Moorman Relishes Strong Ties With Duke

DURHAM, N.C. -- Frankly you don't meet many people, regardless of profession, who glow when discussing their job, enthused about what they're doing even after years of doing it. But, then, there aren't many people like Claude “T.” Moorman III, since 2001 the team physician for the Duke football and basketball teams.

Well, that level of job satisfaction hasn't prevented Moorman from doing more, anyway. Just recently, he took the lead as the initial president of a group of ACC team physicians developing new protocols and awareness to protect the league's football players.

"T. Moorman is a terrific ambassador for Duke University and the Atlantic Coast Conference,” conference commissioner John Swofford said in an e-mail. “He has helped position our league to insure that we are at the forefront of player safety. He is passionate about the well being of student-athletes and very progressive in his thinking."

Taking a cue from other conferences, at the ACC's behest its medical community is supplying each team with a medically trained observer situated in the press box. These eyes on high are associated with specific schools, so observers are grounded in the medical problems already facing squad members. Linked electronically to colleagues stationed on the sidelines, they can instantly recognize ominous changes in on-field behavior and issue an alert to urge medical intervention. To critics who find the extra layer of scrutiny duplicative, Moorman inquires, “What's the harm?”

The heightened attention is reflective of a newfound understanding across all sports of the deleterious effects of concussions in particular, and has spawned greater interest in refining the scientific methodologies necessary to better understand, prevent and treat sports injuries.

Moorman's father, Claude Moorman, was an end on the Duke squad that beat Arkansas in the 1961 Cotton Bowl under Hall of Famer Bill Murray. His son, known as “Tee” or “T” like his father, played offensive guard at Duke under Shirley “Red” Wilson from 1980 through 1982 after a prep career in Concord, N.C. Moorman recalls growing up with exhortations to use his head as a weapon when playing football.

“It was spear the guy,” he says. “Well, there were 34 quadriplegias in 1976 because of that. When I was playing it was, 'Put your hat on him!' Even if it's heads up, you're going to helmet-to-helmet the guy, you're going to take him out.”

Alarm at the cases of paralysis led to rules changes that discouraged spearing. Now there's a greater emphasis on not leading with the crown of a helmet when initiating contact. Concussion protocols are in place that mandate immediate removal from a game and limit contact for extended periods after a concussion is diagnosed.

Moorman believes he suffered mild concussions while playing football; they went unremarked at the time and apparently had no long-term effects. He insists the contemporary game, despite its belated recognition of concussion dangers, and the fact virtually every member of last year's Duke senior football class required some medical “intervention”, is safer than ever.

Due to that conviction, “I've had no problem at all in not only allowing, but encouraging my son to play,” says the father of three. “Just because of the lessons of the game, the life lessons.”

Those lessons include the value of collaboration, as he notes when interviewing job candidates, finding some distinctly more “self-oriented” than others. “You just see these guys and women and you just say, oh, if they'd just played a team sport, they'd have gotten that beaten out of them early on,” he observes, “and they'd be a lot more productive with what they're trying to get accomplished.”

This from a man who runs a cutting-edge sports medicine program at Duke that doesn't employ a publicist. Recently several of the nation's premier prep basketball players came to Moorman for knee surgery, among his specialties, yet his name is not bandied about nationally like some of his colleagues.

“A lot of people ask me, 'What's the most important thing you ever did to get you ready to be an orthopaedic surgeon?' Moorman confides. “I say, “I played football.' Because when that third open tibia comes rolling into the ER (emergency room) at 3 AM and you're about ready to croak because you're so tired, you just say, 'Ah, this is nothing compared to three-a-days in August when I was playing.' That puts everything into perspective.”

Gaining perspective is a particular Moorman passion, medically speaking. A key component of his interest in the ACC physicians' group is the opportunity to collate and compare data, to create an injury registry, then use it to reevaluate the efficacy of current treatments. An early area of investigation, started at the University of Virginia, are the dislocated shoulders and related woes that plague football players. Moorman hopes the ACC medical community can move on to scrutinizing knee injuries, heat-related illness, and perhaps find a way to do cardiac screening in a cost-effective manner.

“Unfortunately the injuries that occur in football tend to be more life- and limb-threatening, so the scrutiny starts there,” he says. “You start with the low-hanging fruit, you move from there. I hope that the ability to study injuries will permeate all of our sports.”

That's already happening on the wooded campus of Duke's Center for Living, home to sports medicine since its former headquarters was removed as part of the Wallace Wade Stadium renovations.

Through the “K Lab,” a facility for which Mike Krzyzewski helped secure funding, Moorman and staff use evaluative measures like preseason MRIs to anticipate basketball's two most common and debilitating injuries — damage to the patella tendon in knees and breaks of the fifth metatarsal of the foot. If indicated by individual tests, rehab measures and orthotics are employed to prevent their occurrence.

Other testing enables Krzyzewski to fine-tune the intensity of his team's practice regimen to match the physical and emotional stress facing his players. “That's a brilliant coach utilizing some of the tools that are available to him through the K Lab, and through the testing done by our medical staff, that helps with some data points for him,” explains Moorman.

And there's a dedicated team physician once again playing a crucial supporting role, a contribution commemorated by a collection of rings from NCAA basketball championships, football bowls and a Baltimore Ravens Super Bowl win that came prior to his current Duke tenure. "My cup runneth over," he says.

Moorman Relishes Strong Ties With Duke

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