It seems fair to say that Dr. Robert Smith knows more about basketball than your average M.D. And most of what he knows he learned not on the court but off it.
Though obsessed with the sport from an early age, he didn’t play for his high school team or his college team, either.
“I loved basketball so much, but I wasn’t gifted enough physically to play for Wake Forest,” says Dr. Smith, a board-certified family medicine specialist who joined Beaufort Memorial Palmetto Medical Group in October 2022. So he found another way to follow his bliss as an undergraduate at the Division I school.
“I started out as a football manager,” he recalls, thinking back on his freshman year. “That’s how all student managers start out.”
He worked hard at it, and his hard work paid off. The Wake Forest basketball team’s two student managers were both seniors that year, and they asked Dr. Smith to step into their shoes when they graduated. Score!
What did the job entail? What didn’t it entail! In those days, coaching staffs were far smaller than they are today, Dr. Smith says, consisting of a head coach and several assistants. That meant a range of responsibilities, and a lot of them, for student managers.
“We helped out at practice, made sure players were in bed at curfew, assisted with the scout team,” he says, ticking off just a few examples from a much longer list. Always on hand for away games and training, of course, they arranged for the team’s food and lodging while on the road as well.
At the same time, “I had to juggle my studies,” says the Rochester, New York, native, whose parents — a professor and a school teacher — instilled in him and his two brothers the importance of “doing well in academics.”
Interestingly, it was the work of the team physician and trainer that most engaged him.
“The more I got involved, the more I gravitated toward medicine and science,” he says, adding that he switched his major to health and sports science as a result.
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From Court to Course
To make sense of the next chapter of Dr. Smith’s life, you have to know that the lifelong athlete has another passion: golf. In fact, he chose Wake Forest in part because “I could play year-round.” His love affair with that sport began in high school, too, when he caddied at Rochester’s famed Oak Hill Country Club.
“I got pretty decent in college,” Dr. Smith says, so after graduation he signed on as a golf pro at a course in Rochester.
After a couple of years, however, he realized his life’s work was elsewhere. More important, so was his heart. “Now I’m motivated,” he says, “now my path is clear.” Med school it would be.
Pre-reqs, MCATs, a brief stint as a medical tech at Canyon Ranch in Tucson thanks to Dr. Andrew Weil, the wellness guru he met along the way, and a master’s in clinical chemistry behind him, he was admitted to, enrolled at and graduated with an M.D. from SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.
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Some two decades on in a successful career — his specialty the provision of primary and urgent care, enhanced by innovations in telehealth, to patients in New York’s Finger Lakes region — the cold and gray began to wear on him. He happened to meet up with an old college friend who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody, and in not much more than the blink of an eye, Beaufort Memorial had made him an offer.
“What does it for us is the sun,” Dr. Smith says of himself and his new bride, Lisa Marie, a fitness trainer, who between them have five children and a large Labradoodle aptly named Moose. “I tell my friends back home, ‘Life just seems better here. Everything has been an upgrade.’”
Let the Madness begin
Wake Forest didn’t make it to the NCAA Tournament during Dr. Smith’s four years on campus, but “after we recruited Tim Duncan, that was another story!” he says, referring to the all-time-great power forward who played, and won, for Wake Forest from ’93 to ‘97.
Needless to say, the doctor remains a big fan of March Madness. Though neither of his favorite teams (Wake Forest and Syracuse) made it to the NCAA Tournament this season, they did square off in their first game in the 2023 ACC Men’s Tournament. Final score: Devil Demons 77, Orange 74.
The obvious question: How did Dr. Smith lean? “I was torn!” he admits. “But Wake, no question.”
It was a good day.
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