25 year ago today ...

Hank Gathers died.

Here's a story from Philly.com (Gathers was from Philadelphia):

Fallen star: 25 years ago, Hank Gathers died on the court

 

Read that the other day. If you can get past the descriptive road map in the beginning, it's a decent story.

 

I remember one of my friends calling me and telling me and I immediately called bullshit.

My friend said, "If I was going to make it up, I would have come up with a better player."

Loved Kimble in the tournament that year. The upset over defending champion Michigan remains one of my favorite games ever.

 

If they would have been put in any other bracket but UNLV's I think they may have made the Final Four.

 

"The Guru of Go," about Paul Westhead's Loyola Marymount teams, is one of the better 30-for-30's that never gets much airtime. Has anyone else seen it?

Without recalling the details, I remember it explaining Gathers' heart condition in unfortunate terms: that he was either prescribed the wrong medication, or that he shouldn't have been playing at all. I can't remember exactly.

 

No defib machine on site. Now they are almost universal at sports vecnues. Saved the life of a kid this August who collapsed in the practice gym at Microville Tech.

 

I think the deal was, the medication they prescribed him made him feel sluggish, so he talked the doctors into giving him a lower dosage.

 

From the ESPN story:

"He was carried outside the gym via stretcher, where he was shocked by a defibrillator that the team had purchased for nearly $5,000 after his original diagnosis."

 

Here's a clip from "Guru of Go" on Gathers' death. The footage of him collapsing is still haunting:

 

Interesting fact I just saw on Twitter. The day Gathers collapsed and died, Loyola was playing Portland, which had Erik Spoelstra at point guard.

 

Something else I didn't realize until reading some of the coverage today: They finished neither the game nor the WCC tournament after Gathers died (the game where Gathers died was a semifinal). LMU was given an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament as regular-season WCC champion.

 

I remember watching the movie they made about him, and it couldn't have been too long after his death. Was an ABC Family type movie. I must have watched that movie 50 times.