Dr. Mary Collings broke it.
As the official chiropractor of the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars for thirty years, Collings is both an industry pioneer and a trusted contemporary. She is, in fact, the only woman in America to serve as the official chiropractor for two professional sports teams.
“When I started in the early ’90s, there were very few women in my profession,” Collings said recently over a dinner of cocktails and crabcakes in Addison. “So, absolutely, I’m flattered to be called a trailblazer. I didn’t inherit my business or marry into it. … I made it myself.”
For 32 years, Collings, now 58, has operated a thriving chiropractic business, moving from Irving to Las Colinas to her current Highland Park Spine & Sports Medicine office in Snider Plaza. From a wide-eyed graduate from Parker College with few local friends and zero advertising dollars, she grew and groomed her enterprise in a tricky profession long dominated by men.
Now, Collings is the chiropractor of choice when sports owners in the Dallas area need hands-on treatment for their multi-million-dollar investments.
“She is good at her job. She is easy to talk to,” said Mavs’ former long-time owner Mark Cuban. “And she loves the Mavs. The trifecta!”
Not bad for someone sold at birth for $10,000.
"Poor Little Thing"
While Collings’ personal and professional network reads like a “Who’s Who” of Dallas, her family roots are as modest as they are messy. She was born in 1966 in Wichita, Kansas.From there, it quickly gets murky.
“My official birth certificate is a joke,” she said. “There’s Wite Out all over it … trying to hide the truth.”
After years piecing together her history through records research, family conversations and an assist from the DNA company 23andMe, Collings believes she was born to a college-student mother and a professor father. He was married with two children but also an Emporia State University teacher.
They had a sexual fling and … Hello, Mary.
“There’s no official record of their names anywhere,” Collings says. “But I know I changed hands to my new family right there in the hospital.”
Collings’ adoptive family took her to grow up 120 miles southwest of Wichita, across the border in the Oklahoma panhandle town of Alva. She found out at age 10 that she was adopted. It was her adoptive grandmother who broke the news of her price of $10,000.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t a life-altering experience.
“I knew it all along,” she said. “I always felt like I was hanging out with someone else’s family.”
When Collings was 12, her adoptive mother died of an aneurysm. Her adoptive father followed soon thereafter, going into a fatal coma caused by what she calls a “broken heart.”
In the wake of the two deaths, Collings was temporarily staying at a friend’s house when she overheard the parents talking about her.
“Poor little thing,” she recalled the wife saying to the husband. “Adopted. Now an orphan. I wonder if she’ll ever amount to anything?”
Said Collings, “I’ve thought about that a lot through the years.”
Her grandmother ultimately raised her in Alva until she left for college.
During COVID, Collings received a DNA alert that she likely had a living blood relative. Seems her birth parents had more than a one-night stand.
She had an older biological sister, Kay, who was born and also given up for adoption by a 16-year-old girl and a 34-year-old man who were having an improper student-teacher relationship at the high school in the tiny outpost of Anthony, Kansas, 60 miles southwest of Wichita. (Both of Collings’ natural parents have since died.)
Collings contacted Kay and traveled to Wichita to attend her newly discovered nephew’s wedding.
“More than anything,” Collings said, “I always wondered if I looked like anybody else.”
She chatted with her sister, hugged her nephew and perused old photos. But unflappable to the core, Collings left with more of a “meh” than an epiphany.
“I’m glad I went … it answered some questions,” she said. “But did it change anything about me? No, not really.”
Though she’s reluctant to draw a direct correlation to her childhood abandonments, Collings has chosen never to get married. She’s had the same boyfriend for 15 years. He lives in her Devonshire neighborhood in Dallas, but she’s never seriously considered him moving in.
“We’re together,” she joked. “Just not all the time.”
After Grandma passed away in 2009, Collings found herself alone again. But not for long.
Through the years, she became close friends with two married patients in Las Colinas whom she first met in 1998. Their relationship flourished into dinners, social events, holidays and even international travel. In 2021, four years after her husband passed away, the wife of the couple, Robbie Raphael, legally adopted Collings as her 53-year-old daughter.
“I was struggling after knee surgery, and my doctor told me there’s only one person that can help you, and he sent me to Dr. Mary,” Raphael said. “She just had this vulnerability and sweetness about her, but she was also so strong. Since she wasn’t tethered to anything, every Christmas and holiday, she’d run off somewhere on a vacation. Well, we decided to give her a family to be with. It was meant to be.”
Said Collings: “People hear my story and the initial reaction is to feel sorry for me. But I’m lucky. How many people do you know that have been adopted twice?”
Collings is a mainstay at Dallas’ see-and-be-seen events. She supports various philanthropic ventures such as the Alzheimer's Association and Dallas Arboretum and spends multiple nights per week networking in little black dresses.
During the interview for this story, she was recognized twice at the restaurant within an hour.
“I call it the four degrees of me,” she said with a laugh. “I’m connected to almost everyone in Dallas in four steps. I love what I do, taking care of people. I’m living the American dream … born in a small town but moved to the big city and made something of myself.”
The “poor little thing” refused to let broken connections shatter her spirit. Now she’s the powerful professional the Mavericks and Stars can’t live without.
Dr. Mary Collings is both an industry pioneer and a trusted contemporary to Dallas sports teams.
Nathan Hunsinger
From the Beach to the Gridiron
Before Collings could conquer Dallas, she had to overcome her fear of flying, especially over water.Before that, she also had to decide on a career path. Her grandmother lit that runway, taking her to regular chiropractic appointments starting at age 5.
“She was a nurse, and we went every month for an adjustment,” Collings said. “It was for our wellness, but it also made my career choice pretty obvious.”
After graduating from Kansas State, she chose between two chiropractic colleges: Palmer vs. Parker.
“I mean, it was Davenport, Iowa, or Dallas,” she said. “No-brainer”
While enrolled at Parker in 1992, she accompanied a friend obsessed with beach volleyball on a trip to California. Not particularly interested in the sport and bored on the hot sand of Manhattan Beach, she went for a stroll and came upon a tent selling the types of tables she used to work on patients back in Dallas.
She asked questions and met Dr. Tim Brown, the Association of Volleyball Professionals Tour’s medical director.
“You’re in chiropractic school? Great because we’re short-staffed, and I could use some help,” Brown said. “Can you stretch out a couple of the players?”
Surprised and energized, Collings went to work and wound up volunteering for two straight days. When she returned to Dallas, she told school founder Dr. James Parker about her AVP interaction. He offered to help her get an internship and give her credit for her time on the tour.
Enter the flying and the giant, scary body of water known as the Pacific Ocean.
Collings’ first tour event was scheduled in Hawaii in February 1993. On the eight-hour flight by herself, she nervously dug her nails into the arms of the seat, squirmed uncomfortably and shot endless glances out the window into the vast blueness. Eventually, two men in her row attempted to calm her nerves. They ordered her a cocktail and began interviewing her, in an attempt to distract her from being distraught.
It worked, and the men were conveniently members of the DFW sports media. They were on the flight to Honolulu to attend the NFL Pro Bowl and cover several players from the Dallas Cowboys, who had just a day earlier won Super Bowl XXVII in Pasadena, California.
By the end of the flight, Collings had met several more media members, and relationships — even friendships — were born. The next day, she bumped into the media group in the hotel lobby, and they told her they had a friend who needed treatment in his hotel room.
Her excitement dwarfing her hesitance, Collings got the room number, lugged her table and knocked on the door.
“There’s this big guy … very polite … said he’s sore and tight all over and needed an adjustment,” she said. “I told him I was just a student still in school. But he said, ‘You come highly recommended.’ We were about the same age, and we both lived in Oklahoma for a while, so it was nice. But I didn’t know him from Adam.”
The next day at the AVP tournament on Waikiki Beach, Collings was working in a treatment tent when her new client appeared.
“You’re really good,” he said. “I feel great. Can I make another appointment? I have some friends that would like to see you also.”
As he walked away, Dr. Brown excitedly rushed over to Collings.
“Wait, how the hell,” he said, “do you know Troy Aikman?!”
With Aikman, the Super Bowl MVP and soon-to-be highest-paid player in the NFL, as her first reference, Collings became convinced she should launch a practice in Dallas rather than trek back to Alva. After graduating, she opened a 900-square-foot office in Irving near the Cowboys’ former Valley Ranch headquarters. About that time, the Stars hockey team arrived from Minnesota.
“I was so young, but when I included Troy and some of the other Cowboys as clients, the Stars’ trainer sent me a player to work on,” Collings said. “I’ve been with them ever since.”
Good reputations travel fast within the sports community. Collings soon expanded to a bigger space in Las Colinas (she moved to Snider Plaza in 2010). In 2005, when Cuban wanted to provide his players with a team chiropractor, Mavs’ trainer Casey Smith called the Stars for a recommendation. Bingo.
“Her empathy and forthrightness about the care that one is receiving is without parallel,” said Smith, now the head athletic trainer for Team USA Basketball and vice president of sports medicine for the NBA’s New York Knicks. “Her collaborative nature. Her ability to relate to people. The ability to meld her knowledge and experience with practitioners across the spectrum of healthcare is unmatched.”
Proof that, progress and laurels be damned, sports remain essentially a man’s world: Despite her tireless efforts and undeniable contributions, Collings didn’t receive a championship ring when the Stars won the Stanley Cup in 1999 or when the Mavs captured their lone title in 2011.
Said Collings of the snub, “I have made enough memories to last a lifetime.”
Citing medical confidentiality, she refused to divulge her patient list. But from speaking with players and associates — and simply taking a gander at the autographed photos on the walls in her office — it’s clear she has treated Mavs stars from Dirk Nowitzki to Luka Doncic, Stars players from Mike Modano to Roope Hintz, Cowboys legends such as Aikman and Darren Woodson, and assorted celebrities Willie Nelson, Chuck Norris, Alannis Morissette and Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott.
When nationally renowned TV interviewer Piers Morgan had Cuban on as a guest in 2014, he asked the Mavs owner to open his wallet. When Cuban obliged, out popped $700 cash … and Collings’ business card.
To this day, Collings hasn’t spent $1 on advertising, instead growing via elite word of mouth.
“There’s no magic formula,” she said. “Be good. Be nice. Be discreet.”
"I Have Always Belonged"
Collings has traveled the world, spending a week treating 250 underprivileged patients along the Amazon River in South America in 2008 as part of the Costner Medical Mission. The American Chiropractic Board of Sports Physicians has also named her “Chiropractor of the Year.”Her most remarkable feat, however, might be successfully and safely navigating sweat-stained, testosterone-fueled locker rooms and corrosive cultures that have recently spawned sexual misconduct scandals. NFL players Deshaun Watson and Justin Tucker were accused of harassing and assaulting massage therapists, and Cuban in 2018 agreed to donate $10 million to women’s organizations after a Mavs workplace investigation revealed, among other things, that team CEO Terdema Ussery had inappropriate interactions with 15 women over 18 years.
Her secret: An unwavering confidence, disarming personality and no-nonsense professional decorum.
“I feel as though I have always belonged there,” Collings said of locker rooms. “I have never had any inappropriateness directed at me. It is their locker room. I am just there to help the training staff help their players. With the world of constantly increasing #metoo, I feel that I am a #notme.”
Said Smith, “She has this great ability to be genuine no matter her audience. Athletes have a great bullshit detector. And in my experience, the greater success the athlete has had, the greater this detector is for them. She is able to relate and gain the confidence of people and athletes across the spectrum of ability and accomplishment.”
It’s almost as if, even after a life filled with parental uncertainty and inconsistent role models, Collings is now the one doing the adopting.
“When I started as a team chiropractor, I was in my 20s, same age as most of the players,” she said. “Now I’m like the mom who reminds my children: ‘Be sure to make good choices.’”
