A few hours before the second game of the basketball league finals last season, a helicopter landed on the roof of Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital, carrying soldiers wounded in the intense fighting in Gaza.
Dr. Gil Rachevsky, from the Orthopedics Division, who also serves as a physician for Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team, entered the operating room. "I told myself I might make it to the second half since there were a few hours until the game," he recalls. "In the end, we came out of the operating room, and I saw that the game had just started because of all the chaos. And I think to myself: People have lost it, it's unbelievable. We, who just treated casualties suffering from burns, young soldiers who fought in battle, see people in the arena throwing flare torches at each other, and think about those images of burns and the damage that can be caused."
Dr. Guy Morag is the senior physician of Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball and also the senior figure in the department. He brought Gil on board 14 years ago, and since then they've been through quite a bit together, especially on sports fields and treating victims of electric scooters and bicycles on Tel Aviv's sidewalks.
No one, of course, prepared them for October 7. That day turned them into one of a kind in their field: the only sports doctors in the world who treat both soldiers from the battlefield and athletes, often on the same day. "There's no precedent for this in other parts of the world," Morag smiles. "We're probably the first to combine these things. In the morning, we treat young soldiers, and in the evening, we go to the basketball court. I'm sure our colleagues look at us from the side and can't understand what's happening."
Q: Let's go back to October 7 for a moment. The EuroLeague had just begun, another season ahead.
Guy: "Yes, we had a game against Partizan Belgrade two days before. On Saturday afternoon, we were already here, and we started to understand and see things we hadn't seen before, like all Israelis, I guess."
Gil: "Beyond the medical aspect, which was obviously something we hadn't experienced before, within a few days, messages and calls of encouragement started coming in. Ioannis (Sfairopoulos, Maccabi's former coach) sent a message, former players inquired. And our players here understood that something was happening and started asking questions, and basketball suddenly seemed so far away for everyone."
Q: What were the reactions of your colleagues?
Guy: "Very quickly, we received offers of help from all the EuroLeague doctors – well, except for the Turks with whom we're not in contact, and relations had not been good even before – they immediately reached out to us and asked what they could do. And when we started playing in Belgrade, the local doctors were always there for us in whatever we needed."
Gil: "At first, we couldn't fly because doctors couldn't leave the country due to the situation, so we relied a lot on their help. Often, we had to see what was happening to a player, check his condition, without actually touching him. When we went back abroad with the team, the feeling was very strange suddenly, this change of atmosphere, when you know what's happening in the country and here we're busy with basketball. But it's something everyone felt, even the foreign players who don't belong here, certainly not emotionally, experienced the same thing."
Dr. Rachevsky and Dr. Morag never thought their expertise in sports orthopedics would help them in this bizarre escapism, where sports treatment would serve as an intermission during wartime. Until, of course, the Wade Baldwin affair came along.
Maccabi's undisputed star of the past season was injured in the playoff games in his hamstring. The injury took them to a specialist in Split, איקמ back to the country to continue treating battle casualties, back to Belgrade for the team's games, while constantly being asked about the star's condition, and meanwhile, helicopters with the wounded kept landing on the hospital roof. We knew more about the wounded soldiers than about Baldwin's condition, as Shimon Mizrahi [the Maccabi Tel Aviv chairman] still knows how to prevent leaks related to the club's security.
Gil: "We're not allowed to talk about it," he laughs, "anything but that. There were situations where we're in the operating room, or meeting patients, and then they ask us about Baldwin. You understand the importance of sports when people in difficult moments talk to you about sports."
Guy: "I really felt that people, while I'm treating them and they're going through what they're going through, are trying to extract information from me. They ask me what the situation is and if he'll return to play and when. People were constantly preoccupied with this."
Q: With the return to routine, we also returned to the old sights of sports – you talked about coming out of the operating room and seeing fans fighting, it's crazy.
Guy: "After October 7, there was a feeling that something had changed, people behaved differently. By the way, even when we returned to the sports fields, you felt there was a very big change. But when we got to the end-of-season games, it was clear that everything had returned to how it was. The fans returned to their behavior from before. True, not everyone, but we've returned to routine in this matter, unfortunately, after there was a feeling for a moment that there had been a correction."
Gil: "We go through what we go through here in the mornings or long nights, and then we arrive at the game and hear curses like 'may you have a Holocaust,' 'terrorist,' and you can't believe it. You think it's not logical that everything has returned to what it was before."
Q: In the room next to us sits Assaf Bibas, who is the medical director of Hapoel Tel Aviv – maybe the fans need to remember what's important.
Gil: "We work with Assaf together even before October 7, consulting and talking even when we're only dealing with sports in our distant routine days. And certainly after that Saturday."
Guy: "We miss dealing only with sports orthopedics, where the emotional effort is completely different. There's something else emotionally when you see a young man struggling to return to his routine, to stand on his feet again. With all due respect to an athlete for whom this is his job, here a person is fighting just to be able to walk."
Q: And if I still ask you for a comparison between treating a soldier and treating an athlete?
Gil: "As far as I'm concerned, I've seen young soldiers here in the last nine months doing amazing things. We wanted them to return to walking, to manage an independent lifestyle, and they tell us they want to return to the field, to their friends, to fight. Despite the situation, they radiate optimism, that they won't settle for just walking again."
Guy: "In that sense, it was really like seeing athletes who do everything to return to play after an injury. And then to improve the range of motion, and another small improvement. Like an athlete who doesn't want to stop improving, who's willing to make more and more effort to be stronger. It's a determination we've encountered here with our soldiers more than once."
Q: Sports medicine in general has obviously improved over the years, what's our situation in the country regarding this matter?
Guy: "We're progressing a lot and there are very good doctors here, but it's understandable that you can't compare it to the world's top. We studied abroad and saw the professional environment that sports teams have: the number of doctors, the support staff they have. This is obviously not something we have in the country."
Gil: "Look at Israeli basketball, for example. Apart from the three big ones, who invest at an international level in the support staff and understand the importance of a large medical team, in the rest of the teams it's not like that, and it's a shame. A good medical team in the era we live in in world sports, with the large number of games, with the money paid to stars, is worth a lot of money to teams in all respects, because the envelope takes care of everything: from nutrition, through the meaning of flights and how they and what they do to the body, and of course rehabilitation. I very much hope that this will change in the coming years and all Israeli sports will rise a level in this matter."
