Mark J. Wrigley, a clinical instructor at Pitt’s School of Dental Medicine and a 1989 graduate, took care of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ dental needs in the early 2000s.
The University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences schools help take care of football players in many ways, including in the dental chair.
Mark J. Wrigley, a clinical instructor at Pitt’s School of Dental Medicine and a 1989 graduate, took care of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ dental needs in the early 2000s. A highlight of his time with the team was the 2006 Super Bowl win against Seattle, but there were other memorable moments as well.
When each new player joined the team, he had to have a dental examination at training camp, he said. “They wanted every player to have two custom-made mouth guards. So, we’d get the molds of their teeth.”
Many of the players “were young fellows who hadn’t received great dental care, and they finally had some funds. And so, they had a bunch of bad teeth that needed to be fixed.”
There was a dental chair at the facility, but when players needed more comprehensive care, they would visit Wrigley’s office, nearby on the South Side. He also cared for patients at Pitt, where he was the director of the faculty practice called University Dental Health Services. Though he is now close to retirement, he still works as a clinical instructor at Pitt’s walk-in emergency clinic, overseeing the third- and fourth-year dental students who treat emergencies.
“My very first memories of football are not of the Steelers but walking up ‘Cardiac Hill’ with my father--who was also a Pitt Dental student grad and a Pitt Legacy Laureate--to go to the Pitt football games,” Wrigley said. “He bled blue and gold, and he definitely passed that love of Pitt sports on to me. I was able to watch the football program grow from a struggling team to the national powerhouse they became during that era culminating in a National Championship in 1976 when I was 13.”
Recently he shared some memories of his years with the Steelers.
One was when he took his young son along to training camp at St. Vincent’s, and there were five all-pro players in the Jacuzzi getting iced down. He said his son, “a rabid fan, like everyone else in the city,” was wide-eyed. The athletes “asked his name, asked him about himself, and it’s just something that he and I will never, ever forget.”
Other memories were a little more stressful.
“There was an away game in Cleveland and on Saturday—so the day before the game—our most important player had a raging toothache. They had to rush him down to my office,” he recalled. “I only had a couple hours with him, and he needed two root canals started, and I thought things went well enough. But I’ve never been rooting for someone so hard the next day, just picturing him having to go out of the game, holding the side of his face and that being the end of my career. As I recall, we won the game.”
And he also remembered some amusing moments.
“There was a very well-known player, maybe one of the more well-known players of the 2000s era. And he was being approached for doing some national ad campaigns. He wanted to get his teeth all fixed up, so he came in for consultation. We decided to do 16 veneers. He was a pretty good patient, but a little phobic, so we decided we’d use what’s called IV conscious sedation.”
Wrigley worked with C. Richard Bennett, then chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at Pitt’s School of Dental Medicine.
“We didn’t want him to be too deeply under because it was the middle of a practice week,” Wrigley recalled. “We’d knock him out as little as possible. And so probably it had to be 6,7,8 times during the procedure he'd start waking up. And every single time he woke up, he asked the exact same question, which was whether I’d been to the cheese steak shop that had just opened two blocks down the street on Carson Street. We’d need to put him to sleep a little more. And so, he’d go back under, and I’d go back to work. And, I mean, the whole thing just repeated itself 20 minutes later.”
The player’s wife was in the room, Wrigley said, and “she was so embarrassed.”
But his teeth turned out well.
“He has a beautiful smile, and he still looks really good on the TV,” Wrigley said.