Robert Cade, who died yesterday at 80 of kidney failure, was a University of Florida nephrologist whose lurid green electrolyte-replacement potion achieved iconic status on football sidelines and paved the way for a new marketing category, the sports beverage.

Americans purchase more than $5.5 billion in Gatorade, which is available in more than 50 flavors around the globe.

But the first flavor, citrus, was suggested by Cade’s wife as a way of covering up the sour tang of sodium, potassium, and magnesium in a beverage that Cade and his researchers developed in his Jacksonville laboratory to help the Florida Gators football team fight dehydration. The drink was credited by many in Florida for giving the 1965 Gators a reputation as a great second-half team, when their Gatorade-supplemented electrolyte balance gave them the edge over depleted rivals.

One early taster, a football player, spat out the drink and loudly complained that it reminded him of a different liquid. Cade, intrigued, took a taste of his own urine and remarked, “It didn’t taste a bit like Gatorade.” Other players seemed to like the stuff, or at least got used to it. When the Gators beat Georgia Tech in the 1967 Orange Bowl, Tech coach Bobby Dodd told reporters his team lost because “We didn’t have Gatorade … that made the difference.” (When Gators quarterback Steve Spurrier won the Heisman Trophy in 1965, he was, Cade later conceded, swilling Coke.)

Having tried in vain to interest the university in marketing the stuff, Cade and his colleagues licensed Stokely-Van Camp, the bean-packers, to produce Gatorade, and it was an immediate sales sensation. After a series of legal tussles, the university got a piece of the action, the Federal government got something for having funded the research, and Gatorade continues to dominate the sports beverage market into the 21st century. The formula has been tinkered with a bit over the years — it at first contained cyclamates, then sugar, and now is artificially sweetened. But the mineral mix remains about the same as it was in the 1960s. Cade died a wealthy man.

But Gatorade was not the only product of his fertile imagination. Cade was nerdy enough to describe himself habitually to audiences as a “wee-wee professor,” yet he also was enough of a sports fan to become the Gators’ team physician. After the success of Gatorade, he developed a number of other less successful products in the 1970s — a high-protein popsicle; an iron-enriched milk that turned coffee green, and Hop’n Gator, a kind of citrus home-brew. Other inventions followed, including a shoe-polish tin with a concave bottom to avoid the wasted bit that remains around the edges. It failed, though, because it couldn’t be stacked. More controversial was his insistence that schizophrenia could be cured through some form of dialysis — as a nephrologist he thought it plausible that mental illness was due to blood impurities. He also had a sideline tracking the landfall of Columbus in North America, although a promised book on the subject never emerged.

Still, his most lucrative venture remained Gatorade, and he was gratified to find it used in place of oral rehydration salts in poor nations and in other therapeutic settings. He credited it with having greatly reduced the incidence of death from heatstroke among athletes. He signed over the rights to the formula to the Gatorade Trust — which sponsors the Gatorade Sports Science Institute of Barrington, Ill., from which flows a series of studies attesting to Gatorade’s clinical effectiveness.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he formulated various competitive products, including Go! — a nutrient-rich reduced-calorie, shelf-stable milkshake, and TQII, another sports drink, with initials standing for thirst quencher. Despite ambitious business plans, none of these came to much more than his shoe polish can.

An optimist and a devout Christian, Cade lived without ostentation, save a collection of 100 Studebakers, which he kept in various levels of restoration. Asked in 2006 by the Orlando Sentinel how he felt about the Gatorade baths that players regularly give to victorious coaches on the sidelines, he answered, “Rah! Rah! Rah!”

The University of Florida agrees; licensing fees paid it total over $150 million.

James Robert Cade

Born September 26, 1927, in San Antonio, Texas; died November 27 of kidney disease in Jacksonville; survived by his wife, Mary, and six children.

To contact obituaries editor Stephen Miller
Phone: 212-901-2638
E-mail: smiller@nysun.com