Kotys Family Album

How Superstar Turned Into A Hero Of Life

  By Edwin Pope   Sports Editor  The Miami Herald

  Reprinted with permission from a July 1990 sports editorial

  Bear Bryant had Mitch Berger to lunch, “one on one!”  South Bend’s Jewish community of 4,000 promised to “adopt” Berger so he wouldn’t feel out of place at Notre Dame.  Arnold Palmer tried to woo him to Wake Forest.  The big three of the Ivy League—Harvard, Yale, Princeton—lined up panting. 

  Berger was an accident looking for a place to happen.  One hundred schools courted The Herald’s Athlete of the Year in 1970.  No one could possibly keep his head through all that coddling. 

Oh no?

The kid from Coral Gables wasn’t your normal 17 year old, 6-4 235 pound All-American defensive tackle and Academic All-American.

He noticed that  “most of the big-time football schools hardly said anything about education.”  Harvard did.

He noticed the “football schools” put him with other players when he visited.  Harvard put him with other students. 

Academic Choice

  Berger picked Harvard.  “My teachers convinced me I had to think about life after football,” he said.  “You can’t imagine how huge a decision that is for a kid.”

  A severe knee injury took him out his junior season before he came back to be second-team All-East as a senior.  But bad knees don’t keep you out of med school.  It was only 11 years ago that he received the University of Miami’s Allpha Omega Alpha Award for “best typifying the relationship between doctor and patient.”

  Berger today is a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Washington.

  I’m sure thee are people, maybe even some of his Coral Gables “former cellmates” who still think he missed out big when he didn’t sashay off to Alabama or Notre Dame.

  He never heard the roar of the crowd at Tuscaloosa or Notre Dame.  And what he does now is quite tedious.  “I stand up all day operating, researching, teaching.”

Still, for a guy who thought jock meant a piece of cloth with two straps, Berger is deeply grateful to football. 

Doctor’s Patience

 “I’d have never made it if it weren’t for all those afternoons on that blazing-hot football field with Nick Kotys yelling at us.  I saw a lot of medical classmates fail because they didn’t have enough patience.  Football is so tedious, so repetitious, above all it teaches you patience.”

 He came home recently for a 20^th reunion of his Gables class.  He stayed with his parents in Hollywood.  He visited his brother Bruce, who played at Penn and now is a lawyer in Stuart.  He renewed acquaintanceships with Dean Colson, a tight end who went to Princeton and Glenn Cameron, a linebacker who went to Florida and then played for the Cincinnati Bengals and now, like Colson, is a lawyer. 

 “A lot of those guys are doing well because they realized early enough that there’s life after football,” Berger said.

 Not that heroism in his own field eliminates all problems.  He earns maybe a fifth of what some peers earn in private practice.  When other doctors walk up stairs, he takes the elevator—arthritis at age 37.  Then he had to hurry home from the Gables reunion because one of his own kids had chicken pox.  Chicken pox! For a neurosurgeon’s child!

 “That’s life,” said a man whose own so easily could have gone down the wrong road.  “The little things never change.  I’m just thankful for all the big things.  I’m just thankful I listened to the right people instead of all the others whispering in my ear.  I’m just thankful for the opportunity to devote my life to finding a cure for brain tumors.”