The Sweat Solution

2015-01-21

The University of Florida football team always seemed to have a heat problem. That tends to happen when you build your football facilities on top of a swamp in a part of the country where the average temperature during the season is over 80 degrees. Players collapsed. They were sent to the infirmary. On good days, they got through it, but just barely. Enter Dr. Robert Cade — artist, musician, horticulturalist, and, most important, world-renowned kidney specialist at the university. In the 1960s, Cade made sports hydration his mission. After a careful series of tests on some of the players, Cade developed a “magic elixir” that would keep the Gators out of the infirmary and on the field. They called it Gatorade.