It would be difficult to argue with the proposition that the torn labrum was sport injury du jour in the year 2000. Over the past six months, Dr Marc Philippon, the Canadian-born hip specialist now practising in Florida, successfully performed surgery to repair the condition on a trio of professional golfers (Greg Norman, Steve Elkington, and Jesper Parnevik), an Olympic ice-skater (Tara Lipinsky), a broken-down sportswriter (this one), and NFL quarterback Jay Fiedler, the 29-year-old Dartmouth graduate who has improbably led the Miami Dolphins into the second round of this year's play-offs.
A year ago this week the Dolphins were unceremoniously ousted from the play-offs in a humiliating 62-7 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Coach Jimmy Johnson resigned within 24 hours, and he was followed into retirement by the team's legendary quarterback, Dan Marino.
It was widely assumed that Miami faced a long rebuilding period, and that this would be accomplished under the direction of Marino's designated heir, Damon Huard.
The notion that the Dolphins' return to the promised land would be sparked by an Ivy League-educated Jewish intellectual whose principal claim to fame was a somewhat distant kinship to the late Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler was the furthest thing from anyone's mind, but then they hadn't reckoned on the perseverance of Jay Fiedler.
Consider: three springs ago Fiedler had been waived by both the Philadelphia Eagles and Cincinnati Bengals, and had been away from the NFL for the better part of two years. He was serving as a volunteer high school coach while working out on his own, and was seriously contemplating the prospect of having to find a real job.
He decided not to wait for an NFL team to contact him. Instead, Fiedler pieced together a personal highlight film - a compilation of his greatest hits from his Dartmouth days, his two NFL exhibition seasons, and from his stint with the Amsterdam Admirals of the World League.
Fiedler sent the videotape package, along with a covering letter, to each and every NFL team. Only one of them, the Minnesota Vikings, responded.
"It was basically a last-ditch effort to get back into the league," said Fiedler of his shameless self-promotion. "If that call from Minnesota hadn't come that spring I would have been done. Being out of the league for two years and not getting a call would have put me on the sidelines for good. "What would I have done? Possibly kept coaching - or perhaps used that Dartmouth degree to get a job somewhere in New York, on Wall Street or elsewhere."
He spent 1998 as a backup with the Vikings, 1999 in the same role with the Jaguars, and was expected to play a reserve role in Miami, particularly after he underwent hip surgery late in the summer.
Even in retirement, Marino continued to cast a long shadow over the Dolphins' locker room. Fiedler had to dress each day beside a veritable shrine to St Danny - Marino's glass-enclosed locker at the Dolphins' training complex. Moreover, Marino, working for HBO's Inside the NFL programme, didn't even wait for the season to begin before criticising coach Dave Wannstedt's decision to start Fiedler instead of Huard, his own chosen heir.
In winning the job, Fiedler became the first Ivy Leaguer to start a season opener for an NFL team since Columbia's Marty Domres almost 30 years ago. He is also the first Jewish quarterback ever to have started for the Dolphins, a team located in a city with a large population of that persuasion.
A competitive decathlete, Fiedler had attended Dartmouth in part because the Ivy League doesn't have spring football practice, a circumstance which allowed him to participate in both football and track.
"When it came down to it, I always wanted to get a good education," Fiedler explained a couple of days ago. "Both of my parents are teachers. They've always stressed education first. There are always people that are going to say, `It's time to give it up, you've got a Dartmouth degree, go use it', but I wanted to keep on chasing that dream of playing and starting in the NFL. I thought I had the capability of doing it."
Having won the Miami quarterback job, Fiedler proceeded to throw 14 touchdown passes and run for another this year. These weren't exactly Dan Marino numbers, but Fiedler's athletic agility added another dimension to which Dolphin supporters had become unaccustomed over the years. In 16 regular season games, Fiedler was credited with 267 rushing yards. Marino had run for a grand total of 87 in 17 years.
Having led his team to a 11-5 regular season record, demonstrating to Miami fans that there was life after Marino after all, Fiedler bounced back from a horrendous first half (he threw three interceptions in the first 10 minutes) to lead the Dolphins past the Colts, 23-17, in last weekend's play-off opener, advancing to Saturday second-round game against the Raiders in Oakland.
Raiders coach Jon Gruden recalls Fiedler from the 1995 pre-season. Gruden was the Eagles' offensive co-ordinator, when Fiedler was competing for a job in Philadelphia.
"He's a great kid, a great competitor," said Gruden in anticipating Saturday's match. "Jay Fiedler's a guy that can hurt you with his head. He can hurt you with his feet, and he can use the people around him to make plays." "I'm just trying to stay focused on what I need to do for this club," said Fiedler. "I'm not trying to put myself in Dan Marino's shoes and say I've got to do what he did for 17 years in order for this team to succeed. I can play within myself and lead this team in different ways than Dan did."
