When Steve Douglas enters the United Center for a Bulls game, nothing special happens. No extra swoops and swirls from the laser lights, no added pompon swishing from the LuvaBulls, no bellybutton baring by Dennis Rodman. Nothing.
And if Douglas has his way, by the time the game is over nothing has happened to change his status as just another face in the crowd. Whether the hometown heroes win or lose, the perfect post-game for Douglas is a brief stop in the Bulls locker room, perhaps a short chat with trainer Chip Schaefer or a coach or player or two, then out the door and into the night. Just an invisible man in the Bulls’ inner circle.
Invisible, yet indispensable–especially if a Bull or an opposing player has the extreme misfortune to catch an elbow or a head in the mouth during a game. Or has a nagging toothache that demands relief. Then it’s Dr. Douglas to the rescue.
Dr. D. is the Bulls team dentist, an increasingly lofty association that began humbly enough nine seasons ago. And although that link may seem somewhat awe-inspiring in a land filled with wonderment over the ways and means of the Wizards of West Madison Street, a trip to the United Center by the low-key Arlington Heights dentist is hopefully nothing more than just another fan’s outing.
“I can’t begin to tell you how basically invisible I am at most Bulls games, and that’s the way we all want it to be,” said Douglas, who spends four days at his Arlington Heights office and two days in his downtown Chicago location.
“I show up. I sit in my seat (about 17 rows up). I watch the game. They know I’m there. But much more often than not, I’m not needed. Unless there’s an emergency. Then I go downstairs.”
Like the night when former Bulls player B.J. Armstrong, one of the few Bulls ever to wear a protective mouth guard full time, had the bad luck to catch a ferocious chop to the teeth while moving to the basket. A bloodied B.J. wound up receiving emergency treatment on the floor, in the locker room and eventually in Douglas’ Loop office until close to 3 a.m.
“And, remarkably enough, after Steve completed treating B.J.’s teeth that night, B.J. caught a regular flight out that morning to catch up with the team for a game in Detroit the next evening,” said Schaefer, who has been with the Bulls since 1990. “As Steve showed in that instance, and has repeatedly showed over the years, he is incredibly accommodating to helping the Chicago Bulls whenever dental crises come up.”
And it’s not just the good guys in the red, white and black who have been treated by Douglas. Like the evening when the eminently boo-able Rick Mahorn of the Detroit Pistons took a resounding elbow just above the bottom gum line from former Bull Bill Cartwright.
That night, in a typically restrained display of non-partisanship, Douglas treated Mahorn, whose four lower teeth had been laid in (indented backward at an angle) from the force of Cartwright’s blow. “But thanks to Steve’s quick actions, Mahorn lost none of the teeth and wasn’t in terrible pain for very long,” recalled then-Bulls trainer Mark Pfeil, now with the Milwaukee Bucks. “We joked later that Bulls fans probably wished Steve would have let Mahorn suffer a little more.”
The good doctor seems to work overtime to deflect attention from himself. “I’m really just a practicing dentist who happens to be associated with an NBA team, a team that just happens to represent an organization that has grown to stand for excellence,” said Douglas.
“People like Michael Jordan and Jerry Krause and Jerry Reinsdorf are the ones who built that first-class team. If I in any way contribute to that standard of excellence, that’s great, but I’m not sure it’s true. What I do know is true is that I have had a great viewing perch during my nine years around the Bulls to watch the championship teams evolve.”
What some athletic health professionals would find incredible is the diversity of Douglas’ professional credentials. The 42-year-old Douglas is also a licensed athletic trainer and a certified physical therapist. In fact, he worked in physical therapy for almost six years before beginning the study of dentistry at Southern Illinois University’s school in Alton.
“You will find few health or medical professionals with a resume like Steve’s,” said the Bulls’ Schaefer. “I think that’s one big reason he has such an easy rapport with the players.”
“I was drawn to a career in medicine from very early on,” Douglas said. “My father was a general surgeon in Monroe (Mich.) and as a kid, I loved going to the hospital with him. His world fascinated me.”
The world of sports also held a fascination for the young Michigan lad. “I played defensive back at Monroe High and swam on the varsity but also knew that my future did not lie in being a professional athlete,” said Douglas.
But he knew he wanted to be in health care, and transferred from Alma College in Michigan to Northwestern University so he could major in physical therapy.
Douglas’ move to Northwestern would prove fortuitous. There, he became associated with Dick Hoover, then the Wildcats’ athletic trainer and a budding entrepreneur who was developing a plan for a string of physical therapy clinics. “Dick started out with two clinics under the umbrella Suburban Physical Therapy Group, with one in Des Plaines and one in Chicago,” Douglas said. “I worked at the one in Des Plaines and a young fellow from Nebraska named Mark Pfeil staffed the one in Chicago.”
By 1976, one year out of Northwestern with a degree in physical therapy, Douglas was assisting Hoover as a trainer with the Chicago Sting soccer team in addition to maintaining a work schedule at the clinics. He also did extensive volunteer work with high school sports programs, notably the football teams at Rolling Meadows, Forest View, Maine East, Ridgewood and Notre Dame of Niles.
By 1980, Douglas was set to expand his professional health horizons. “Mark Pfeil had been asked to interview for the position of trainer with the Bulls, and he wound up taking that job,” Douglas said. “That happened just at the time I was weighing whether to go to dental school or medical school. My final decision came down to the fact that I was 27 years old at the time and if I went into orthopedics, between school, internship and residency, I probably wouldn’t be in practice until I was around 40. If I went into dentistry, the entire process would take much closer to only five years.”
So it was on to SIU’s dental school, where he also met his future wife, Carol, a law student. Carol is now a litigator who moves back and forth between regional court work and the couple’s Arlington Heights home.
Asked to describe her husband, Carol said laughing, “Well, he is very close mouthed. The standard line about him has always been that getting a word out of him is like pulling a tooth.”
After graduating in 1984, he returned to Chicago and faced the formidable task of opening and building a dental practice. He opened his Chicago office in January 1985 and his Arlington Heights location in 1990.
While Douglas’ dental practice was taking root, Pfeil needed a specialist to help plug one hole on the Bulls’ expanding medical staff. “Back in 1987, Bulls management and the existing medical staff decided that we should add a dentist,” Pfeil said. “I presented Steve as a candidate because I bet we could have searched the country and not come up with a person who had the depth and breadth of his professional credentials and hands-on knowledge.”
Douglas was added on to the Bulls medical staff, a group that has now expanded to include senior member Dr. John Hefferon, an orthopedic surgeon; Dr. Jeffrey Weinberg, an internist; Dr. Frank Lagattuta, a psychiatrist, and Dr. David Orth, an ophthalmologist.
“When you consider all of the money involved in the NBA today and all of the interest, it only makes sense that you would want as many medical assets as reasonably possible to be affiliated,” said Pfeil. “As far as team dentists go, Steve was one of the first to become officially associated with a team nine years ago, but now their presence at games and association with teams is standard operating procedure. As a matter of fact, it is now an official guideline of the NBA that the home team provide a dentist to oversee any potential emergency or treatment situation that may arise for either the home or visiting team before, during or after a game.”
“(Steve is) unobtrusive, which is very important to know how to act around professional athletes at this level,” said Hefferon, the senior member of the Bulls medical staff. “From their standpoint, a visit to any doctor is scary because in many cases it can be career threatening. And even when it comes to a dentist, although that may not be career threatening, who looks forward to going to the dentist?”
In addition to his assignment during the Bulls’ 41 regular-season games at the United Center, plus pre-season and playoff contests, Douglas also assists in the pre-season dental screening and checkups of players. He also fits and makes the optional protective mouth guards for players, although only three current Bulls–Toni Kukoc, Luc Longley and John Salley–wear them.
“Certainly I wish that all players would wear them, and I recommend that they do so,” Douglas said. “But their No. 1 reason for not wearing them is that they complain they can’t breathe as freely when they wear them. Personally, I just think it takes a little getting used to.”
One player who has tried it and not liked it is Michael Jordan, who at Douglas’ suggestion used one for part of a pre-season game a few seasons ago. “It wasn’t for me,” said Jordan, he of hang time and hanging tongue renown. “And while I’ll admit that I look forward to going to the dentist as much as the next guy, which isn’t much, I’ve always found Steve Douglas to be thoroughly professional and competent in all of his dealings with any of us on the team. He’s a good guy.”
Not all of Douglas’ patients are aware of his connection with the Bulls. “I’ve had people who’ve been coming in for years finally see one of the championship rings (he has received rings for each Bulls championship) or autographed pictures or posters who’ll finally say something like, `Are you associated with the Bulls?’ ” he said.
When people do find out about his link to the championship dynasty, Douglas said there are three standard questions: “No. 1 is, `Can you get me tickets?’ No. 2 is, `Can you get me autographs?’ And No. 3 is, `What’s Michael Jordan really like?’ In order, the answers are: no, no and truly a great guy.”
For his efforts, Douglas receives season tickets and parking, and he bills the team for professional services as rendered.
Douglas does not normally travel with the Bulls, which allows him more time to tend to his regular practice.
But on game nights at the United Center, you can bet that Dr. Steve Douglas will be one member of the Bulls’ inner sanctum tucked 17 rows up, far away from the rush of lasers and LuvaBulls and fuzzy navels.
And liking the invisibility. Because as he has proven, sometimes nothing special can be a pretty special thing.
