DATE: Sunday, September 21, 1997            TAG: 9709190404

SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER      PAGE: 02   EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: RANDOM RAMBLES 

SOURCE: Tony Stein 

                                            LENGTH:   79 lines

CANCER-FIGHTING DOCTOR STUDIED ENGINEERING AND PLAYED ICE HOCKEY

Maybe your doctor has a more unusual background than Dr. Richard Moore, but I doubt it.

Canadian-born Moore attended two colleges on hockey scholarships. Though he has a degree in mechanical engineering and a degree in industrial engineering, they were just preliminaries to the main event of his career. He became a full-fledged gynecologist and obstetrician with a medical degree from the University of Alberta and four-plus years training at the very prestigious Jones Institute in Norfolk. He's a Chesapeake resident now, a member of the staff of the Virginia Center for Women.

At 35, he's past his playing weight of 200 pounds, but he's still a solid-looking 6-foot-1. And he still plays hockey each week at a Virginia Beach rink. ``Sometimes,'' he says, ``my body does what I want it to and sometimes it doesn't.''

Canadian kids take to hockey early and Moore was no exception. He was out on a rink when he was 5 years old. ``Hockey is a Canadian game. Everyone grows up playing it,'' he says. ``In the United States, it's baseball, basketball and football. In Canada, it's hockey.''

``There are rinks everywhere. Wherever there's a basketball court or a tennis court, in the winter it becomes an ice rink. And there are regular rinks about every mile.''

Moore played club hockey and then college hockey, but he says the level of competition in Canadian colleges was higher than the game played by the professional Hampton Roads Admirals. In another comparison, he says Canadian college hockey was more on the level of the Norfolk Tides baseball team. The Tides are a Triple-A minor league team, just below the major leagues.

Ask him what kind of a player he was and he'll tell you that he liked a rough game. ``I was big enough so that people had a hard time stopping me,'' he says.

What about fights on the ice?

``You never get a punch in during a hockey fight,'' he says. ``Everybody just grabs sweaters.''

A medical career was always in the back of his mind, but he worried that he wouldn't be able to get into medical school. Engineering was a fall-back plan, he says, because he enjoyed the creative challenge of starting with an idea and turning it into something tangible. That's why chose engineering when he got his hockey scholarships, first to Dawson College and then Clarkson University.

Mechanical engineering, which he studied at Dawson, is the design of tools, equipment and machines. Industrial engineering, his major at Clarkson, involves planning factory layouts.

``Hockey did a lot for me,'' he says. ``It gave me direction and motivation. Competitive hockey teaches self-discipline. It's done a lot in my life to develop me as a person and to get me where I am.''

After completing his training at the Jones Institute, he joined the Chesapeake practice a couple of months ago. His particular interest there is the treatment of gynecological cancer. ``Cancer patients are special,'' he says. ``So many of them have a great outlook on life. They learn to enjoy smaller things; getting up in the morning, going to a nice restaurant, being able to spend another day with their families.

``I don't think they get bogged down in the little details. They live their lives day to day and that's a quality I find special.''

But cancer is a savage foe that so often wins the battle. Isn't that a depressing reality?

``It can be depressing,'' Moore says, ``but I look at it this way: They're going to get cancer whether I'm here or not. If I can make their quality of life better, if I can make the time they have better, then I am doing my job and it makes me feel good.''

Talking about his years at the Jones Institute, Moore calls Drs. Howard and Georgeanna Jones and faculty member Dr. Mason Andrews ``icons in the medical community, not only in Norfolk but across the world.'' The institute is especially known for its pioneering work in the field of in-vitro fertilization.

Moore lives in the Riverwalk section with his wife Emily, a nurse practitioner. Off-duty, he's been trying to teach himself to surf but says he can't stand up yet. And, surprisingly, he's only seen a very few Admirals hockey games. ``Been there, done that,'' he says.

In sum, though, he's become an enthusiastic Hampton Roads resident, despite sometime Tidewater heat. His choice is clear: ``I'll take 100 degrees here over 40 below in Canada anytime.''

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