James Robert Cade
September 26, 1927 - November 27, 2007
Dr. J. Robert Cade, who invented the sports drink Gatorade and launched a
multibillion-dollar industry that the beverage continues to dominate, died
Tuesday of kidney failure. He was 80.
His death was announced by the University of Florida, where he and other
researchers created Gatorade in 1965 to help the school's football players
replace carbohydrates and electrolytes lost through sweat while playing in
swamp-like heat.
"Today with his passing, the University of Florida lost a legend, lost
one of its best friends and lost a creative genius," said Dr. Edward Block,
chairman of the department of medicine in the College of Medicine. "Losing
any one of those is huge. When you lose all three in one person, it's
something you cannot recoup."
Now sold in 80 countries in dozens of flavors, Gatorade was born thanks
to a question from former Gators Coach Dwayne Douglas, Cade said in a 2005
interview with The Associated Press.
He asked, "Doctor, why don't football
players wee-wee after a game?"
"That question changed our lives," Cade
said.
Cade's researchers determined a football
player could lose as much as 18 pounds — 90 to 95 percent of it water —
during the three hours it takes to play a game. Players sweated away sodium
and chloride and lost plasma volume and blood volume.
Using their research, and about $43 in
supplies, they concocted a brew for players to drink while playing football.
The first batch was not exactly a hit.
"It sort of tasted like toilet bowl
cleaner," said Dana Shires, one of the researchers.
"I guzzled it and I vomited," Cade said.
The researchers added some sugar and some
lemon juice to improve the taste. It was first tested on freshmen because
Coach Ray Graves didn't want to hurt the varsity team. Eventually, however,
the use of the sports beverage spread to the Gators, who enjoyed a winning
record and were known as a "second-half team" by outlasting opponents.
After the Gators beat Georgia Tech 27-12
in the Orange Bowl in 1967, Tech coach Bobby Dodd told reporters his team
lost because, "We didn't have Gatorade ... that made the difference."
Stokely-Van Camp obtained the licensing
rights for Gatorade and began marketing it as the "beverage of champions."
PepsiCo Inc. now owns the brand, which has brought the university more than
$150 million in royalties since 1973.
Cade said Stokely-Van Camp hated the name
"Gatorade," believing it was too parochial, but stuck with it after tests
showed consumers liked the name.
Gatorade held 81 percent of the $7.5
billion-a-year U.S. sports drink market in 2006, according to John Sicher,
editor and publisher of Beverage Digest.
"Gatorade is the clear granddaddy of
those drinks," Sicher said.
Cade said he thought the use of Gatorade
would be limited to sports teams and never dreamed it would be purchased by
regular consumers.
"I never thought about the commercial
market," he said. "The financial success of this stuff really surprised us."
Cade, who was the University of Florida's
first kidney researcher, also said he was proud that Gatorade was based on
research into what the body loses in exercise. "The other sports drinks were
created by marketing companies," he said.
Since its introduction, Cade said the
formula changed very little. An artificial sweetener has replaced sugar.
Instead of the original four flavors,
there are now more than 30 available in the United States and more than 50
flavors available internationally.
Born James Robert Cade in San Antonio on
Sept. 26, 1927, Cade, a Navy veteran, graduated from the University of Texas
at Austin and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.
Cade was appointed an assistant professor
in internal medicine at UF in 1961. He worked until he was 76, retiring in
November 2004 from the university, where he taught medicine, saw patients
and conducted research.
Cade and his wife, Mary, had six
children.
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