Ouch: Gregg Doyel undergoes NFL combine medical tests
INDIANAPOLIS – The door is plain and unmarked. The room is small. If you’re an NFL draft prospect and you're brought to this door, to this room at IU Health Methodist Hospital, something has gone wrong.
Roughly 300 of the top 2017 draft prospects are headed next week to Indianapolis for the NFL Scouting Combine, which begins Tuesday at Lucas Oil Stadium. All of them will end up at Methodist for a battery of tests. Only a few will end up here, in this small room behind this unmarked door.
Where I am.
About to throw up.
The testing they’ll do in this room — the testing I’ve just done, after being allowed to partake in the same cardiac testing the players will undergo — isn’t hard. Until it becomes so hard, too hard, I have to quit. There’s no shame in that. The draft prospects who walk behind this unmarked door? They’ll quit, too. That’s the point. That’s the goal.
And that’s why Dr. Michael Emery — medical director of the IU Health Center for Cardiovascular Care in Athletics — decided last year to stop putting NFL prospects on the treadmill behind the unmarked door, the biggest treadmill you’ve ever seen, a $10,000 Hummer of a treadmill that can handle even the world's most massive athletes.
Dr. Emery puts them on the cardio bike instead.
Why? Because there have been times in this room behind the unmarked door, doing the sorts of cardiac stress tests required of a world-class athlete, when Dr. Emery has literally had to catch athletes as they collapse on the treadmill. Those athletes were small. They were women. Both times, Dr. Emery could see it coming. He stood behind them, straddling the treadmill, and sure enough:
“They start to fall and I go, ‘Woop!’” Dr. Emery says, cradling his arms into a catching position. “That’s why we put the football players over here.”
Emery is pointing to the racing bike, the one I’m sitting on, the one that will break me.
Wait, what’s that you’re putting on my face …
* * *
Let’s back up a minute, to the blood tests.
Roughly one in 40 people pass out when they give blood. Athletes, lawyers, sports writers, anybody. One in 40. So at Methodist they have these future NFL players, who can weigh as much as 350 pounds, lie down first. Sure enough, a handful every year — one in 40, give or take — close their eyes and don’t open them until a capsule of smelling salts is waved under their nose.
I’m not one of those 1-in-40 who pass out. Hey, you take your victories where you can get them. Now we’re following the tape on the floor to our next destination: the cardiac department. Methodist is a large facility, see, and players come to the hospital in waves. The easiest way to direct traffic is to line the floor with colored tape: red, blue, green. Follow red to the cardiac department.
And take off your shirt. Even, sigh, me.
A nurse attaches 10 electrodes for the electrocardiogram (EKG). For most combine participants, this easy and relatively cheap test is the extent of their heart checkup. But if those squiggly lines show anything even remotely problematic, the athlete is just getting started. Such was the case in 2013, when testing at Methodist revealed heart abnormalities with Utah defensive tackle Star Lotulelei. He was held out of combine workouts, and further testing revealed his heart was fine; doctors suspect a viral infection produced the initial results.
My EKG raises no red flags, but I’m here for the whole treatment. And so after cardiac sonographer Lauren Wang pulls the electrodes off and notes that most draft prospects — unlike me — shave their chests, we move on.
Next is the echocardiogram, basically a sonogram of the heart. Wang smears Vaseline-like gel on my chest, then rubs what’s called a transducer over my rib cage. Now my beating, blob-like heart is showing up on a monitor.
Dr. Emery is telling me what he’s seeing on that monitor, but none of it registers until he says the most fit draft prospects tend to have “athlete’s heart” – marked by bigger ventricles and thicker walls. Now I’m curious. I’ve been boxing for 10 years, and those workouts are no joke, so I’m wondering if I have …
“No,” he says, looking at the monitor.
Look again, I say.
“Nope, you don’t have athlete’s heart,” Dr. Emery says.
He’s 45 but he looks about 30. Where did you go to school, I ask Dr. Doogie Howser.
“Eastern High School in Greentown, just outside Kokomo,” he says.
And then?
"IU,” he says, for undergrad, grad and medical school.
It was about a year ago that Methodist launched the Center for Cardiovascular Care in Athletics. They wanted a world-class sports cardiologist to run it. I ask around and learn that IU Health recruited Dr. Emery from private practice in Greenville, S.C. He's as good as it gets.
So I’ll take his word for it: No athlete’s heart in my chest. Just a broken one. Awww.
* * *
And now we reach the unmarked door. Inside is a room of no more than 250 square feet, a room with a treadmill and stationary bike and bank of computers. Inside is the stress test, a fabled but little known part of the scouting combine. Last year two NFL prospects bailed on the test, quitting suspiciously early, saying they’d had enough when the computers attached to them via electrodes indicated they’d barely gotten started.
My turn.
Dr. Emery opens the door, and exercise physiologist Darrika Van is waiting inside with clippers. She's going to make room for the electrodes by shaving my chest, though Dr. Emery uses the verb “shear." Like I’m a sheep or something.
Now she’s closing my nostrils with a padded blue pincher and putting me through a series of breathing tests: explode a breath out, then keep exhaling for six more seconds. Does that sound easy? Two words for you:
Try it.
Anyway, Van is attaching more electrodes to my chest and draping a big blue mask over my face, a mask that covers my nose and mouth. She inserts a breathing tube into an opening near my mouth, a long plastic tube that goes up over my head and down my back like a dorsal fin.
At first, I felt like Bane.
Now, I feel like Flipper.
Whatever. Let’s do this stress test. The first two minutes on the bike are a warmup. No resistance. I’m told what the draft prospects who sit on this very bike will be told: Stay seated and keep the revolutions per minute between 65 and 70. The tension will be gradually increased, and eventually all of us will drop below 55 rpm. Test over.
Dr. Emery says the test should last between 8-12 minutes. I’m begging him: Make sure I survive eight minutes —– this is going in the paper, for crying out loud — but he's not listening. Instead he's muttering something to Darrika Van about “195 watts,” which apparently is how much effort it should require an average, mid-40s male to hit the breaking point. A watt is a mathematical equation that measures, essentially, the power expended during a given physical activity. It's also …
Hold on. Average, mid-40s male?
So I’m pedaling. The tension increases, as does my heart rate. What started at 59 beats per minute is now hitting 80, 90, 100. A person’s predicted max heart rate, Dr. Emery was telling me, is roughly 220 minus your age, but that generally speaking most people should hit 85 percent of that. I’m 46. So, 85 percent of 174 is 148.
My heart rate is 140, 150, 160. Darrika Van and Dr. Emery are prodding me: “Come on, Gregg! Let’s go, Gregg!” They will do this for every draft prospect who sits here, too. They're finding how strong our heart is by seeing how far we can push it.
After a lifetime on that bike, my rpm drop below 55 and I’m told to stop pedaling. This whole time Dr. Emery has been studying two screens of data, one a bunch of squiggly lines, the other filled with rows of medical jargon abbreviations above columns of numbers. Looks like sabermetrics to me, and my VORP — sorry, my VO2 — is 43.8. No idea what that means, though he says my heart performed at roughly 130 percent of the average mid-40s male. Ha!
Then he shares my final numbers: 316 watts. Maximum heart rate of 172. And it was 15 minutes before I broke. There you go, Dr. Emery, take your “athlete’s heart” and shove …
“I’m impressed,” he says. “Most draft prospects are in the low 300s (watts), too.”
Really, I say? Because I do work out hard and …
“Although,” he says, “we had an offensive lineman hit 400.”
They hand me a cup of water and a few of the towels they’ll give draft prospects next week, tell me to put on a shirt for heaven's sake and take me to the MRI station. Methodist has some of the biggest MRI scanners available, with a 70-centimeter diameter that can fit even the biggest NFL prospect. A heart MRI can take an hour, though the more common MRI’s are for other parts of the body. A year ago, one draft prospect needed eight different MRIs.
That’s a guy who’s been through some battles.
But if he made it to the MRI machine, that means he made it out of the room with the unmarked door, away from the shears and the bike and breaking point. Those are some battles, too.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter:@GreggDoyelStar or atfacebook.com/gregg.doyel
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