Warrior Girls by Michael Sokolove

Author:Michael Sokolove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

AMONG THE PLEBES

Steve Marshall is among the doctors, physical therapists, athletic trainers, and other researchers trying to solve the mystery of ACL injuries. His passion does not allow him to be particularly measured in conversation. Even when he seems to want to be more temperate, words pour forth. Fragments of research. Thoughts. Observations. “Females jump funky,” he says, by which he means some girls and women do not seem to land well. He can be as eloquent as he is snappy. “The human body is like a symphony,” he observed in another of our interviews. “Some of us were written by Mozart or Beethoven, and some of us were written by committee. What we’re hoping to find out is, Where are the discordant notes and what can we do about them?”

He did not want to imply by either of these statements that all women have biomechanical flaws that lead to injury or that all men move their bodies flawlessly through space. But whatever the glitches are that cause ACLs to rupture, women, statistically, are more prone to them. This is another inconvenient truth, like the high rate of stress fractures in military women or, on the male side, heart attacks and prostate cancer, which no one, by the way, equates with weakness; it is only female differences that are likely to be construed as deficiencies.

Marshall is leading the largest research study of ACL injuries, a $2.8 million project financed by the National Institutes of Health and involving 4,800 subjects enrolled at the nation’s three main service academies: West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy. This is not a lavish amount of money by the standards of large medical studies, but the scope and cost are ambitious for athletics, which rarely loom as a big enough priority to attract much funding.

Marshall sort of stumbled into his life’s work. He was a graduate student in his native New Zealand in the late 1980s, short on money and trying to figure out how best to make a career out of his facility for numbers and computers. “Somebody suggested, ‘Go down the hallway. There’s a guy down there who might have a halftime job for you,’” he recalls. “Things are a lot less formal in New Zealand. I just went down there and he took me on to help out in his research.”

The professor offering the job was an epidemiologist, a field of study that until that moment Marshall had never heard of. But he was quickly attracted to it, sensing that it offered him an opportunity to apply his skills to work that included “a human element.” He met his future wife, an American, moved to the United States, and earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health.

Marshall explains what he does in terms that are almost ghoulish. “As an epidemiologist, what I’m looking for are large, willing groups of subjects, and then I want to follow them until they have interesting events happen to them—bad things, to be honest about it.

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