Leadership Is Worthless, But Leading Is Priceless, with Dr. Thom Mayer (Sports, Ukraine, 9/11, Medicine)
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You fly in and you think, oh my God, these are the gates of hell. I mean, you see the Pentagon of all things burning. Couldn't even see that there was any remnants of a plane and the Southwest wall was completely on fire. But the gates of hell take you to some pretty interesting places.
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Today's guest is Dr. Tom Mayer, an author and keynote speaker who's been a leader in times of crisis for over 25 years. He's the medical director for the NFL Players Association, served as a command physician at the Pentagon on 9-11, led a mobile emergency team in Ukraine, and has authored the new book, Beatership is Worthless, with Leading is Priceless. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Tom Mayer. Tom, great to meet you. Good to see you. I actually want to know a little bit of your backstory. Where did you grow up and then how did you end up where you are now?
Well, I grew up in a small town, Indiana, Midwestern, classic Midwest way to be raised. One of those factory towns that feeds or fed General Motors, 70 miles northeast of Indianapolis. And a football player, a lot of people play football in order to go to college. I went to college in order to continue playing football. And you know dreams of playing in the nfl and aside from i did play in college uh was a all-conference linebacker and you know the old saying as you know the longer ago we played the better we were did have a chance i'd broken my leg my or i didn't break it somebody broke it for me in my junior year a pretty bad fracture so i couldn't play my senior year But I was invited to training camps with the Vikings and the Bears and thought, hey, let's give this a shot. And discovered that, what did they tell me? They said, aside from my side speed, strength, and talent, they said I had no talent. Other than that, I would have been a perfect linebacker in the NFL. So- How nice.
Yeah, decided to go to, I was in at Duke's Medical School and I thought no matter how nasty the professors at Duke were, they couldn't be any worse than the guys trying to take my head off with the Vikings and the Bears. So became an emergency physician. I trained in surgery at Salt Lake City and we worked a deal out so that the surgical residents covered the park doctor role at Yellowstone National Park. Wow. And we've been going back ever since. So 25 years ago, we we bit the bullet and bought a place and have enjoyed it ever since. It's still a small town atmosphere. A lot more people have moved in from other places, but we love it.
How did you it's a big reevaluation, right? When you switch gears from thinking I'm going to be a professional athlete to you obviously had another trajectory in mind to even be considering Duke Medical.
Well, I was actually a theology major when I was in college. And it wasn't that I was particularly cerebral or reflective. It was because you didn't have to take tests. You just wrote papers. At the end of my sophomore year, my two professors, my theology professor and a biology professor, his name was Dr. Prey, you can't make that stuff up, said, have you ever thought about going into medicine instead of being a theology professor? After Duke, I was very clear I wanted to go west. I decided I was either going to go to Colorado or Utah. So I ranked Salt Lake number one and loved it. Met my wife Maureen there. She was a newborn ICU flight nurse. I was a pediatric trauma fellow. Just a magical series of serendipitous circumstances.
And then how did you decide to re-engage with the NFL, or how did they decide to re-engage with you?
People ask me all the time, how do I build my resume to get a job like yours as the medical director of the NFL Players Association? And my answer is, I became the medical director on August 1st, 2001. Corey Stringer, a tackle for the Vikings, died inexplicably of heat stroke. And I got a phone call. The phone call was from Gene Upshaw, then the executive director of the NFLPA.
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