T. Wiley did a good job

I did not like Dr. T. Wiley Hodges. Nonetheless, after more than four decades of spinal health I am forced to admit he was highly adept as a surgeon. The circumstances under which I met him were as follows.

In the summer of 1969, Don Chandler and I spent countless hours at Harry Stone Recreation Center, located half a mile from Bryan Adams High School. We would soon be juniors at BA, and we both intended to be on the varsity basketball team. Actually, Don (who stood 6′ 4” and had been one of the top players on the all-sophomore “B” team [of which I was an end-of-the-bencher] the year before) was a lock to make the 1970 team. I, on the other hand, was a guard and one of many guys hoping to be chosen by coach Ralph Zietz to wear the green and white. Theoretically, if I were cut I might have tried out again before my senior year, but I would have had little chance.

Great things happened that summer at Harry Stone, known to humorous individuals as “Fuzzy Rock.” Don was six inches taller, and he did not mind playing rough. He and I engaged in dozens if not hundreds of one-on-one games, both the half-court and the full-court varieties. Never before or since have I seen a one-on-one, full-court game, but we did it mostly for the sake of conditioning and high-speed dribbling skills. If other players were around, we joined with them for some two-on-two or three-on-three. But I mostly recall me and Don going at it, head to head, in friendly yet competitive games. I got better, as he noticed. I intentionally adopted many of the things I had seen up close in the Dallas Chaparrals’ games I attended the previous season. There was one man I imitated most, and he did not play for the local team. James Jones, the New Orleans Bucs’ all-star guard, was a Grambling alumnus and I admired his game greatly. He could handle the ball, he could drive, and the form on his jump shot was simply perfect. I fancied myself a shorter and somewhat paler Jimmy Jones.

Like I stated earlier, Don took note of my improvement as a hoopster. He raved about it. “Rich, I can’t believe your moves!” he said more than once, and he was right. I had learned to create a number of tricky moves and most important, I could put the ball in the hole. One sweltering day, his father came to observe. Don said, “Watch this, Dad. Richard is going to take 10 outside jump shots, and let’s see how many he makes.” Using my beloved red-white-and-blue ABA ball, I made all but one.

Bryan Adams and other area high schools sometimes had informal basketball games that summer. Once we were to play a team in Irving. We went in two cars, one of which got delayed in traffic. For that reason, the five players in the car in which I rode started the game. I suppose you would say most of the “stars” were in the other car. Without fear or shame, I shot the ball, scoring 10 of our first 12 points. I can assure you, the other guys on the team saw what I had done.

No more than a week later, I began to feel pain in my lower back. As a long-time jock, I was accustomed to dealing with minor injuries. They always cleared up—except this time. As a result, my mother took me to the doctor. How she chose the bald-headed Dr. Hodges, whose office bestrode Northwest Highway, I do not know. Perhaps he was the closest orthopedic surgeon to our house. At any rate, he wasted no time in having me X-rayed. He showed us that some bones in the lumbar region of my spine were congenitally malformed. Obviously, this situation had been with me all my life but it took 16 years to manifest. Major surgery, a spinal fusion to be precise, would have to be done. Dr. Hodges stated, without the slightest compassion on his face or in his voice, that I had to stop playing basketball immediately.

My parents decided that for school purposes it would be best to wait until the following summer to have the operation done; for the next nine months, I had to wear a bulky back brace. I walked into Presbyterian Hospital on June 4, 1970, not knowing quite what to expect. I found out the next day. Dr. Hodges had taken a slice of bone off my right hip and fused it into my lower back—two major incisions involving not just muscle but bone. The pain was far beyond anything I had ever experienced before. The nurses gave me copious pain-killers, but they seemed to have little effect. It was awful, horrible, indescribable. I thought I was going to die from pain, but of course I did not. Carol Brandeberry, my girlfriend at the time, was an aspiring nurse, and she did her best to help me through it.

Dr. Hodges came into my room now and then to do obligatory checkups. His bedside manner left a lot to be desired. He had an old-school attitude wherein patients or family members were not encouraged to ask questions. As he saw it, he was the king and I was a peon. There came a point at which I decided to return rudeness for rudeness, and that seemed to catch him by surprise. I spent 17 days in the hospital and was finally taken home in an ambulance. Almost six weeks after my surgery, I was allowed to get out of bed for the first time.

Rehabilitation was slow but steady. While my lower back had been permanently robbed of flexibility, the earlier tenuous situation was resolved. I have had no spinal pain ever since, for which I am deeply grateful. It could have gone differently. We had to sign a waiver before I underwent surgery stating that we would not sue in case of paralysis and other complications. If I had not been paralyzed, I might still have had to deal with chronic back pain. A vigorous life—one in which I could play hoops, do physical work, run in hundreds of races and swing Korean kids round and round—would have been out the window. I would have been an object of pity for my family: “Oh, poor Richard, he’s had back problems for so many years.” None of that happened.

Dr. Hodges, who died in the 1980s, was utterly clueless about warm-and-fuzzy stuff. His job, as he saw it, was to provide medical service, not emotional comfort. I think everything turned out just fine. If I despised him back then, the main thing is that he was very good with the scalpel. Well done, Doc!

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The Vietnam War was still going on when I enrolled at the University of Texas. The U.S. had a military draft—girls were excluded, by the way—and unfortunately, I got a very low number. In 1972, I went to San Antonio and took a nerve-wracking exam with a number of other young men. I would have passed, been inducted and quite possibly sent to southeast Asia, but I was clutching a to-whom-it-may-concern letter written by Dr. Hodges. In it, he described the operation he had performed on me two years earlier. Simple as that, I was given a medical deferment. I returned to Austin with a big grin on my face.