Indy Drivers Call On A Friend, Dr. Trammel

INDIANAPOLIS - Make them the advance force in a 200-mph blast into steel-reinforced concrete.

Pulverize them. Rip away the protective skin and tissue to expose the bones. Spray them with shards of glasslike carbon fiber. Grind them along the asphalt.

Indy cars are designed to shatter upon savage contact with a wall. Feet, ankles and legs are not.

Calling Dr. Trammell.

Calling Dr. Terry Trammell.

Rick Mears will never again work the pedals of a race car. He will not walk to a Penske-Chevrolet the morning of May 30 and bid for a record fifth victory in the 77th running of the Indianapolis 500. Mears retired in December.

By all rights, though, Mears' career - probably his very ability to walk - should have ended Sept. 7, 1984, in a crippling crash at Sanair Speedway outside Montreal. It would have if it hadn't been for Trammell's nearly magical orthopedic creativity.

The Indy 500 field will include three-time world Formula One champion Nelson Piquet. It will include Jeff Andretti, who for weeks after last year's Indy 500 prodded Piquet along the path to rehabilitation by vowing to get back onto his own reconstructed feet before Piquet did.

Piquet brutalized his feet in a crash during practice. Andretti, younger son of racing legend Mario Andretti, crushed his when a broken wheel hub spit off a tire and propelled his Lola-Chevrolet nose-first into a wall just past the halfway point of the 500.

Piquet may need one shoe 1 1/2 sizes larger than the other. But he has two feet that work. Initially, that's all he asked. The urge to race was restored along with his lower limbs through a cumulative 17 hours of surgery.

Piquet, overjoyed after he qualified, said yet another procedure will be scheduled after the race. "I go back in for them to take some pins out, some bolts, some nuts." He laughed. "I hope the thing doesn't fall down."

Trammell, 43 and a race fan long before he was a surgeon, has never promised miracles. But he delivers them. His reputation has produced a spinoff industry. What he has accomplished mending Mears and Mario Andretti and A.J. Foyt has brought him patients from other forms of the sport.

Stock-car star Rusty Wallace broke his left wrist in a violent flip at the finish line in the May 2 Winston 500. He wanted to race again in two weeks. He called on Trammell. A pin was inserted in the broken bone. A flexible plastic cast was built for the wrist. Wallace raced.

"I've said this over and over, sort of tongue in cheek, but it's not," Trammell said. "If I had to take care of only race drivers and Indiana farmers, I would have a 100 percent success rate . . . they all go back to work."

After surgery, he said, "A farmer doesn't ask you `if" he'll be able to return to the fields. "He might ask you `when,' but he usually just tells you he did. That's how the drivers are."

What drivers have in Trammell is a friend.

"This guy is so switched onto our way of thinking," said Mario Andretti, who has some of Trammell's hardware in his clavicle. "He knows damned well we're not fools. But what he does, he plays with you to the limit of our pain . . . to the maximum of our psychological capability."

Dr. Steve Olvey, director of neurological intensive care for Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital, also is IndyCar's director of medical affairs and Trammell's counterpart for drivers' head and internal injuries. His recommendation of Trammell to car owner Roger Penske immediately after Mears' 1984 crash led to Trammell's current role and impact.

"Terry was the first to use techniques hand surgeons have used, but with the foot," Olvey said.

Previously, severe injuries of this type led to amputation. With Mears, Trammell said he "just stole techniques from hand surgeons, vascular surgeons, plastic surgeons, everybody I could think of from other areas of the anatomy. What was original was the application."

As close as Trammell gets to the drivers, he is doctor first, friend later. "I don't operate thinking, `This is Rick Mears' foot' . . . `This is Sheila Crawford's husband (Jim) I'm taking care of.' The mind-set is, `It's just a foot, a broken-up foot that needs to be taken care of.' "

But Mears emphasized that Trammell's healing powers extend beyond what he does with the hands.

"Call it bedside manner, or whatever," Mears said, "but when he walked through the door to see you in the hospital, you knew he was a friend coming to see how you were doing, not just a doctor."

That friend kept Rick Mears in racing for Indy victories Nos. 3 and 4. Terry Trammell saves feet first. He saves racing careers as a byproduct.