[:en]The octogenarian body under my hands was broken and distorted by five decades of professional abuse. It also belonged to a Canadian icon. Gordie Howe is the Babe Ruth of professional hockey. “Mr. Hockey” (the nickname by which he is still known and to which he holds a trademark) was the all-time leading scorer in the National Hockey League (NHL) for almost three decades before Wayne Gretzky finally broke his record in 1989. And now he was in my humble Audubon, Pennsylvania office, undergoing his first Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) session at the urging of his son, Mark Howe, a Hall of Fame ice hockey player in his own right. Mark had learned first hand what Rolfing SI could do for him, and was hopeful it would help his father.

The elder Howe was still a big man, and still built like a rock. He had played most of his career without a helmet. During the 1950 playoffs, he suffered a skull fracture severe enough to require emergency surgery. He won the league’s scoring title the following year. He broke his arm several times. His artificial knees clicked when he wiggled his legs. Yet Mr. Hockey was reluctant to begin Rolfing sessions. He’d never liked massage.

The first athlete of note that I worked on was Baltimore Colts great Alan Ameche, known to National Football League (NFL) fans of the era as “The Iron Horse.” I have no idea how he found me, but as a huge sports fan, I was pretty intimidated by the prospect of using my hands to help repair his body. That changed once we were in the Rolfing room. He was no longer a sports legend; he was a client who was in pain and needed my help. Ameche’s body was a bunch of knots, as though he’d just returned from a visit to the 19th century, where he’d been badly beaten in a bareknuckle boxing match. We got to work. Ameche attended all ten Rolfing sessions, and afterwards he was standing straighter, had recovered much of his lost flexibility, and was extremely appreciative. The following summer he had the four advanced sessions I learned from Dr. Rolf.

I found most of my later athletic clients through old-fashioned networking. One of my clients was the bookkeeper for a famous South Philadelphia restaurant, The Saloon, which was a haunt for many local sports figures. She spoke of being friends with Dick Vermeil, then head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. I asked to be introduced, and she obliged. Before I knew it, I was sitting at a bar with Vermeil, telling him about Rolfing SI and how I believed an ongoing Rolfing regimen would better allow his squad to weather the physical demands of the full NFL season. Vermeil was intrigued enough to introduce me to the Eagles organization.

My subsequent meeting with the Eagles’ head trainer didn’t go as well. He was skeptical of Rolfing SI and clearly felt as though I was invading his territory – which at the time, due to my excitement, I failed to notice. When I finally got to do a couple of Rolfing sessions on a player who had suffered a pulled hamstring, the trainer prematurely sent him back out on the field for a full workout. He reinjured his hamstring, and I received the blame. Thus ended my brief career thus far as an assistant NFL trainer.

It was not, however, my final Rolfing session with members of the Philadelphia Eagles. Irving Fryar, Keith Byars, and Jon Runyan – the latter now a former U.S. congressman – all completed successful courses of Rolfing SI with me. Some, like Fryar, had me visit their homes and even work on members of their families. In many cases, I offered them free sessions in exchange for lifetime endorsement rights. The one thing that stands out in my work with athletes is their deep appreciation for the ontological/ emotional benefits of their sessions as well as the physical/structural changes.

One of the clients who found his way to my studio was Jay Snider, whose father owns the Philadelphia Flyers NHL team. I’d read in the paper that Mark Howe (Figure 1), who was then playing for the Flyers, had injured his back and was contemplating retirement. I told Jay that I thought I could help Howe get back on the ice.

Figure 1. Mark Howe playing for the Philadelphia Flyers.

“You’ve got to be crazy,” Jay said to me. “We’ve had him to the top doctors in the area, and nobody seems to be able to help him.”

“Then he’s got nothing to lose,” I replied. That got me a meeting with Pat Croce, who by then was the Flyers’ conditioning guru. After listening to my pitch, Croce convinced Mark to give me a call. (I’ll use his first name here, to differentiate him from his father Gordie Howe, who I’ll speak more of later.)

The man who eventually came to my studio was barely able to bend over or remove his clothing. I gave him a traditional first session and asked him to get up and walk around to see how he felt. Mark was amazed. His flexibility had increased by about 50% and his pain, while not gone, had significantly subsided. He made an appointment for a second session. After his third session, he returned to the ice for the Flyers. After his fifth session, I attended my first ever hockey game by going to watch my client play. I saw a man playing his sport with caution, as though he still had a bad back. I told him that at his sixth session. The next time he took to the ice for the Flyers, he no longer played as though he had a bad back. He went on to play in twice as many games as he had the previous season.

A note on how I work. Both Ida Rolf and Dick Demmerle – who I apprenticed with after my Rolfing training – always said follow the ‘Recipe’. While initially that was hard, I surrendered. When I work with an athlete, I explain in the beginning the theory behind Rolfing SI, the basic Ten Series, the advanced series, and follow-up sessions throughout life. I have stayed away from trying to fix problems since anything that can be transformed will be covered in the Series. Usually I have not worked on any athletes on the day of play – except on occasion Mark Howe – though it is my aim to one day be on the sidelines available to anyone who needs some immediate attention. (That one is from my lips to God’s ears.) That summer, Mark invited me to his home in New Jersey, where I gave Rolfing sessions to all his children. His revival in Philadelphia led to him receiving a two-year contract from the Detroit Red Wings, the team for which his legendary father, Gordie Howe, had played. We didn’t talk much during that season, but he called me the following summer and wanted another session.

I asked how the season went. “Not that good,” Mark said. “My back hurt me a bunch of times and I had to sit out more than I wanted.” I scolded him. I said. “You have the money, and I have the time. You should have called me and I would have come out.” Mark, a notably humble guy for a star athlete, was surprised that I was willing to do that. The next season, I received a call from him while the Red Wings were in Los Angeles to play the Kings, he had hurt his back and wanted me to come to L.A. I couldn’t come then but agreed to meet him in Detroit two days later, the first of four trips I took to Detroit that winter.

Mark brought me to the famous Joe Louis Arena, where I met many of the other Red Wings players. Some had me do Rolfing sessions, but none elected to do the full ten-session course. The Red Wings were having one of their best seasons in recent memory, and they were hell-bent on reaching the Stanley Cup Final.

Of all the athletes I’ve worked on, Mark has the best appreciation of the body-mind relationship and for how Rolfing SI could help him. As the playoffs approached, we began to push the envelope together. On my fourth trip to Detroit, I pulled out every tip and trick I ever learned from Rolf and Demmerle. That night, he had one of his best games in a Detroit uniform. “My teammates were asking me what happened to me,” Mark said. “I was skating around the rink so fast.”

By then, it was late spring. The Red Wings had stormed through the playoffs and were in the Stanley Cup Final against the New Jersey Devils. Mark brought me up for the fifth and final time that season. The security in the locker room was fit for the U.S. president. I administered one last Rolfing session to Mark. He didn’t win the Stanley Cup, but he was able to play in every game of the series.

Throughout our entire relationship, Mark’s father Gordie remained a regular topic of conversation. Mark knew that his father, who had lost nearly all his flexibility and developed a pronounced tilt and limp, needed help. Two summers ago, Mark called me and asked if I was ready to work on Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey. Mark and Gordie had driven an hour and a half to my office, and now a living legend was waiting for me to help him walk upright again. Just then, I heard Rolf’s confident reassurance in my mind. “Follow the Recipe,” she whispered to me from heaven. “Work in his body, not on his body.”

Gordie Howe rose from his first-ever Rolfing session and stood up straight. His son was amazed as his father bent to put his socks back on. Mark and Gordie came back every week after that. (Figure 2 shows the Before 1 and After 10 photos for Gordie Howe.) A couple of times, I called the news media. Stories were written, television news segments were filmed. Massage magazine did a feature story on them. Mark still calls me from time to time and asks for a session, and acknowledged me in his autobiography for making a major difference in his life. Both he and his father have given me lifetime endorsements, and I have a number of segments with them on my YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/ user/teamchildren09/videos.

Figure 2: Gordie Howe, before Ten Series (left) and after (right).

This has not led, however, to an avalanche of athletes getting Rolfing sessions. My phone doesn’t ring off the hook with calls from the locker rooms of the professional sports world yet. My major focus is actually on babies, children, and families. That said, many of the babies I’ve worked on have grown up to become athletes themselves.

Josephine and Dabney Fischer are sisters who both had their first Rolfing sessions the day after they were born. By the time they were two, they were doing advanced sessions. I’d previously worked on their parents: they’d seen how my son turned out and wanted that sort of outcome for their daughters.

Today, Josephine is one of the best soccer players in Pennsylvania and has a full scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh. Dabney is an incredible dancer and actor who lives independently in Los Angeles at age seventeen and is pursuing an acting and singing career with her very own agent.

The Dabback twins also received Rolfing sessions from early on and were state-level gymnasts all through high school. The same goes for Shanna Silverstein. Josh Millan experienced Rolfing SI as a baby and became a great basketball player until he was seriously injured. Other people who I worked on as children have gone on to climb big mountains, run marathons, and complete in other impressive projects.

As Ida Rolf used to say:

• The work comes first and the inspiration comes later.
• Follow the Recipe.
• Take photos and videos of all your clients.
• Work in people, not on them.

Robert Toporek trained as a Rolfer in 1975, and apprenticed with Dick Demmerle and Dr. Rolf for more than four years. He also was an administrative assistant to Rolf over the last four years of her life. He jointly created and managed (with Rolf, at her request) The Children’s Project to document and demonstrate the value of Rolfing work for babies and children, publishing an award-winning documentary and monograph entitled “The Promise of Rolfing Children.” He has given the complete ten Rolfing sessions and oftentimes the advanced series to over 300 whole families as deep as four generations. Toporek began giving Rolfing SI to his son Bryan the day he was born and continues working on him once or twice a year. Many of the children he has worked on have had him work on their babies. He continues to expand his work in Audubon, Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia region. More can be found on his website www.newbabymassage.com.Athletic Legends and the Power of Rolfing® SI[:]