“Like Lou Gehrig and Dr. Alois Alzheimer, Tommy John will always be associated with his condition.

He didn’t discover Tommy John surgery, the way Alzheimer discovered a particular form of dementia, and he wasn’t a helpless victim of ALS the way Gehrig was. In fact, he was unconscious, on the operating table, when Dr. Frank Jobe looked at John’s left elbow and realized he had to do something unprecedented to save John’s pitching career. But John’s life wasn’t at stake. Without the operation, he would have quietly gone home to Terre Haute, Ind. to begin his second life, the way most injured pitchers did.

When John awakened from the surgery in September of 1974, he was puzzled to see his right hand in wraps. Jobe had taken a tendon from that right hand and used it as a replacement for the one in the left elbow that was shattered. There had been transplants to the legs of polio patients, but Jobe was the first to attach the tendon to an elbow. There was no manual for this, and not much confidence either. But John had already given something more valuable than his elbow. He had given Jobe his faith. “