Without Dr. Robert Cade, we'd have never known the joys of Brawndo, glowing sweat, Powerthirst, or the ti-zzight Keith Jackson ads where he dramatically overstates the effect of sugar, water, and salt mixed togther in a single beverage on the play of the Florida football team. (Hey, it worked, but Ray Graves probably had as much to do with a 70 win decade as Gatorade did.)
Cade, who died today of kidney failure, was the inventor of Gatorade, the wonder beverage launching an entire industry of obese child-fuel, and someone who shared an experience we had many a time in Gainesville: he scraped together around forty bucks and mixed up something that made him vomit.
"It sort of tasted like toilet bowl cleaner," said Dana Shires, one of the researchers.
"I guzzled it and I vomited," Cade said.
He's talking about the first batch of Gatorade. We're referencing just about any night between 1994 and 1997, but sure, it's the same feeling, more or less, minus the cold press of a jail cell against your face and waking up naked in the primate research facility. (Again.) We hope Cade didn't experience anything of the sort in his research or in his subsequent life as a researcher at the University of Florida, where he worked until his retirement in 2004.
Dr. Cade was eighty.
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