Dr James Andrews receives votes for Sports Illustrated Sportsmen of the Year

It is taken for granted now that athletes can be repaired. That their shoulders and elbows and hips and knees and ankles, torn asunder in the many ways that sports can destroy the human body (in a football collision, throwing a baseball, screaming down a ski slope), can be restored to something resembling their original condition. That an athlete -- carted-off, air-casted, bedridden and full of pain and self-doubt, contemplating life after athletics -- can be returned to the field as if transported through time to the moment before he was hurt. It was not always thus, however. In fact, it is a relatively new condition, one that has altered not just the physical and emotional, but also the economic paradigm of modern sports.