By Sam Gardner
If William Meyers could get one message across to the sports world at large it would be this: Stop calling everything a sports hernia.
Meyers is the founder of the Vincera Institute, a massive medical center in Philadelphia that specializes in the treatment of core muscle injuries, and for decades he’s been thought to be the leading expert on the topic.
Chances are, if a professional athlete has had surgery to repair a core injury, Meyers was the guy who performed it — you could call him the James Andrews of the field in that way; the two are close friends — with more seeking his expertise each week.
Most recently, Meyers was in the news for his treatment of Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, who underwent surgery last week to repair an abdominal injury, and over the years, he’s taken care of some of the world’s biggest stars, from Adrian Peterson and Arian Foster to Justin Verlander and Robinson Cano, with athletes from just about every level of every sport in between.
In more than three decades in the field, Meyers estimates he’s performed some 20,000 operations on these core muscles, which essentially comprise everything from mid-chest to mid-thigh (“the American League strike zone,” the Red Sox fan Meyers calls it), and the prevailing myth that Meyers aims to someday debunk is the one that all of them have been to fix the same thing.
