Heart Condition and Death
Gathers' first sign of trouble came on Saturday, December 9, 1989, when he collapsed at the free-throw line during an LMU home game against UCSB.
He was found to have an abnormal heartbeat (exercise-induced ventricular tachycardia), and was prescribed a beta blocker, Inderal. However, Gathers felt that the medication adversely affected his play, and he soon cut back on his dosage. As the West Coast Conference (WCC) Tournament neared, Gathers did not show up for repeated appointments to test if the reduced medication was still suppressing the arrhythmias. It was suspected Gathers was not taking any dosage on game days.
On Sunday, March 4, 1990, in Los Angeles, he collapsed again with 13:34 left in the first half of the WCC tournament quarterfinal game against Portland, just after scoring on his trademark tomahawk dunk on an alley-oop pass pass from point guard Terrell Lowery that put the Lions up 25–13. He collapsed a yard or two away from the current head coach of the Miami Heat, Erik Spoelstra, then a point guard for the Pilots. He attempted to get up, telling the trainers, "I don't want to lay down!", then shortly after stopped breathing. He was declared dead on arrival at a nearby hospital at the age of 23. An autopsy found that he suffered from a heart-muscle disorder, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
Following his death, Gathers' family filed a $32.5-million lawsuit charging negligence. Loyola Marymount settled out of court for $1.4 million, while the cardiologist who treated Gathers settled for $1 million.
Read more about this topic: Hank Gathers
Famous quotes containing the words heart, condition and/or death:
“When the situation is, what we would wish, nothing is so ill- timed as to hint at the circumstances which make it so: you thank Fortune ... you had reason—the heart knew it, and was satisfied; and who but an English philosopher would have sent notices of it to the brain to reverse the judgment?”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Undoubtedly we have not questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)