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Now he belongs to the ages.
While he maintained a busy private practice of orthopaedic surgery, Allen set aside time and resources to record his results meticulously and contribute abundantly to the fund of knowledge in sports medicine. Beginning with his first paper, ‘‘Anterior Calcaneal Osteotomy for Symptomatic Juvenile Pes Planus,’’ in 1984, 3 his prolific research continued unabated through the present year. 15 Allen was particularly interested in the welfare of young athletes, leading to important articles on the subjects of osteochondritis dissecans 5,8 –10 and anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction in the skeletally immature patient. 2 In an era when many American surgeons felt that randomized trials in orthopaedic surgery were unfeasible, Allen showed us that they could indeed be done. 7 As chairman of the International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) for nearly 18 years, Allen played a pivotal role in developing and validating a patient-reported outcome score that has been used and cited in countless subsequent publications. 4,11 –13 The quality of Allen’s research was recognized with the Hughston Award in 2002 7 and the O’Donoghue Award in 2014. 14
If the ‘‘80/20 rule’’ dictates that 20% of the members of an organization do 80% of the work, Allen was always among the 20% who contributed heavily to the success of several major orthopaedic sports medicine societies. His tenure as president of the AOSSM from 2015 to 2016 was the culmination of decades of service to the organization. Providentially, Allen was at the helm of the AOSSM to guide it through the critical process of selecting a new executive director. Allen’s participation was not confined to North America; internationally, he served on the boards of directors of both the International Cartilage Repair Society (ICRS) and the International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery and Orthopaedic Sports Medicine (ISAKOS). These efforts in support of the global sports medicine community, together with Allen’s selection as an AOSSM traveling fellow in 1989 and godfather in 2013, brought him many friends and admirers around the world.
We were blessed to have Allen as a member of our AOSSM publishing family. Starting as a reviewer, he subsequently became a member of the AJSM editorial board and an associate editor for Current Concepts. In that capacity, he advised Tim Foster on the selection of review articles and served as a judge for the AJSM Systematic Review Award. This experience prepared him to be a guest editor of the AJSM supplement on articular cartilage repair in 2009. 6 When we initiated OJSM in 2013, Allen was a logical choice for the inaugural editorial team. His thoughtful judgment and commonsense approach were instrumental in setting OJSM on the right path from its inception. Because of his special expertise as chairman of the IKDC, I often pressed Allen into extra service to evaluate manuscripts that dealt with the somewhat arcane process of outcome measure validation.
Despite all these professional accomplishments, Allen never lost sight of what was most important in life. He and his wife, Candy, met while they were college students, and their 44-year love affair was an inspiration to all who knew them. Together, they raised 3 sons—an orthodontist, a stock broker, and an orthopaedic sports medicine specialist. Allen and his sons shared a passion for hunting and fishing that took them to some of the most exotic and remote regions of the globe. Closer to home, Allen found that performing manual labor on his farm near Nashville provided a refreshing respite from the stresses of medical practice.
In a presidential address to the AOSSM that was filled with his typical self-deprecating humor, Allen described the personal faith journey that began following the death of his father and that formed the centerpiece of his life. 1 Allen’s conduct always reflected the central commandment of his faith, loving the Lord and sharing love with his neighbors on earth. That love continuously shone forth from his gentle countenance.
Allen’s benign demeanor was on full display at a consensus conference convened by the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne a few weeks before his death. As usual, when Allen promoted the concepts that he felt were correct, his gentle Tennessee twang never rose above a soft conversational volume; he never denigrated other points of view nor demeaned those who held them. Allen’s expressed goal was to have a servant’s heart, using his talents to mirror divine glory; in his words, ‘‘loving people rather than using them to achieve worldly measures of success.” 1
Allen was a special person in innumerable ways. Those of us who were privileged to count Allen as a friend have been truly blessed. Allen will be missed tremendously by all of us in the AOSSM publishing family and by colleagues and friends around the world. Now he belongs to the ages, and to his Heavenly Father. We wish that he could have abided with us a while longer.
Footnotes
A version of this editorial was also published in the February 2018 issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine.