From Jock to Doc
By Emily Kaplan
September 20, 2013
It was a simple pass blocking drill during training camp. Simple, that is, until Mark Adickes’ knees went numb.
In college and throughout his eight years of professional football, the 6-4, 278-pound lineman endured several injuries, including an ACL tear and a PCL tear. But this was different. This pain stemmed from his back. “The thought of paralysis or some lifelong debilitation? That just wasn’t something I wanted to explore,” Adickes says. “When I hurt my back, I knew I needed to stop playing.”
He was 31 when the Redskins placed him on injured reserve for the 1992 season, hoping to avoid surgery and contemplating what would come next. With his business degree, he could try something in sales. Or perhaps become an entrepreneur. People always said he had charisma. “I thought about broadcasting,” Adickes says. “Like most athletes.”
But Adickes wasn’t like most athletes.
“Most of us don’t stay up reading until 1 a.m. the night before games,” says Mark Schlereth, a guard who played in 156 NFL games over 12 years and was Adickes’ road roommate for two seasons in Washington. “We always knew he was special.”
Adickes, looking for a way to help others like himself, became enamored with an ambitious idea: he wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon.
He had to start from scratch.
After Robert Griffin III first tore his right ACL in 2009, he ended up on the Houston operating table of Baylor alum—and former Redskins lineman—Mark Adickes. (Rod Aydelotte/AP)
The son of an Army chaplain, Adickes was a military brat who was born in Germany, grew up in the sprawling plains of Central Texas and played college football at Baylor before turning pro. He was a first-round pick in the 1983 USFL draft, and played two seasons for the Los Angeles Express (blocking for quarterback Steve Young) before the Chiefs selected him in the first round of the 1984 NFL supplemental draft.
Born overseas … grew up in Texas … played at Baylor and wound up with the Redskins … sound familiar? “It’s pretty crazy how similar my background is to Robert Griffin III,” Adickes, 52, says.
Perhaps that’s why Griffin, after sustaining an ACL tear in his right knee during the third game of his sophomore season, entrusted Adickes to perform the quarterback’s first reconstructive knee surgery in 2009. The procedure took place at the Ironman Sports Medicine Institute in Houston, a three-hour drive from Baylor. By then Adickes, an orthopedic surgeon and the clinic’s co-medical director, had fully graduated from jock to doc.
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