Goalie Adin Brown Dropped From Olympic Team

With more time, Adin Brown believes he could have healed his injured knee by using the scientific prayer or spiritual communion with God that his faith, Christian Science, espouses. But when Brown caught his cleats during an Olympic qualifying tournament in late April, he soon realized that his spot as the starting goalie for the U.S. Olympic soccer team was on the line.

In today's sports world, surgery to repair knee cartilage (torn meniscus) has become routine. Often it can be completed in a few hours, with only local anesthesia required. Even the "zipper" scars, long the mark of a major knee surgery, have been replaced by three dots where doctors probe and repair the injured joint. Knee surgery is no longer that big a deal--unless you are a Christian Scientist.

Those who follow this faith believe that "a spiritualization" of a patient's thought can heal any condition. They tell of documented cases of Christian Scientists setting and mending broken bones through prayer. Church of Christ literature maintains such treatment and medical approaches "proceed from opposite standpoints." The church views illness, and therefore healing, as existing in the spiritual realm. Medicine, on the other hand, "deals with matter as both cause and cure." They conclude that "to try to heal from opposite systems may be unfair to the patient and could be counterproductive to healing."

Brown was caught in the middle of these two conflicting systems last spring. He could follow his faith to the letter, but in doing so would probably miss playing in the Summer Games in Australia. U.S. coaches told him that knee surgery "was reality" for him. When he isn't playing for the Olympic team, Brown is a member of Major League Soccer's Colorado Rapids. That team also urged him to go "under the knife."

"It's the only decision he could make," Rapids coach Glenn Myernick said at the time. "He's got a defect that is only going to be repaired by surgical procedure."

Despite such advice, Brown was determined to try other tactics first. He prayed several times a day, and with the help of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs he hobbled through another qualifying tournament. But the bum knee forced him to miss a game, and the buzz began that Brown could be dropped from the team in favor of Kasey Keller, a veteran goalkeeper with international experience.

"I needed to do some serious thinking," Brown says of that time. "I knew I had to make the right decision. To do that I had to talk things over with my family and friends."

Brown's inner circle includes his grandmother, a Church of Christ practitioner who devotes herself full-time to Christian Science ministry, and other family members who told him they would support him whatever he decided. Brown reread Christian Science literature, especially "Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. One of his favorite passages told him: "Whatever is your goal, it is fine as long as your heart is involved."

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