SB XXIV Memory

Bruce:

I will have to cogitate on the best and worst Super Bowls, but let me share with you an anecdote that marries my training days at Vandy with one Super Bowl to which you alluded:

As pathology residents, we had to present autopsy findings to the Internal Medicine residents at their noon conference each Monday. This entailed having a bunch of photos ready, reading up on the relevant diseases, knowing the patient's medical history, etc. The head of the Medicine department, John Leonard, was a skilled physician who wasn't without his eccentricities. One thing in particular I remember was that the guy, brilliant as he was, couldn't figure out how to translate military time notation to civilian and vice-versa. He apparently could master the intricacies of human disease, but adding and subtracting 12 eluded him.

Anyway, one of the things he would do is "pimp" the residents - medical school speak for putting trainees on the spot with questions. He would always get carried away and go real long on the first case, leaving just a few minutes for the second. We wouldn't know going in which case would be presented first, so we had to prepare as if our case would be the first one, which would be beaten into the ground. Then the second case, which took as long to prepare as the first, would get short shrift.

So the day of the 49ers-Broncos Super Bowl, I was at the hospital preparing a case. I remember having missed all of the first quarter and a bit of the second, and then passing a TV in a waiting room on the way out - it was already a blowout. So now I was miffed: I missed part of the SB, and the part that I was going to be able to watch was already in garbage time.

So you probably have guessed by now that my case went second. And Dr. Leonard, the medicine chairman, spent the first 55 minutes or so on the first case. It was a scheduled one hour conference that usually went a few minutes late. So when I got up to present, I turned to a colleague and said: "What's the significance of 55 to 10?" He said "The Super Bowl?" I said, somewhat wistfully: "No, the amount of time Dr. Leonard allots to the two cases!"