Los Angeles

When Drew Brees unexpectedly found himself in the office of someone he wasn’t exactly thrilled to see, he was asked the sort of question that NFL quarterbacks are not used to hearing.

“What does your job require?” Steven Shin said.

Shin is a surgeon. Brees was his patient. It turned out they both have jobs that require them to work with their hands. “My livelihood is gripping a football,” Brees says.

But the problem was that the NFL leader in career touchdown passes wasn’t able to grip a football after his throwing hand got in the way of a defensive tackle attempting to pulverize him during a September game. Brees came to Shin with a torn ligament in his thumb—a debilitating injury for a 40-year-old quarterback. In another era of sports medicine, he might have been out for months. Instead he was back within six weeks. Shin helped save his season, and the New Orleans Saints’ hopes for a Super Bowl, from thousands of miles away.