By John Meyer, Denver Post

VAIL— When a teen-aged Richard Steadman answered the phone one fateful weekend morning in 1955 at his family’s home in Sherman, Texas, the voice at the other end of the line was that of Paul “Bear” Bryant, calling with a scholarship offer to play football for him at Texas A&M. Steadman planned on going to Harvard until Bryant called with what he thought a better offer.

Bryant would go to win 323 games, including six national titles at Alabama. Steadman would go on to revolutionize orthopedics and sports medicine. Six decades later Steadman still tells the story of Bryant’s recruiting pitch with a sense of awe.

Today the walls at the Steadman Clinic in Vail are lined with framed jerseys of athletes Steadman got back on the field including NFL stars Dan Marino and Bruce Smith and hockey legend Mario Lemieux. He fixed tennis great Martina Navratilova and pop singer Rod Stewart.

In the early days of his orthopedic practice in South Lake Tahoe, Steadman had an intuition that putting a reconstructed knee in a cast for eight weeks was the wrong thing to do, even though it was the common practice.

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