with the always-injured Jerry West and with Elgin Baylor’s career-defining knee injury. The first time Baylor met Kerlan, he left the doctor’s office after seeing Kerlan doubled over in excruciating pain. But when other specialists couldn’t fix his knee, Baylor returned and started a long professional and personal relationship with the man who extended the Laker Hall of Famer’s career into the early ‘70s. During the ‘60s, Kerlan teamed with a young doctor named Frank Jobe who began consulting with the Dodgers in 1965 before getting hired full time a few years later. As Southern California became one of the centers of the sports world, Kerlan and Jobe treated every prominent athlete of the era and their just-as-iconic injury: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s back, Tommy John’s throwing arm and his eponymous surgery, Sandy Koufax’s elbow, Kirk Gibson’s knee.
While he played a major role in diagnosing these sports injuries, Kerlan was rarely the man behind the knife. Due to his condition, Kerlan started occasionally using crutches in the late ‘60s and needed to use them full-time by 1977. But he didn’t lighten his workload. Together with Jobe, the two doctors added the Angels, Kings, Rams, and the jockeys of the Hollywood Park race track to their list of Southland athletes treated by their practice. Kerlan would get into his car -- “He would cringe from the pain, and I could hear this popping and cracking from his hips before he had the replacements,” his daughter Kerry told the L.A. Times -- and drive to Dodger Stadium in Echo Park, then down to Inglewood to check on his patients with the Lakers and Kings, and then even further south to Anaheim to treat the Rams and Angels in his care. He would even join teams on road trips to treat others’ pain despite the torment it would incur on himself.
By the early ‘90s, a combination of age, his rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple heart attacks slowed down the doc. But he was still seeing dozens of patients a week until heart failure finally got to him in 1996. In his L.A. Times obituary, Kerlan’s daughter Kim described him as “one of the players.” That was the highest compliment you could have given Dr. Robert Kerlen. As a star athlete whose own body turned on him, he could’ve wallowed in his own misery. Instead, he devoted his life to extending the careers of athletes with the least amount of pain possible. His understanding of agony that went beyond the usual sports-related cause, defeat, helped him connect with players in a way nobody had before. Their pain was his pain. Their relief, his relief in multitudes.
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Strawberry Brulee
8 ounces softened cream cheese
1 ½ cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 to 4 tablespoons sugar
2 to 3 baskets fresh strawberries or 6 to 8 medium peaches
Brown sugar
Blend cream cheese and sour cream together in a blender or food processor. Add sugar -- amount will depend on sweetness of fruit. Slice berries or peaches and fold into sour cream mixture. Place in shallow baking dish or individual oven-proof dishes. Just before serving, top with ½ inch layer of brown sugar. Place under broiler until sugar caramelizes. Watch carefully to prevent burning. Serve immediately.
Sour cream and cream cheese. When I started Goldstein and Gasol, I had never baked a cake. Or a pie. Or really any kind of dessert that didn’t come out of a tube with premade images of bats and jack-o-lanterns insert into the middle. But if I’ve learned one thing in this six month (and counting) journey into cooking: It’s that sour cream and cream cheese are 70% of every cake ever made. I may not be Buddy “Cake Boss” Valastro, but I know this to be true.
Strawberries Brulee -- peaches aren’t available until summer where I shopped -- was basically a cake recipe interrupted. Instead of flour and other baking ingredients, you just spoon brown sugar over the cream mixture like the Romans salting the fields of Carthage. Did the Romans actually do that after sacking the Carthaginians? Probably not. Seems like a waste of time after you spent years fighting a war and your fastest method of transportation were horse drawn carriages. My history degree, along with a healthy dose of skepticism about everything in history books, continues to pay off in dividends.
This dessert rules. If this was 2011, the height of marijuana concentrate dabbing, and I was still living in a beautiful Isla Vista apartment complex just 8 blocks away from the Pacific Ocean, I would’ve borrowed my neighbor’s blowtorch to finish this dish off. But a broiler will do the same thing without having to ask someone in the middle of a k-hole where he put his dab torch.
