Twenty years later, Gathers still died too soon

It's been 20 years since Hank Gathers died, and I still remember the blue satin lining in his coffin. It looked like a baby blanket. I remember walking through the Raymond Rosen projects in North Philadelphia, where Gathers grew up, and seeing a door frame with bullet holes in it.

Too many young athletes I covered in the Philadelphia high schools died from violence. A basketball player shot at a party. Another stabbed repeatedly on a playground, which he apparently didn't recognize as gang turf. A promising runner beaten with one of her track trophies and then shot by her own mother.

Hank Gathers averaged 28 points and 11.1 rebounds in three standout seasons at Loyola Marymount. (Getty Images)

But Hank died on a basketball court. The sport took him away from the bleakness of North Philadelphia, to Southern California and a college campus on a bluff near the Pacific Ocean. The danger stayed with him, though, in his heart and in the sport he loved.

He collapsed during a college game exactly 20 years ago on March 4. Three months earlier, he had fallen to the floor in another game against UC Santa Barbara. Doctors diagnosed a heart condition and prescribed a drug called Inderal. The Loyola Marymount athletic department bought a defibrillator, just in case.

But Inderal made Hank feel sluggish, taking away some of the edge that had helped him lead the nation in scoring and rebounding the season before. That intensity was supposed to carry him into the NBA, to a contract that would help his family leave North Philadelphia and maybe bring something good to the neighborhood. There were a lot of great people there, people who deserved much better than bullet holes in their doors.

An autopsy showed no traces of his heart medication. At the time, this was a politically incorrect point, suggesting that Gathers had gambled his life away. There were too many raw emotions, and there were lawsuits to be settled.

But since that spring, I've never forgotten that athletes have to be protected from themselves. Whether it's a concussed football player, an Olympic luger going down a track that terrifies him or a gymnast the size of a toothpick, they won't know when to stop.

It's easy to be a libertarian about the risks athletes take until you've been to one of the funerals, seen someone's mother in tears, viewed his 23-year-old body laid out in a casket and heard his neighborhood priest swearing and crying as he sat in his battered row house, sorting through mementos.

Father Dave Hagan was not a typical priest. He was a salty man, a civil-rights advocate and an anti-war protester who taught young men how to register as conscientious objectors and avoid service in Vietnam. He had taught Hank in grade school and coached him as a youngster.

Father Dave, as everyone in North Philly called him, read from a letter that Hank wrote after transferring from USC to Loyola Marymount: "I thought USC was the place to be. Now I know it's true blue with the crew at LMU."

He couldn't accept that such a vibrant life could be extinguished so quickly. It left him in a rage.

I have no idea whether anyone or any drug could have saved Hank Gathers. After the first collapse, he assured several people, including Bryant Gumbel on the Today show, "I've got the heart of a lion."

Gathers' family later said he felt embarrassed after the December episode, because he seemed so helpless as he lay on the court. Shame has long accompanied sports injuries, as if they reveal a character deficiency. True athletes don't feel pain, don't concede to weakness.

That attitude is shifting, however glacially. The NFL has finally been forced to acknowledge the brain damage that football can inflict on a player, and commissioner Roger Goodell has floated the idea of banning the three-point stance as a way to slow down the game. In gymnastics, age barriers have been implemented for international competition, partly in response to the disturbingly undernourished bodies turning up at the Olympics.

When most sports fans remember Hank Gathers now, they think of Bo Kimble, his collaborator both in college and at Philadelphia's Dobbins Tech, paying tribute by shooting left-handed on his first free throw of a game. Gathers, willing to try anything to fix his one egregious flaw, had begun taking foul shots as a lefty that season.

It was the perfect gesture, honoring Gathers' zealotry. But what I remember most are the swearing priest and the baby-blue satin, saying adamantly and poignantly that Hank had died too young.

Gwen Knapp is a sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.