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, seek him out for injury treatment or rehab or to maximize athletic performance. And that they are willing to put their faith and trust in him to the point where their bodies, careers and entire futures are in his hands. Literally.
    â€œIt is like playing an instrument,” Lindsay said. “You can be super-bright, super-intelligent, but it has to translate to tactile, to the hands. I mean, you’re working on someone’s body. You have to feel it. From my own experiences, getting treatments, you can tell right away when someone gets it, when someone has the touch. . . . It’s like watching Wayne Gretzky or Connor McDavid play hockey and you say, ‘How do they know to do that?’ What they do isn’t easy, they just make it look that way. . . . I shake my head a lot at how things have gone for me. I grew up in a small town. Never in a million years did I imagine I’d be doing this. Sometimes I think, ‘This is cool—this is my job.’”
    Imagine a 39-year-old Mark Lindsay being called into the office of the notorious Oakland Raiders boss Al Davis and being given his marching orders for the 2002–03 NFL season: keep the aging core of Raider veterans healthy enough to stay on the field and make plays.
    That veteran core included Rich Gannon, Tim Brown, Charlie Garner, Rod Woodson, Charles Woodson, Bill Romanowski and Jerry Rice, amongst others.
    Every Friday during the season, Lindsay would fly from Toronto to Oakland or wherever the Raiders were playing. He’d treat the star veterans the day before the game, the day of the game, and on the sidelines
during
the game. On Monday, he’d fly back to Toronto and his regular, and thriving, chiropractic practice.
    â€œIt almost killed me,” Lindsay said, laughing. And all that separated Lindsay and the Raiders from fulfilling Davis’s Super Bowl dream were the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the revenge of former Raider coach Jon Gruden and the bizarre disappearance of Raider all-pro centre Barrett Robbins, who went AWOL from San Diego the day before the Super Bowl to party in nearby Tijuana, Mexico. (Robbins was later diagnosed as bipolar and has suffered from mental, emotional and legal issues since then.)
    Word travelled fast about the skilled young Canadian chiropractor with healing hands. There’s no better calling card than word of mouth, and whether it was athletes from one sport talking to those in other sports or their agents talking amongst themselves, it wasn’t long before the biggest names in football, baseball, tennis and golf were clamouring for Lindsay to rehab their injuries or treat them on an ongoing basis. With a thriving practice back home in Ontario, there were occasions when Lindsay actually had no choice but turn down some of the invitations from some of the world’s pre-eminent athletes. No sooner would one door close, though, than another two would open.
    â€œIt was an unbelievable experience,” Lindsay said. “This was all happening in a period of a few years between 2008 and 2011 when I was working with some incredible athletes in so many different sports. I had, in my profession . . . I can honestly say I reached the pinnacle.”
    Maybe Mark Lindsay was always destined to be a healer of high-performance athletes. As a teenager growing up in White Lake, near Arnprior, he dreamed one day of going to medical school. And he always loved and played sports himself. He ran track—400-metre hurdles—and was a wide receiver in football in high school. He was good enough to get an NCAA Division I football and track scholarship to Ball State in Indiana, a school he chose in large part because of its strong exercise physiology department and the presence of Dr. David Costill, who did work in the 1980s with distance runners Mary Decker and Alberto Salazar.
    Two years in, Lindsay realized Ball State and Division I football weren’t for him. He came home to Canada,