I sold a Lambo to the guy I bought my knees from

I wonder if his knees are spoken for [Music] [Applause] [Music] I've mentioned before that I played basketball at a pretty high level at a young age I suppose it's just what you do when you're 6 1 and 13 and I love the sport had some amazing teammates many of whom have gone on to do awesome stuff in the NBA but unfortunately my own basketball career was cut short at about the age of 13 or 14 because I was having a ton of knee pain and I was diagnosed with a condition called osteochondritis dissecans disease which is essentially that where your femur bone comes into your knee there's kind of like two ball or condyles in the joint and the outer ones of each of my knees had pretty much just crumbled away and it's a condition that impacts about one out of every million people but I had it about as bad as one could it was a severe case as they had seen and in my case it there was no like therapy or anything about one out of every ten million people get it that badly and so I required a bone and cartilage transplant called an osteochondral allograft and I learned that because even as rare as the condition is the worldwide expert on the disease was here in Atlanta and so we went down to his office and he didn't have much of a bedside manner but he just said hey yeah you're gonna have to have a bunch of pretty painful surgeries and that's the only way to fix it but when you do you'll be able to walk and everything else otherwise I think I would have been in a wheelchair it by the time I was in my mid-20s so fortunately that bullets been dodged but at the time it was a very experimental procedure it wasn't something anyone did all that often it was approved generally but as I recall my insurance paid like a hundred grand for my right knee and then turn the left knee down and so through some shrewd negotiation I think my parents got him down to a few grand to do the left knee and that was just to pay out-of-pocket thing and so you got to love the American health system and it's does interesting things for my legs and Nick's face as it turns out and it was hard for me to give up this sport that I love you know I talked last week about Kevin Messer my childhood best friend that really introduced me to the love of cars and as much as we were great friends if we hadn't had as much time to spend together particularly those impressionable early driving years that may never have happened so the fact that the knees in my basketball career in the five-game a weekend distraction that's really what's you know least knocked over that first domino and led to whatever this has all become and so I suppose we have that to thing but it was a really really painful process and being on a transplant list is a really miserable thing you can't travel far from home you've always got to be on call to come to the hospital the next morning to have surgery and at the time they were really harvesting most of the bone and cartilage tissue out of a company in Florida there wasn't anybody in Georgia that was doing it so they all were being flown in but of course your grandparents don't know that so every time there's a death in the newspaper they call and I I wonder if his knees are spoken for so it took about a year and a half to get the first one at about six more months to get the second and my right knee I think is five years older than I am my left knees a couple years younger than I am but it was an interesting kind of circumstance that now they don't really do it in exactly the same way I actually called to have a checkup a few years ago and the receptionist it was just shocked that I'd had this happen that I was one of the people that had this surgery I was like you know you probably had a calm down that response a little bit because it's really horrifying from my into this phone call and I said well how many people ever had this surgery said I don't know maybe a hundred or a hundred and twenty so it was a pretty rare thing and again now it's just titanium replacement from day one there are a little higher quality at last longer but mine should last the rest of my life they still give me a little bit of issues every once in a while but if I run around a little bit I can usually manage to dunk a basketball but fast forward about ten years and I'm selling Lamborghinis at Lamborghini Atlanta and one of my main responsibilities is to order all of our new inventory and so I try to keep two or three coming each month and we're selling a ton of guy autos at that point and in this point maybe 2012-2013 it was really not popular to order very unique colors or unique specs on cars the resale red mentality from Ferrari had kind of permeated the whole exotic car industry and on the Lamborghini side they really wanted to do to stick to their kind of primary color palette green yellow orange if you wanted a bright color or maybe white black gray if you wanted something more subtle and those did sell well that was the most popular thing and if you wanted to order something that was really off the wall most dealers would discourage it because their theory was that not that many people are interested in having a purple Lamborghini so you just don't see a whole lot of those in that kind of age range now looking back but I knew that when we had a really uniquely suspect car even though it wasn't a mass appeal circumstance there were more people that were interested in owning something weird then there were weird cars and so if you had a SPECT that somebody really wanted they would generally forgive other issues like a bad car fax or some miles or some neglected service or one of these things that would normally devalue a car they would get over that because I really wanted that color and so when I started ordering cars I would try to get some really unique stuff order colors we didn't see as often and things like that one of the first cars that I ordered was actually a 2012 Guyardo LP 550 Spyder in a color called verdict Artemus and that was a color in 2003 that Lamborghini used to commemorate their 40th anniversary on a limited run marciella go and to be honest they didn't sell that well initially I mean there were really pretty cars but they set around for a little while but in the pre-owned market they had become a little bit more popularly demanded and they sold pretty well at a little bit of a premium its final this is gonna be a cool color in fact the only model precedent I could find was I think there was an O six Verde Artemis Kyoto in Germany but I think that car was crashed so I believe this is the only LP generation Ford II Artemis Kyoto in the world and the only Verdi Artemis Kyoto of any model year in the US so it was a very special car and it came in and we were all so excited about it but they took kind of special attention and they sent us a color sample to verify when we ordered it and in fact the car got delivered without the front-end lift system which in the US had been standard since 2005 so they ended up sending it to us we kind of repaired it as almost a warranty claim and it was a massive operation to retrofit it I think it took like 15 grand in parts and the whole front had to come off the car was wild but we got the car up but in the showroom and in fact that was the first car I ever took a picture of him put on Instagram that used some terrible filter but I really loved it it was just one of those cars that really appealed to me I thought it was unique it stood for something in the brand's heritage but also was a really exciting and unique color and honestly we had some initial interest but it kind of set around for a little while and my management staff was all kind of like yeah we told you this would wouldn't sell I don't know what we're gonna do with it but eventually this guy wanders in he's looking for his first Lamborghini and he falls in love with this car loves the color his daughters are there they love the color too and it was really exciting and they to buy the car and so as we're kind of talking through the process I'm talking to about what he does and he tells me that he sells medical equipment but that he used to sell bone and tissue with a company in Florida I'm not gonna name that company because they were involved in a lot of lawsuits around the time that I got my knees because sometimes when the tissue was harvested from the donor you know it's kind of get up here really really fast they put it on a plane in a cooler and it comes up to Atlanta to be installed and what it was happening very occasionally was that these spores were forming that they couldn't really check for and that once it was put in you'd get this terrible infection and generally die and that's one of the reasons they don't do this surgery anymore but fortunately mine all worked out pretty well but that ended up being the demise of this company and it made him you have to go out and find a new employer but as he tells me healthiest I'm just kind of sitting there like this guy may have been the one that sold my knees and he said actually I was probably the one in the operating room as we harvested them there were only a couple of guys and he did almost all the work in that zone in Florida and so this was the guy responsible for extracting the tissue that became part of me and so 10 years later I'm sitting across the desk selling him a Lamborghini it's one of those things that you never expect to kind of come full circle but he was excited to see me doing well and I think he'd enjoyed that part of it but obviously in the medical profession sometimes things go a little bit pear-shaped and that's what happened and so he no longer had that job but he had an exciting new company here in Atlanta still in the medical space and was doing obviously very well with it and he was excited to have his first Lamborghini and so we developed a great relationship stayed in touch went on a lot of drives together the car to me is just the most beautiful guy out of I've ever seen I just I love the spec I love the color I love how it works with the lines and the polished aluminum wheels and the yellow accents I'm very pleased with how it came out and I've tried to buy it from him a couple of times and he loves the car too so I haven't had any success in doing that but I love getting to see it when we go out to dinner or go on a drive or wherever it is and just the way the Sun hits that paint it's extremely unique and now of course we've seen a lot more Varde artemus cars popping up on Aventadors and her cons and things like that and I love seeing that I love that the trend is now what we see on Instagram these really unique specs these strange colors this PTS porsche movement how prestigious it is to have a really really especially color door option door configured car and I'm glad to see that continue because generally yes not all the market is going to prefer some unique spec but more people will like it more people will demand it then there could ever be supply and so as the cars age it becomes a really really good thing and it helps you to overcome a lot of other issues the car might have that you can drive it more not worry about it and know that somebody out there is gonna love the way it's optioned and you never know how these interactions with people are you gonna intersect from times where you have nothing to do with cars no interest in cars but then a decade later it becomes that so it was an exciting thing for me to encounter not the most salacious story to ever come out of the exotic car sales world but one of those great small world moments a Dollar Shave Club we always in control simply choose the delivery dates and frequency that sees your schedule so you don't run out get a shave shower with oral care starter set for just five bucks at dollarshaveclub.com [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 842,158

Rating: 4.940588 out of 5

Keywords: Ed Bolian, Lamborghini, VINwiki, Car Stories, LP550, Spyder, Verde Artemis, Osteochondritis, Dissecans, Dessecans, Disease, knee, surgery, injury, basketball, cannonball run, Jade Green, Murcielago, 40th Anniversary, Green, LP640, Mountain Drive, physical therapy, transplant, cadaver, tissue, bone, atlanta, insurance, negotiation, shrewd negotiator, exotic car, sales, lamborghini atlanta, transplant list, cryolife, organ donor, allograft, resurgens, medical device

Id: Lz9d8-ZXaKo

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 20 2019