EIGHTEEN
The Birth of Sports Medicine
I am sitting in the executive office suite at Arthrex in Naples, Florida,
waiting to meet with company founder and president, Reinhold
Schmieding. Today is a very busy day for Reinhold, with hundreds of young
surgeons in attendance for the annual resident symposium, and his
impending trip to Munich, Germany, where he spends every summer,
overseeing the European branch of Arthrex. Despite all of the commotion,
the American-born son of German-American dentists has agreed to the
unthinkable: a sit-down interview. Quite possibly, it’s only because I am a
busy shoulder and elbow surgeon with the proper pedigree of having
trained at the famous Kerlan-Jobe Orthopedic Clinic in Los Angeles, but
whatever his reasons for allowing me to pepper him with questions, I am
pleased to sit down with one of the world’s great entrepreneurs.
As I review my research papers while seated on a modern, black leather
chair, I glance down at a simple white table with tubed, aluminum alloy A-
frame legs, and a thought occurs to me: is this the drafting board of
legend, where Reinhold Schmieding designed the Arthrex logo that has
endured almost forty years? While living in a small apartment in the
Olympic Village in Munich in 1981, the twenty-six-year-old simultaneously
invented his company’s name and logo while perched over a $50 drafting
table purchased at a home improvement store, and the thought of a “small
beginnings” nostalgia is appealing to me.
Reinhold Schmieding is sixty now, still very fit and impressively
energetic. After a few moments in his presence a visitor realizes his pride
of ownership of Arthrex, which is now the world’s most successful sports
medicine implant company, and you realize that his fierce competitiveness
and loyalty are shared among all his employees. The company got its start