Sports Medicine's Secretive Sultan Billionaire

Reinhold Schmieding, the 58-year-old behind hundreds of medical marvels that get pro athletes and weekend warriors alike back on the field, has a singular style of relaxing. An avid fisherman, the founder of Arthrex, a private surgical-devices company, treated a dozen distributors and company executives to a smallmouth bass fishing trip in the Boundary Waters of southern Canada a decade ago. This was no ordinary cast-and-drink excursion. “We had to compete for who got the first fish, the biggest fish, the most fish,” recalls a former associate who was on the boat. Remembers former distributor Bill Schultz: “I caught the biggest walleye, and it really pissed him off.” Come evening Schmieding engaged some of his exhausted, soused underlings in a game of Spades, refusing to call it quits until he came out on top. (An Arthrex spokeswoman says “the specific details of this story are inaccurate” but would not clarify what they were.) Recalls the former colleague: “He has to win at everything.”