This Texas Longhorns graduate played a huge role in Florida’s iconic sports drink Gatorade

The University of Texas hasn’t played the University of Florida since 1940. All these years, Longhorns fans have been denied a chance to remind the Gators of one fun historical fact.

Dr. J. Robert Cade, the inventor of Florida’s hydration breakthrough Gatorade, was a Longhorn himself.

Cade was a scientist, physician and inventor who was born in San Antonio on Sept. 26, 1927. Cade would join the U.S. Navy and serve as a “hospital corpsman” from 1945-48. He would use the G.I. Bill to return home and start at UT in 1950.

Cade finished his undergraduate work in history and then moved to Dallas to study medicine at the UT’s Southwestern Medical School. Cade would graduate and work a residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas.

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In 1961, Cade moved to Gainesville, Fla., and joined the school’s faculty. He started as the assistant professor of internal medicine.

Cade didn’t wake up one day and create the world’s best-known sports drink. He had multiple innovations that fostered sports safety, like developing the first shock-dissipating football helmet.

In 1965, Cade led a medical team that began developing a replenishing fluid for the Gators’ football team. Players were suffering from extreme dehydration. Cade’s team began studying perspiration itself and how to replenish those fluids. Scientists also had a basic question: why weren’t players urinating after games?

They developed a drink that combined “water, salt, sodium citrate, fructose, and monopotassium phosphate,” according to a feature profile published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

“Three doctors who sampled the first batch in 1965 quickly spat it out,” according to the profile. “Gators lineman Larry Gagner’s review was even less forgiving. Spitting out the drink, he declared it tasted like a certain bodily waste and dumped the rest of it on top of his head.”

Cade’s wife, Mary, had a simple solution — add lemon juice. Cade added lemon juice and cyclamate, a type of artificial sweetener.

It was first used on the sideline against LSU in October 1965. It helped Florida win the game, and thus, “Gatorade” was born. The drink then proved pivotal in the 1967 Orange Bowl against Georgia Tech. Florida won 27-12, prompting Georgia Tech coach Bobby Dowd to lament, “We didn’t have Gatorade.”

For years, universities wouldn’t pay scientists for their breakthroughs. So Cade sold the formula. The drink took off, and Cade took in all the royalties. The university soon took notice and demanded some repayment. The two sides ultimately settled, opting to share the royalties from PepsiCo which later bought the brand. Cade conducted research on kidney and liver disease, diabetes, hypertension, and other illnesses until his death in 2007.

Now, Gatorade is one of the world’s biggest selling sports drinks. It even comes in orange.

Not exactly burnt orange, though. But close enough.