Joseph Torg; tried to lessen football injuries
Dr. Joseph Torg, an orthopedic surgeon whose experience treating and researching football players’ spinal cord injuries made him a strong voice in the 1970s for banning a dangerous tackling technique in high schools and colleges, died Dec. 15 at his home in Wayne, Pa. He was 88.
His daughter, Elisabeth Torg, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.
By the mid-1970s, Joseph Torg was well known for his sports-related activities. A former offensive guard for Haverford College, he was the doctor for several Philadelphia teams and was often quoted on players’ injuries. He opened one of the first sports medicine and rehabilitation centers in the United States at Temple University. And he testified in a case in New Jersey that led Little League Baseball to end its boys-only policy.
He was alarmed by a spate of spinal cord football injuries caused by spearing — a technique that involves a player lowering his head, bending his neck and launching himself into an opponent, using the top of his helmet as a battering ram.
“If these forces are greater than the elastic capabilities of the spine,” Dr. Torg explained in a 1992 video narrated by Dick Vermeil, a former Philadelphia Eagles coach, “the spinal segments will buckle.”
In 1975, he told The Associated Press that the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations were “derelict in their responsibility to safeguard the health and well-being of young men playing football” and urged them to change their rules.
He teamed up that year with Ted Quedenfeld, Temple’s head athletic trainer, to collect data about the number of spinal cord injuries in the United States that had been caused by spearing. They called the project the National Football Head and Neck Injury Registry.
Around that time, a colleague said, Dr. Torg put further pressure on the NCAA.
“As I remember, he threatened the NCAA that if they didn’t institute the rule, he’d sue,” said Dr. Raymond Moyer, a professor of orthopedic surgery and sports medicine at the School of Medicine at Temple, in a phone interview. “He didn’t back down from anyone.”
The NCAA and high schools banned spearing in 1976. The NFL followed suit in 1979, largely as a result of a paralyzing hit to the helmet of Darryl Stingley, a New England Patriots receiver, a year earlier.
The registry’s initial findings, published in 1979 in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, documented 259 cervical spine fractures and dislocations among high school, college, and other football players between 1971 and 1975. Ninety-nine of the players became permanent quadriplegics.
The rules against spearing had a significant effect. From 1976 to 1984, the number of cervical spine fractures, dislocations and partial dislocations fell to 42 from 110, and the number of players permanently rendered quadriplegic fell from 34 to just five, according to an article in 1985 in the Journal of the American Medical Association written by Dr. Torg and three colleagues.
Joseph Steven Torg was born Oct. 25, 1934, in Philadelphia.
He earned a bachelor’s degree at Haverford College in 1957. Four years later, he received his medical degree from Temple.
Elisabeth Torg said in an email that her father probably pursued orthopedics “because of his love of football and his own experience with athletic injury (concussion) in high school.”
“When he graduated medical school,” she said, “orthopedic surgery was the most sports-oriented field in medicine and the field that enabled him to treat athletes.”
After interning at San Francisco General Hospital (now Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center) from 1961-62, Dr. Torg spent two years in the Army Medical Corps. Following his residencies at Temple University Hospital and Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children (now Shriners Children’s Philadelphia), he began teaching at Temple in 1968.
He soon became widely known. In 1970, he and Quedenfeld released a study that found conventional football shoes, with seven cleats each three-quarters of an inch long, were far more responsible for knee and ankle injuries than soccer shoes with 14 shorter cleats.
In 1974, Dr. Torg and Quedenfeld opened the Center for Sports Medicine and Science at Temple to treat players from colleges and local professional sports teams, as well as recreational athletes.