Chapter 03: An Inspirational Friend, Sports, and Spirituality
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. Tweardy makes connections between his practice in sports and his spiritual sensibility. He begins by talking about an influential friend he at Princeton, Louis Rinaldini, who convinced him to join the crew team. Dr. Tweardy then talks about lot about the experience of rowing crew, where in peak moments, the rower will reach a state of ecstasy. He describes the spiritual dimensions of this experience, shares an analogous experience in basketball, and makes the connection with his sense of spirituality and science.
Identifier
TweardyDJ_01_20190122_C03
Publication Date
1-22-2019
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
David J. Tweardy, MD, Oral History Interview, January 22, 2019
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Personal Background; Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Faith
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
David Tweardy, MD:
And it turns out it was a perfect fit for me. And I was looked at as—I was called Harry High School. I was nicknamed—I was, okay (laughs). I always find that I react interestingly to these, because they don’t mean anything to me, like Harry High School, and “What are you doing here at Princeton?” So I got into Princeton, but Princeton probably was a little more—there was a little more of a culture clash there, but it was really insignificant, because, fortunately, a friend of mine from South Kent, he and I both matriculated the same year. We were roommates, and he was a pretty amazing dude. I mean—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What was his name?
David Tweardy, MD:
His name was Louis Rinaldini, from Mendoza, Argentina. His father was actually a scientist at NYU, biochemist, and his mother was a homemaker. He was a remarkable guy, and in many ways I would say inspirational, and so helped motivate me, although, frankly, I don’t know how much more motivation I needed. But he was a guy, just—he was a double major at Princeton. He was a mechanical engineer and an architect, which were two of the most difficult majors at Princeton at the time. He graduated and got a job with Philip Johnson in New York, probably among the top three architects in the country, if not the world. Decided not—he didn’t like architecture because it didn’t give him enough to kind of really sink his teeth into at probably an early stage of his career. Went into the—got an MBA at Harvard, and then—and because he fluently spoke three languages, English, French, and Spanish, he got a job at Lazard Frères in New York, kind of a small, more boutique-y type of Goldman Sachs. And he brokered the deal for the Japanese purchase of Rockefeller Center, and then he basically retired. (laughter)
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s so funny.
David Tweardy, MD:
It was such a—he’s a character. I mean, everybody who went to Princeton knows Louis, knows Louis, and they all have Louis stories. He’s just—he’s a somewhat larger-than-life guy. And it was just great to go into Princeton with a guy like this. And then, of course, he influenced me there, because I actually was, as I say, I was an athlete, and he was an oarsman. Okay, he rowed as a freshman. I did basketball. I was a walk-on at the Princeton basketball team. And funny story there is—I didn’t know this until years later, but there was a guy, Joe Vaevrika, who was also trying out with me. Joe was actually recruited, though; he was not a walk-on. And then while the trials were going on, I, just as a part of getting a rebound, I sort of jumped on the back of Joe Vaevrika, (laughs) being aggressive, trying to get the rebound, and I apparently hurt his back. Yeah, he fell, took a fall, hurt his back, and so he couldn’t play that year. And I think, in retrospect, I got his position. (laughs)
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, wow.
David Tweardy, MD:
Sorry about that, Joe. But he then joined the team the next year and made the varsity. I, on the other hand, getting back to Lou, I knew I wasn’t going to play for the varsity for about two years, because I actually couldn’t play basketball with South Kent. They didn’t have a basketball team. So I sort of forego my athletics, in a way, to go to South Kent for the academic experience. I kept up enough skills that I could walk on and make the team, but I wasn’t going to play any time soon. So I said, hmm, what am I going to do? So Louis, as an oarsman, the next year he roomed with—in fact, as you might expect, he befriended a bunch of oarsmen, and we all got together in an eight-man kind of double-four suite, and there were five oarsmen. And so I just said, hey, let me try out for crew. And that, again, kismet. It was just the best circumstance, because it turns out crew is maybe the best sport I could have done. It’s—if you know anything about rowing—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Not a lot, just what I’ve watched.
David Tweardy, MD:
Well, it’s one of these (laughs) insane sports, okay. And here’s why. They joke—you joke, and you have to put up with it very early—if you’re not going to be able to understand how everybody else thinks you’re crazy, which is part of the ethos and the attraction of crew, is that who would ever participate in a sport where you had to sit down to participate, and you had to row backward to win. I mean, it’s like, come on. And the other thing that that joke doesn’t tell you is that for every minute of competition, you train for six hours. So it’s like this—the ratio of—people complain about how much training they have to do to participate. There are very few—maybe swimming. Swimming’s like that.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So why—how—what are the ways in which that sport and that scenario was significant for you at that time?
David Tweardy, MD:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think what rowing taught me like no other experience, really, was the limits of one’s capabilities, and how to expand those limits. The physical exertion—I thought I was in great shape, because I played basketball, I went running a lot, and I could run three, four miles if I just wanted to. And remember, this is a time—people were not running back then. It was not one of the things people did. They were working—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
No, because you were at Princeton in 1970, you went?
David Tweardy, MD:
Yeah, ’70-’74. It was not a thing that people did, even—so I thought I was in good shape, but then I started rowing, and that’s a whole different dimension. That’s a whole different level. So I—I mean, the amount of times I would go to—I would come back from crew practice, eat, and go to sleep, just because I was totally exhausted, was amazing. But what I realized is the payoff was you just became amazingly in great shape. And so I think what it taught me was a lesson on the physical side of athletics, and the physicality of people, is just there are really no limits to what you can do, if you just pay a price. The price there was just tremendous fatigue, tremendous pain, actually—or I shouldn’t say tremendous. But the thing about rowing, and if you’ve talked to any elite athlete or exertion athlete—long-distance runners and aerobic exercisers—is you have to put up with lactic acidosis. It’s the phenomenon that you can’t—the muscles can’t clear the lactic acid quickly enough, and that causes pain, because the body knows—and because you’re actually causing muscle damage when that happens. And so you have to learn to be a little bit tolerant of pain, and dose it, almost. And so rowing, for instance, a 2,000-meter race, you’re rowing pretty much at your threshold of pain for six minutes, and that’s—it sounds a little interesting, and, in fact, I’ve told people one of the things I’ve noticed in the last 40 years is masochism has gone really out of style. (laughs) It used to be more a part of my—especially about rowing. I mean, rowing had a real streak of that, because in order to get better you had to just—you had to go through—walk on fire a little bit, and this walking on fire was to exercise to exhaustion, and to muscle pain.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, is there something else going on at the same time, though, in the experience? I mean, here you are. You’re rowing. You’re in this situation with a group of other oarsmen. You’re outdoors. You’re in the water. It’s the scenario. And you’re experiencing pain. But what else is going on?
David Tweardy, MD:
Oh, yeah. I mean, there is a whole lot more. It’s a social group. I mean, as I mentioned, five to six of the guys in my eight-man suite, if you will, were oarsmen. So there was a lot—there was a great support system for it. It’s funny to talk about it as support because we really did not seem to be supporting each other, but it was there. I mean, you’re almost more giving each other a hard time whenever the opportunity came up, but frankly you were forming a support network for each other.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, and there’s that whole phenomenon of when you’re in the moment of something like that, and psychologists talk about that experience of flow, when you’re sort of operating—
David Tweardy, MD:
Oh. Ah, yeah. Well, so that’s the minute that you’re training for, you’re training six hours for. There is—yeah, so the part I’ve emphasized is what you learn about yourself, and what you can achieve if you put your mind to it, in a physical realm. The other thing that is very important is that there are these moments—ecstasy comes to mind. It’s kind of a strange word, but—where—in fact, the only book that I’ve read that captures this is a book that was written about five years ago. The Boys in the Boat was written about the 1936 University of Washington crew that won the gold medal in Berlin. It’s one of several other stories. The important—of course, the highly touted and very important story was Jesse Owens in that Olympics. It was his Olympics. But the other story, this phenomena was the fact that a high school—or, sorry, a college crew went and beat the world’s finest oarsmen—Italy, Germany, etc.—in the Olympics. And in that book, the writer, who’s not an—I don’t think he was an oarsman, but he was interviewing the last surviving member of that team, and he wrote a book around it, because the story around that guy is—there’s some parallels to my own life, although he had a much harder childhood. I think he came from a much more split home, etc., but he prevailed. But the moment when eight men, or eight women, or eight men and women, are in a boat, and the synchrony is spot on. There is this—it’s called swing. The phenomenon gets you to that point of perfect ecstasy on a boat is called swing, where everybody’s moving up to the catch at the exact same time, their weight’s distributed evenly, and they’re all centered, and then they hit the stroke at the same time, they finish at the same time, and it lasts, for the most part, maybe—it can last maybe six to ten strokes, but it is like nothing else. It’s like discovering God’s secrets. It’s—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I was going to ask if there was a spiritual connection.
David Tweardy, MD:
Yeah, there. There is no que—I think part of it—I think you probably can appreciate this, having talked to lots of people, but I always remember Willa Cather’s quote from I think her first book, which is, “There are many life stories, but they each go on and occur as if they’ve never happened before.” I think there are so many events that we kind of try to bring together and try to coalesce around, and I think spirituality is one way we do it, because words sometimes can’t handle it. And so you’re right: it’s a spiritual moment, because in that instance it’s like—it’s not you in the knowledge, you in the discovery; it’s actually you and seven other people are achieving this moment that’s—I think it is spiritual. In fact, sport—and that’s, frankly, maybe why, sports became important to me, because I think just as new discoveries can capture a spiritual moment that is difficult to reproduce, but you try to reproduce it. But sports also --I vividly remember moments like that. I remember seeing things that are miraculous in sports. For instance, my freshman year—I’ve told this story so many times, just because it’s so meaningful to me, but the one thing about getting close to being an elite athlete—and I would say I was close; I wasn’t an elite athlete—but you have the exposure to elite athletes. For instance, when I was an oarsman in my sophomore year, I trained with a guy by the name of Pete Raymond, who was the two man in the Olympic eight-man shell that won the silver medal in the ’72 Munich Olympics. His physical condition was just unbelievable, and it was just—knowing what he did in a day of workouts, and you compare it to what you did, is like a whole different, almost a whole different species of person, or of human. The story, though, of this spiritual moment I had in basketball was there was a guard by the name of Brian Taylor. He was a sophomore. The freshman team, back in the years that they had freshman teams, would scrimmage against the varsity when both teams were at home on Saturday morning. And so at one scrimmage—I’ll never forget it—I was a forward, a small forward, and I was guarding the guy who ends up leading it, who was starring on the freshman team. And the other guard, who wasn’t supposed to shoot—he was actually the point guard—did take a shot. He went over towards the rim, hit off the back of the rim, and as you probably have seen it careens off over and hits the back, careens over. And I turned, because I thought I had a shot to rebound. I knew where the ball was going. I was heading for the wall. And then all of a sudden, appearing out of the periphery of my eye, is this waist, a pair of shorts. (laughs) And I stopped, because I was going to probably collide with it. And it turns out Brian Taylor had basically—saw what was happening. He also wanted the rebound, but he had abilities that were like I would never, ever have in a lifetime. He jumped from the foul line, and because the ball was coming over the paint he was able to grab the ball about two to three feet above the rim and jam it, having jumped from the foul line, 15 feet away. And so I just, like, suddenly bird’s eye view, maybe groundhog’s view, and I just—it’s like, it’s a miracle. It’s the first time I’d ever seen anybody do that, even the pros, or—and be that. So sports does have the ability to give you spiritual moments that are pretty much unique, that you’d never have experienced before, and that’s one of them. So sports and science, I think, did do that, and along with other things.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, it’d be interesting to pick up some of those themes as we go into other areas, because it obviously has a lot of connection to how you feel about working on teams and a lot that. Yeah, so we get a spirituality interview. How cool is that? (laughter)
David Tweardy, MD:
Yes. Yes. Go figure, right?
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, it’s following the story.
David Tweardy, MD:
Yes.
Recommended Citation
Tweardy, David J. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 03: An Inspirational Friend, Sports, and Spirituality" (2019). Interview Chapters. 1385.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1385
Conditions Governing Access
Open
