Tony Daly reflects on his many Olympic moments
BILL DWYRE
The sports doctor, suffering from prostate cancer that forced him to watch the opening ceremony in Beijing from his home, has had a front-row seat for some dramatic events.
BEIJING -- Tony Daly has had an Olympic moment or two. More like 200.
That's why it was fitting and special that he was able to comfortably watch Friday night's Olympic opening ceremony from his home in Los Angeles.
The 74-year-old doctor and sports medicine expert is on the receiving end of treatment these days. He has prostate cancer and says he has good and bad days.
The day they opened the Beijing Olympics was a good day.
"I feel good, sometimes," he says. "It's the treatment, the chemotherapy. That's worse than the cancer.
"One doctor gave me a day or so. Another four weeks. Who knows? I feel fine right now."
From the day in 1962 that the young doctor from New Brunswick, N.J., signed on as team doctor for the U.S. Military Academy's football team at West Point, he knew that the medical side of sports would be his life direction. And it was, from his days as an AAU basketball team doctor, to touring with U.S. track and field teams all over the world in the early 1970s, to advising promoter Bob Arum on the health of his boxers, to his current role as team doctor for the Clippers.
It hasn't all been sports, of course.
He was the attending doctor at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington for the last eight hours of the life of General Douglas MacArthur in 1964. On a sports trip to China in the early '70s, when the senior George Bush was a U.S. envoy there, Bush asked Daly to examine the diplomatic family working for him, including their families.
"He asked me what he could do in return," Daly says, "and I suggested he have a barbecue. So he did. We had hamburgers and hot dogs and a great time."
But much of what he has done and seen has been in connection with the Olympics, as team doctor for U.S. Olympians. The high spots included early tours in Innsbruck, Austria, and Montreal in 1976, followed by Lake Placid, N.Y., in '80. He was medical director for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee in 1984 and the doctor for USA Basketball at the '04 Games in Athens.
"My most memorable moment by far was our hockey team, beating the Soviets at Lake Placid," Daly says. "We got ahead and those last seven minutes were the longest of my life."
Daly said he had dinner nightly with U.S. Coach Herb Brooks, whom he admired as a master of discipline.
