Courtside Manner

Sheldon Burns’s small office at Edina Family Physicians is decorated in a style that falls somewhere between a fourteen-year-old’s bedroom and a Hollywood delicatessen. Above a black leather couch with armrests covered with recharging pagers is a wall covered with autographed photographs and sports memorabilia. There’s a picture of Garth Brooks. “I had no clue who he was at the time, but I took care of his mother, who had cancer, and gave his whole crew flu shots,” the doctor remembers. There he is with the Crocodile Hunter. There’s gymnast Kerri Strug and Whazzit, the ridiculous 1996 Atlanta Olympics mascot. Jimmy Buffett. There’s Dr. Burns and former Vikings coach Jerry Burns both in tuxedos smiling at a wedding (no relation, but Burns tells everybody he got the job as one of the Vikings’ two physicians because of his “brother”). Team photos of the T-Wolves, the Lynx, the 1980 Olympic hockey team. “Yup, the Miracle on Ice, baby,” he chuckles, reminiscing about the first of his seven Olympics, where he worked as the team’s assistant equipment manager. “They already had a team doctor, but the equipment manager just had a triple-bypass, so they didn’t mind having another one around.” There’s an Australian cricket bat mounted in a glass case and a Team USA jersey and his laminated credentials from 2004 in another. A framed letter from New York Knicks coach Larry Brown compliments Dr. Burns on his “calm and assured bedside manner.”

Burns is a self-professed country doctor who grew up in Grand Meadow, Minnesota, earned an MD from the University of Minnesota, and began his career in Wabasha. His primary job is to deliver babies (“2,500 kids so far,” he says, smiling), depress tongues, and administer shots as a family physician. But he’s also certified in both sports and emergency medicine and is the medical director for the Wild, Timberwolves, Lynx, and Swarm, and a Vikings team physician. In his free time (“Sports medicine is only 5 percent of my practice, but 90 percent of my free time”), he strides onto the court to immobilize a Chicago Bull point guard who temporarily can’t move his arms after an awkward spill, or he gives a physical to a Wild right winger or stays up all night with an Olympic swimmer who has trained his whole life, only to come down with a case of diarrhea on the eve of a race. “Ohhhh, God,” Burns wheezes at the end of a story, “I remember the governor asking me what the most common thing I saw at the Olympics in Athens was. I know he was thinking ACL or something, but I said, ‘Nope. Diarrhea.’ ”

The doctor has always loved athletics, lettering in four sports at tiny Grand Meadow High (thirty-six people in his graduating class) and starring as a tackle on a Meadowlarks football team that went 67–0 (still a state record). His football career was derailed when a misdiagnosed case of diabetes cost him a full ride to the Air Force Academy. He went to Hamline instead, where he played football, but knew his future was in medicine.

Burns calls the other doctors at the Edina clinic the “true dream team,” but he’s not fooling anybody. A true fan, the doctor is in awe of the modern-day athlete. While he’s tapping your knee and checking your very average reflexes, he’ll marvel that pro athletes’ hearts are so huge they routinely fail EKGs, or tell you that former Viking linebacker Scott Studwell was a bloody mess every Sunday, but by Wednesday, you couldn’t find a scab on him. “They’re just different than you or me,” he says.

Well, sure, doc. But we all need a good doctor.