Published: July 15, 2006 10:46 pm         

ISU prof invented first lateral knee brace designed to prevent injury

The hinged, plastic device caught the attention of one of Bob McDavid’s colleagues.

So McDavid explained how he and his production team would heat the plastic parts of the McDavid Knee Guard in an oven before shaping them to the contour of a human leg with a wooden mold.

“How much pressure do you put on the mold?” he asked McDavid.

“Well, it depends on which child sits on the mold,” McDavid answered.

His production team consisted of he and his wife Maryalyce’s 13 children. Their factory was the basement of their Terre Haute home. And that oven was located in their kitchen.

“The kids liked to do that, because they got out of doing the dishes,” McDavid explained.

A multi-million-dollar industry grew from those humble roots. A professor of physiology, McDavid invented the first lateral knee brace designed to prevent injury or reinjury to that vulnerable human joint in 1967. Now the company it spawned — operated by his son Bob “Fin” McDavid III and his business partner — is a $30-million-a-year firm, employing 230 people in the Chicago suburb of Woodridge, Ill.

“There are 12 or more competitors now,” the elder McDavid said. “But we were the first.”

It all began when McDavid was teaching kinesiology at Southern Mississippi University. Almost daily in that course about the mechanics of human movement, McDavid found himself drawing diagrams of knees on the chalkboard. “And one day, the light came on, and I said, ‘Why don’t we just put a bridge over the knee?’” he recalled.

So he did. Using basic plastic, McDavid crafted a two-piece guard, hinged by a brake-shoe rivet, to be worn on the outside of the leg alongside the natural hinge — the knee. The moveable core pieces (later made from Lexan, a light and durable plastic used to make football helmets and automobile fenders) were covered with light foam rubber, which was then dipped in a shiny lacquer. Athletic tape secured McDavid’s knee guard to an athlete’s leg.

Its purpose was to both protect damaged knees from reinjury and to prevent injuries to healthy knees.

That joint contains four major ligaments, two located along its outside and two along its inside. McDavid’s creation served as a second medial collateral ligament, the knee’s oft-injured outside ligament. By guarding the knee against damaging side-to-side impact, the device also protects the other outside and inside ligaments, he explained.

McDavid envisioned all athletes wearing his knee guard for safety.

First, though, he tried it out on a Southern Miss football player whose knee had been damaged. The player ran and changed directions cleanly. Soon, as word spread, a Washington Redskins player sampled the knee guard, liked it, and wanted to take it back to the team with him. But the patent McDavid sought for the product was still pending that year, 1967. So he turned down the Redskins player’s request.

Finally, in 1969, McDavid’s patent had been approved. He and his family had moved to Terre Haute, where Bob was hired at Indiana State University, which at that time “had visions of being the Michigan State of Indiana with their athletic program,” he remembered.

His cutting-edge knee brace fit right into that ambitious atmosphere.

Convincing skeptics took time

Though the football coaches at ISU and some Wabash Valley high schools quickly began using the knee brace for its players, others elsewhere balked initially.

“It was a tough sell,” McDavid said. “The coaches were hesitant because they said, ‘Why use it if there’s not a [pre-existing] problem?’”

Skeptics also presumed the knee guard would slow athletes down. So an ISU graduate student in athletic training, Al Martindale, researched the device’s impact on a player’s speed and agility. That study from 1974 showed the McDavid Knee Guard had no significant effect on an athlete’s quickness.

“Doctor McDavid’s brace was kind of the pioneer of the knee braces,” said Martindale, who is the head athletic trainer for the University of Illinois, where he’s worked for 23 years.

As the scientific testing whittled away the doubts, the knee guard gained acceptance as both a protective and preventative piece of equipment. “The breakthrough came when [the coaches] said, ‘If the injured [players wearing the knee guard] are not being reinjured, then why don’t we use it for everyone?’” McDavid said.

Eventually, college athletic teams from Notre Dame, Oregon, Oklahoma State, Navy, LSU, Arizona, Boston College and Miami joined ISU and Southern Mississippi in using the McDavid Knee Brace. Unfortunately, two prominent sporting goods manufacturers rejected the invention, contending it needed two hinges instead of one.

“From then on, I knew they didn’t understand the movement of the knee,” McDavid said. “So that’s when I decided to make it at home.”

And the McDavids, all 15 of them, as well as students from Indiana State, cranked out the braces from the family’s basement. And McDavid himself traveled to schools and trade shows to market the item. Sometimes, son Tom would wear the knee guard, prop his leg up on a chair and allow people to stand on it.

“It was a lot of work,” said 54-year-old Bob III, the eldest of the McDavids’ seven sons and six daughters. “That was pretty much a family deal.”

University and high school coaches and athletic directors would call the McDavid house at odd hours, often in urgent need. One Wednesday at midnight, someone from the East Carolina University football program telephoned Bob after one of the players injured a knee. He needed a brace in order to play in that Saturday’s game.

“We’d ship it off to them right away,” McDavid said.

By 1980, the McDavids incorporated the device. And McDavid turned rights to the product over to Bob III, a Notre Dame graduate like his father. Initially, Bob III and his business partner continued making the knee guards in Terre Haute. “And we knew after one day we couldn’t do it that way,” the younger McDavid said.

So he called a college buddy with a molding shop in Arkansas, who agreed to manufacture the McDavid Knee Guards for $30,000. They paid that cost off after one year.

“After that, it really took off,” Bob III said.

More ideas in the works

Now McDavid Inc. is the nation’s largest supplier of sports medical products, technical protective athletic wear and consumer merchandising, with a 60-percent share of the market, Bob III said. The company has endorsement contracts with numerous star athletes, including Dwayne Wade of the NBA champion Miami Heat. And their line of accessories has expanded to more than 450 items. That includes the popular HexPad, a padded undergarment — usually a bodyshirt or a hip girdle — designed to absorb impacts to an athlete.

“But it all started with the protective knee brace,” Bob III said.

Indeed, his father’s invention “still sells steadily,” he said. Notre Dame and Alabama athletes, particularly football linemen, use it for protection. “It’s just that it’s not used wholesale like it once was,” Bob III added.

The McDavid Knee Guard rode a public relations rollercoaster in the mid-1980s. Its peak came on March 26, 1984, when an article in Sports Illustrated hailed the healthy virtues of the device, as well its primary competitor, the Anderson Stabler. But shortly thereafter, it suffered a PR hit when orthopedic surgeons suggested the attachment of the brace to the leg placed the ligaments under too much stress, a problem labeled “preloading.” Those criticisms eventually faded.

“No one refers to that preloading anymore,” McDavid said. “It does the job. It protects the knee.”

After teaching at ISU from 1967 to 1992, McDavid is now 81 years old and lives in retirement with Maryalyce in Westminster Village. But the guy who also promoted jogging for fitness in his 1960s college classes, long before that activity became popular, continues brewing innovative ideas. He’s trying to get manufacturers interested in an athletic shoe with a sole thicker at the toes than at its heel. Because it stretches and stimulates the ankle and foot muscles, the wearer jumps higher and runs faster, McDavid said.

“It could make the knee guard look like a play thing in regard to the number of [potential] users,” he said.

As with the knee guard, McDavid knows doubters are plentiful. Before Lycra became a popular material, he created an exercise bra for large-breasted women. Among that bra’s primary assets, so to speak, was its ability to prevent “nipple whiplash.” The indelicacy of that phrase in any potential advertisements scared off a would-be manufacturer, McDavid said. Two other creations — a golf putting practice device with linked, side-by-side balls, and a wrist strap that prevents tennis elbow — were also mildly received.

But as the inventor of a knee guard that triggered a worldwide industry, McDavid appreciates being mentioned as a sports pioneer.

“I’d like to think hundreds of thousands” of injuries have been prevented with it, he said. “But I have no idea. As long as they keep wearing them and these companies keep selling them, then they must be working.”



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or 1-800-783-8742, Option 6, Ext. 377.