Dr. Alfred Yeoman Gordon Jr.

Dr.Al Gordon thought about becoming a dentist before he chose a career as a family practice physician. But his love of sports led him to his 2nd job, head team primary-care doctor for the Razorbacks.

Dr. Al Gordon, the physical physician for the Arkansas Razorbacks, at Baum Stadium in Fayetteville.
Dr. Al Gordon, the physical physician for the Arkansas Razorbacks, at Baum Stadium in Fayetteville.

FAYETTEVILLE — Dr. Al Gordon did not attend the University of Arkansas.

This qualifies as a supreme irony. Gordon’s mother and father went there. So did his older sister, his brother-in-law and his nieces.

Not Gordon, though. When he graduated from DeSoto High School in Helena in 1976, he decided to attend Hendrix College in Conway instead.

Gordon, now the head team primary-care physician for the Arkansas Razorbacks, wasn’t sure what he wanted to do as an adult, but thought a career in dentistry was a possibility, and that influenced his decision.

“I knew a couple of professors who taught at the [University of] Tennessee dental school, and was advised by them that if I was thinking about dentistry and going to school in Arkansas to go to Hendrix,” Gordon says. “So that was part of the reason. Also, Hendrix has a Methodist tradition and I grew up Methodist.”

Gordon is glad he went to Hendrix. He loved the school, both the friends he made there and the education he received — even though he confesses it took him a while to focus on school and not “majoring in females and social life.” And he met the love of his life there, his wife, Debby, a Hendrix graduate whom Gordon dated there, then reunited with 32 years later and married in December.

Still, it’s kind of hard to believe that Gordon didn’t attend the UA for his bachelor’s degree. He certainly had the grades to get into the school, he had the family connections, and he grew up in Helena, where the Razorbacks were immensely popular.

“Helena was huge Razorbacks country,” says Marty Faulkner of Dallas, a friend since childhood. “As boys we went to a lot of Razorback athletic events. It’s a dream come true for him to be around that stuff [now], even though it’s very demanding.”

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For the past 19 years, Gordon has been on the sidelines for every sport offered by Arkansas. A weekday nonconference tennis match or the College World Series, a gymnastics meet or the Sugar Bowl, Gordon has been there as a primary-care physician.

The sports fan in Gordon gets a huge thrill out of this, can’t believe that he has been privileged to get this opportunity. The doctor in him loves the relationships he has developed with coaches, athletes and other doctors in the Southeastern Conference — as well as the chance to be there on days when his work is “like a M *A * S *H unit,” where it’s all he and the other doctors can do to keep enough healthy players on the field.

“He lives and breathes it,” says lifelong friend Jay Hollowell of Helena. “He loves it, just loves it. He’s just a real grounded, even-keeled person, which is a quality you like to see in a doctor. He doesn’t get ruffled.”

Gordon has been working with Razorback athletes for nearly his entire medical career. He helped organize a team of primary-care physicians for UA athletics in 1994, the same year he finished his residency, and is the only one of the original doctors still working with the Hogs.

For most of the past 19 years, Gordon worked with every sport. These days he focuses on volleyball, baseball and track and field, although he still rotates in and out of the other sports.

Gordon was honored as the 2011-12 SEC Team Physician of the Year by the Southern Orthopaedic Association.

“He just knew how to take care of you, and if you had any doubts, he would always point you in the right direction,” says retired Arkansas baseball Coach Norm DeBriyn. “I always appreciated that about him, that he’s upfront, a great go-to guy.”

Gordon’s work with UA athletics is a second job — a time-consuming one, to be sure, but it’s not his primary career. He’s a family practice physician with First Care Family Doctors, a clinic that is under the Medical Associates of Northwest Arkansas (MANA) umbrella, where he treats everyone from newborn babies to people at the end of their lives.

No matter whom he’s working with, whether it’s a longtime patient in for a routine physical or a volleyball player wondering if flu-like symptoms will prevent her from competing in a big match, Gordon tries to remember the advice of his mentor, the late Dr. H.N. Faulkner: A good doctor listens, and never jumps to conclusions.

“He’s got the bedside manner of a family doctor from the ’50s and ’60s,” says Marty Faulkner, son of H.N. “He listens to your problems and in turn explains things to you in detail. It’s never a run through; he takes a lot of time to care.”

PAYING ATTENTION

Emma Lee Gordon knew what was best for her son, even when he wasn’t listening.

She had a side job teaching music, and Al remembers scores of kids coming into the family’s Helena house to take piano and voice lessons. She said Al should get involved with music, but he had other things on his mind.

“She kept telling me I’d regret not taking advantage of that one day, and she was right, of course, but I was just way too much into sports and chasing girls,” he says. “I just couldn’t get myself settled down to practice.”

Gordon admits this with a laugh. He may have missed the boat when it came to music, but he has few regrets about his upbringing along Arkansas’ eastern border.

It was a childhood filled with sports, of closely following the Razorbacks and St. Louis Cardinals and playing whatever was in season. He played golf, basketball and football, leading DeSoto to an undefeated season his junior year as the Thunderbirds’ starting quarterback.

He deflects any praise for that to his offensive line, but the coach of that team, Bill Koen of Mountain Home, remembers Gordon as someone whose poise was critical to the team’s success.

“He was very, very intelligent,” says Koen, who was also Gordon’s geography teacher. “Al probably played his best football when he was under pressure, [because] he was always prepared for the game.”

Gordon found similar success in the classroom. His mother taught social studies and, unlike music education, she did not consider her son’s active participation in school to be a matter of choice.

“We were both in her class, and you stood up a little straighter in your chair” in her class, Faulkner recalls. “She was a good teacher.”

Born eight and a half years after his only sibling, Gordon says he has been called “oops” more than once. He’s quick with a joke, many of them self-deprecating, and possesses a laid-back disposition.

It comes from his father, A.Y., a farmer who became a justice of the peace and then a county judge.

“Al grew up in a great home,” Koen says. “I expected him to accomplish great things in life, and he certainly has done that.”

A STRONG CONNECTION

It was one of the best things that Gordon ever did, only he has no idea how it happened.

When he was a senior at Hendrix, friends talked him into taking an emergency medical technician (EMT) program in Little Rock. Gordon became licensed as an EMT, and worked as one while he earned his master’s degree in biology at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

After getting his master’s, Gordon took a job teaching in the biology department of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He liked teaching, but as he continued to work as an EMT, he changed his mind about his career path, and enrolled in the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences at the age of 27.

“The main thing I liked about it was you really could have a direct effect on someone’s life,” Gordon explains. “You were trained to intervene in a person’s life in an emergency. I found that the vast majority of the time, no matter what the outcome was, people were very appreciative of the efforts.”

Gordon decided during his junior year of medical school that he wanted to go into family practice. He liked the regular hours, the frequent contact with patients, and the fact that it offered him the “best way to have a taste of everything,” rather than specializing in a single field.

During his three-year residency in Fayetteville, with the UAMS Area Health Education Center Northwest, Gordon spent some time in obstetrics. He enjoyed that, too, and wound up delivering more than 700 babies during a 12-year period.

After completing his residency in 1994, he joined Dr. Sara McBee at the McBee-Rogers Clinic, and they helped form the First Care Family Doctors Clinics in 1997. Today, First-Care is part of the MANA (Medical Associates of Northwest Arkansas) umbrella, a multi-specialty system with a central billing and administrative office, and Gordon is the vice-chairman of MANA’s board of directors.

It’s time-consuming and not all that enjoyable, he says, but it’s important work. His heart’s not in the administrative side; it’s in dealing with patients.

“I like the physician-patient contact, treating the patient, hearing what the problem is, figuring out what’s wrong and finding a resolution,” he says. “I still have as much interest in that as I always did.”

AT HIS BEST

Al and Debby Gordon took a long time to get to the altar.

They dated for a year and a half at Hendrix, but broke up when Al wasn’t ready to commit. For more than three decades, they had no contact.

She moved to Northwest Arkansas for work a few years back, and after reading about Gordon in an alumni magazine, she reached out to him. They were married in December on Hendrix’s campus.

“Debby’s the one I should have been with all along, but one lives and learns,” says Gordon, who has a grown daughter from a previous marriage. “If somebody told me five, even three years ago, this was going to happen I’d have said, ‘What are you smoking?’ To be honest with you, it’s one of those things that makes me think there can be divine intervention.”

Al refers to Debby as his “soul mate,” a huge sports fan who loves living his life with him. This summer, he has a continuing medical education conference in Washington, and they’re talking about subsequently visiting multiple Major League ballparks along the East Coast as they work their way to New York.

She’s also happy to live in a house that has enough sports memorabilia to put a collector’s shop to shame. Gordon’s house and office are filled with autographed jerseys, helmets, balls — even a personal check from legendary golfer Ben Hogan, made out to a liquor store.

Not surprisingly, much of Gordon’s collection is Razorback-related. Some items predate his time with the athletics department; most were accumulated during the past 19 years — mementos from coaches, athletes, bowl games and trips to the College World Series.

Before the UA assembled a primary-care team that included Gordon in 1994, trainers would have to track down available primary-care physicians who were available and close to campus as medical problems arose. (Primary care refers to everything but bone and joint matters, Gordon says; those are handled by orthopedists.)

The team has four physicians and a physician’s assistant, and any time there’s a sports activity happening on campus, there’s a doctor either at the event or on call.

Gordon travels with teams in the post-season, but rarely for regular-season games. Instead, he and the rest of the medical team have developed relationships with other SEC physicians and trainers, and when something goes wrong, they call him. It was these colleagues who voted him the SEC Team Physician of the Year.

Conversely, Gordon has treated many athletes from other SEC schools who have had something go wrong in Fayetteville, and had to explain medical issues over the phone to doctors hundreds of miles away.

“He connected with [athletes],” DeBriyn says. “His personality was such that he was trusted by them.

“I leaned on him. If a player got sick on the road, if a situation came up with an injury, you could always go to him. He definitely was a help.”

Sports medicine is different from general practice, Gordon explains. A team doctor needs to work faster, knowing that if something goes wrong, he needs to quickly assess whether the athlete can go back to play that day, and then make that outcome happen if it’s possible.

There are days when it’s slow, when everyone’s healthy and Gordon’s little more than a spectator. Then there are days when bodies are dropping left and right, and Gordon’s facing the sort of immediacy he once did as an EMT.

Either way, it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

“My wife says, ‘He’s living his dream,’ and she’s right,” Gordon says. “To be an intricate part of the University of Arkansas’ sports medicine, to be able to use my knowledge to be part of the system, is quite a thrill.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Al Gordon

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Nov. 26, 1957, in Helena

OCCUPATION: family practice physician, head team primary care physician for the Arkansas Razorbacks

FAMILY: wife Debby, daughter Laine

OUTSIDE OF FAYETTEVILLE, MY FAVORITE SEC TOWN IS Nashville (the home of Vanderbilt University).

THE BEST PART ABOUT BEING A DOCTOR IS the trust established with doctor-patient relationships.

MY FAVORITE BOOK IS A Time to Kill. I have a hard time putting down any John Grisham book.

MY SECRET TALENT IS shopping, especially for that special gift.

THE PLACES I’D LIKE TO VISIT ARE several historic Civil War battle sites.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM HAVING A MOTHER AS A TEACHER WAS to avoid cramming for tests.

THE BEST ADVICE I EVER RECEIVED WAS from my mentor, Dr. H.N. Faulkner: “Take the time to listen to patients.”

I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT computer technology.

THE PIECE OF SPORTS MEMORABILIA I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE IS an autograph of Jackie Robinson.

THE PERSON I WAS MOST EXCITED TO MEET WAS Jack Nicklaus.

MY FAVORITE ST. LOUIS CARDINAL OF ALL TIME IS a tie between Stan Musial and Bob Gibson.

A WORD TO SUM ME UP: persistent

High Profile, Pages 37 on 04/21/2013

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