Road to Duke
Loel Zachary Payne came up out of Pinehurst, North Carolina, the small Moore County town in the Sandhills of central North Carolina that has been one of the world's great golf-resort destinations since Donald Ross designed the No. 2 course in 1907. Pinehurst is the town that hosted the 2014 U.S. Open Championship and the 1999 U.S. Open and the 2005 U.S. Open and the 2024 U.S. Open. It is also the town that, by the late 1970s, had developed a youth basketball culture that produced the kind of 6'5" forward who could play at the Division I level. Loel Payne grew up in Pinehurst playing basketball. He attended high school in Pinehurst. He was, by the time he was a senior, a Division I college basketball prospect.
What set him apart from the other Division I basketball prospects was that he had also been, in the way of so many basketball players raised in Pinehurst, an injury kid - he had spent time watching local orthopedic surgeons treat sports injuries and return players to their games. The fascination with the orthopedic surgeon as a healer had taken root. He was, by the time he chose his college, looking for a school that could give him both - a basketball roster spot and a top-tier biomedical engineering program. Duke University offered both. In the fall of 1979, Loel Payne entered Duke as a Pratt School of Engineering biomedical engineering major and a member of the Duke Blue Devils men's basketball roster under head coach Bill Foster.
Foster, the head coach who had taken Duke to the 1978 NCAA Championship Game (where the Blue Devils lost to Kentucky), was in his fifth year as the Duke head coach when Loel Payne arrived. The 1979-80 Duke team that Payne joined as a freshman would go 24-9 and reach the Elite Eight of the 1980 NCAA Tournament before falling to Purdue. It was Foster's final Duke season. In March of 1980, Mike Krzyzewski - the thirty-three-year-old former West Point head coach - was hired to replace Foster. The Coach K era began that fall, with Loel Payne entering his sophomore year as a Bill Foster recruit on the new head coach's first roster.
At Duke
Loel Payne's documented Duke basketball career, in the framing his own current professional bio uses, is the line that he played one semester for the Duke Blue Devils basketball team under Mike Krzyzewski. That one semester was the fall of 1980, the opening of Coach K's first season at Duke as head coach. The 1980-81 Duke team that Coach K inherited had eight returning players from Bill Foster's 1979-80 Elite Eight squad and would finish 17-13 in K's first year. The freshman class K signed that next spring would be Greg Wendt. The freshman class the year after that, in October 1982, would be the Godfather Class.
Loel Payne, by the framing of the records of his Duke career, never appeared in a box score. Sports-Reference has no per-game statistics for him. The Duke season-by-season player records have him on the roster - listed in the 1981-82 GoDuke roster page as a 6'5" forward, jersey #42 or #34, junior class academic year, hometown Pinehurst NC, 200 pounds - but the box score never recorded his name in a game line. He was, in the strict statistical record, a ghost on the roster.
What the orthopedic-surgeon bio Tidewater Orthopaedics published forty years after his Duke years tells us instead is what his choice was. Loel Payne, in the fall of 1980 as a Duke sophomore biomedical engineering major, walked into his first Coach K semester of Duke basketball practice, played the semester, and then chose to focus on biomedical engineering and the pre-med track that would, nine years later, deliver him to medical school at the University of North Carolina. He stayed on the Duke roster as a junior in 1981-82 - the year the 1981-82 official roster page placed him at jersey 42 - but his orthopedic surgery future was already starting to outrank his basketball future. He had been on Coach K's first Duke roster. He had played one semester. He had earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering with a major in Biomedical Engineering from Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, graduating Magna Cum Laude with the Class of 1985. The Coach K basketball career that would, over the next four decades, produce five national championships and one of the greatest coaching legacies in American sports history was the basketball career Loel Payne touched for one semester before walking off the floor to become a surgeon.
After Duke
Loel Payne walked across the Pratt School stage in May 1985 with his Magna Cum Laude Bachelor of Science in Engineering and headed eight miles west on Highway 15-501 to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He enrolled at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, the rival-Tobacco-Road institution whose Duke-versus-UNC rivalry had defined Loel Payne's youth and whose medical school was, in 1985, one of the top public medical schools in the American South. He earned his MD from UNC in 1989. From UNC he traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, for his internship in general surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital. He stayed at Yale for orthopaedic surgery residency, completing his four-year residency in 1994. He met his wife Christine at Yale during those residency years. They would later have three children.
In 1994 he traveled to New York City for a one-year fellowship in shoulder surgery and sports medicine at the Hospital for Special Surgery, the elite orthopedic specialty hospital in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that consistently ranks number one in the American hospital orthopedic specialty rankings. During his HSS fellowship year, Dr. Payne worked with the New York Mets baseball organization - the kind of postgraduate experience that combined the high-volume professional-athlete shoulder caseload of a major-league baseball team with the academic excellence of the HSS faculty. The mentors he trained under at HSS - Russell Warren, Edward Craig, David Altchek - would publish papers with him through the late 1990s on rotator cuff repair, subacromial impingement, and arthroscopic acromioplasty. By the time his HSS fellowship year ended in 1995, Loel Payne was a board-eligible orthopedic surgeon, a published academic author in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, and a fellow who had worked with the New York Mets.
He returned south. In 1995 he joined Tidewater Orthopaedic Associates in Hampton, Virginia, the orthopedic specialty practice serving the Tidewater Virginia region that includes Hampton, Williamsburg, Newport News, and the broader Hampton Roads area. He has been at Tidewater for the entire thirty years since. He is, by the framing of his own practice bio, the elbow-knee-and-shoulder specialist of Tidewater Orthopaedics - known around the practice as the shoulder guy. The Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center and Bon Secours Mary Immaculate Hospital are his primary surgical affiliations. The Williamsburg-and-Hampton patient base he has served across three decades is the population that built the colonial-Virginia capital of the United States and that has continued to live and work in the Tidewater region across every generation since.
Where Is He Now
In 2016, Coastal Virginia Magazine, the regional lifestyle publication covering the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, named Dr. Loel Z. Payne the Top Orthopaedic Surgeon in the magazine's annual rankings. The recognition arrived during the third decade of his Tidewater Orthopaedics career - a decade in which his published research, his Hampton-Williamsburg surgical practice, and his community standing had reached the kind of accumulated weight that the local press could no longer ignore. By 2022, his career had become substantial enough that, when he needed his own hip replacement, he was, in the framing of the Hospital for Special Surgery patient story he authored that year, an orthopedic surgeon insider who chose HSS for his own surgery.
The 2022 HSS hip replacement story is one of the most extraordinary Brotherhood-physician parallels on the site. Loel Payne had been an HSS shoulder fellow in 1994-95 - the institution where he had learned the methodology of the modern shoulder surgery practice that he would then carry south to Tidewater Orthopaedics in 1995. Twenty-seven years later, he came back to HSS as a patient. He chose Dr. Alexander McLawhorn, the HSS hip-and-knee replacement surgeon, for his anterior-approach robotic-assisted outpatient hip replacement. He flew north from Williamsburg, had the surgery, recovered at home, and was back in the operating room performing his own surgical procedures on his own Tidewater patients two weeks later. The hospital that had trained him in 1994-95 had fixed him in 2022. The patient testimonial he submitted to HSS for their Back in the Game patient-story site was, by HSS publication standards, the highest possible endorsement: an orthopedic surgeon's recommendation from a man who had been on both sides of the operating room.
Dr. Loel Zachary Payne lives today in Williamsburg, Virginia with his wife Christine and his three children, who are currently in college. He continues to practice at Tidewater Orthopaedic Associates in Hampton, Virginia. He continues to see patients in Williamsburg. He continues to be the elbow-knee-and-shoulder specialist of his practice. He continues to publish on shoulder surgery technique. He continues to take an annual spring-break family trip with Christine and the three Payne children. The Tidewater patient reviews speak for themselves in patient after patient testimonial: he is the orthopedic surgeon who replaced both of one patient's knees in a single operation and had her walking unassisted in one week and playing 18 holes of golf in six weeks. He is the orthopedic surgeon who repaired the running femur of another patient who was running again six months after the freak-accident break. He is the orthopedic surgeon who is, in the framing of his own patients, the most capable surgeon on the peninsula.
The Brotherhood, when properly understood, includes the player who played one semester of Duke basketball under Coach K in the fall of 1980 and then walked off the floor to become an orthopedic surgeon. Loel Payne's career path is the path the Brotherhood always honors - the player who chose his calling over his sport and built a thirty-year medical career on top of a Duke biomedical engineering Magna Cum Laude degree, a UNC medical degree, a Yale orthopedic residency, an HSS shoulder fellowship, and a community in Tidewater Virginia that has trusted him with its shoulders and elbows and knees and hips for three decades. The kid from Pinehurst chose biomedical engineering over basketball. The Brotherhood records the kind of choice that built a thirty-year orthopedic surgical career and a top-ranked Coastal Virginia practice. The Brotherhood begins, with players like Loel Payne, with the one-semester rosters that produce the lifetime surgeons. The Tidewater Orthopaedics shoulder specialist of Hampton Roads is the Brotherhood version of what every Duke biomedical engineering major could become.