Tommy John was a pioneer in pitcher surgeries. He was the first pitcher to have his ulnar collateral ligament reconstructed in 1974 by Dr. Frank Gobe. Recently, I ran across a couple accounts of the injury and surgery that show some insights from the time.
First, Tommy John explains how the injury felt to him.
After the injury to his left elbow on July 17, 1974, Tommy John would wake up in his home in Yorba Linda, Calif., and the bones, he says, would go “pop and crack,” like giant dice rattling around. [2]
A few months later, the team doctor, Frank Jobe, performed what would become to be known eventually as Tommy John surgery.
The elbow did not heal, and Dr. Jobe went in and operated on September 25. It was worse than anybody expected. Totally shredded, Jobe had to cut a seven-inch strip of tendon from John’s right arm for use in sewing up the muscles in the torn left elbow. Even that may not work, Jobe said. Maybe the tissue would not be accepted, and if it weren’t , they’d have to do something else. Even if it did heal, Jobe said, he could make no promises about the ultimate strength of the arm. He called the operation “quite serious” and, on a scale of one to ten, he had it near the top “as one of the serious operations for a pitcher.”[2]
Today the operation is fairly common with a good success rates, but it was cutting edge at the time. The operation did run into some issues when the ulnar nerve was injured and atrophy set in.
Dr. Frank Jobe took several inches of tendon out of Tommy’s right forearm and grafted it in the left elbow, but somewhere along the line the ulnar nerve began to drop out. This is a conduit of sensation known to the layman as the “crazy bone”, but it was like an unplugged electric wire so far as Tommy was concerned. The arm and hand began to atrophy and parts of the fingers [began] to mummify. [1]
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