Mark Hyman portrays himself as a typical parent: highly engaged in the athletic exploits of his two baseball-playing sons, and eager to see them succeed. Maybe too much so, he now says.
Audio: Mark Hyman on Overzealous Parents and ‘Orthopedic Time Bombs’
Several years ago, while writing for BusinessWeek about Little League players who underwent reconstructive surgery on a ruptured ulnar collateral ligament—better known as Tommy John surgery, named for the pitcher whose elbow was famously repaired by the procedure—Mr. Hyman says he scoffed at the players’ parents for allowing the surgery on their young sons. Or for allowing them to pitch so much in the first place.
Before long, though, his older son, a pitcher, complained of elbow pain after a game. The diagnosis was swift: a ruptured UCL. Two years after his father’s self-described “snarky” article about overzealous parents subjecting their children to reconstructive surgery, titled “‘Tommy John’ Comes to High School,” Ben Hyman,, age 18, had the same procedure done. With his father’s blessing, of course.
“You lose sight of the long term,” Mr. Hyman said in a recent interview here at his home, reflecting on occasions when he encouraged his son to pitch a hectic schedule that now makes Mr. Hyman flinch. By encouraging young athletes to train and compete with such intensity all year long, he says, “We think we’re advancing our kids’ sport interests, and it’s just the opposite. We’re preventing them from reaching their potential.”
The experience provided the foundation for a 2009 book, Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession With Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids (Beacon Press). Throughout the account, Mr. Hyman levels a stern gaze at his own past actions as the parent of a young athlete, and at a youth-sports industry that he portrays as fueled largely by the sports-crazed notions of adults with little knowledge of the health risks for children or adolescents.
Severe orthopedic injuries, psychological burnout, eating disorders—all are byproducts of a sporting culture too focused on winning and being the best, he writes. And for those who go on to compete for college teams, the fallout lingers as they wrestle with nagging injuries that, in many cases, never disappear.
In researching the book, Mr. Hyman says he encountered a sports-medicine community rife with concern over the impact of preventable overuse injuries among young athletes. “They were so glad somebody showed up to ask them about this,” he says of the physicians and other medical experts he spoke with—including Frank W. Jobe, the surgeon who first conceived the Tommy John procedure in 1974. (“You know ‘No pain, no gain?’” Dr. Jobe asks Mr. Hyman in the book. “I’d like to punch the guy who said that.”)
As for Ben Hyman, the author’s son, his dreams of making it to a Division I team never transpired. He unsuccessfully tried out as a walk-on for George Washington University’s baseball team a few months after his surgery. Years later Mr. Hyman acknowledges that the vision of a college scholarship was misguided all along: Even without the injury, he says, a big-time program would have been out of reach for his son.
But the surgery and its long aftermath had an unexpected upside, he now says. It allowed Ben Hyman to happily compete for four years, in a far more casual setting, on the university’s club baseball team. Now finished with college, his father reports, Ben is still playing.
“In that sense, I feel good. My kids are still active in sports,” says Mr. Hyman, whose second book, The Most Expensive Game in Town, about the commercialization of youth sports, is scheduled to come out in March.
Still, he worries about the other young athletes whose injuries and fatigue eventually kill their enthusiasm for sports.
“Unfortunately, a lot of kids go through this process, and the last thing they want to do is be involved in organized sports,” he says. “Those are the kids you worry about and feel badly for, because they aren’t able to do something that could add to their lives.”
