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| In Memory of Mr. Gathers |
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| A Law, Perhaps? |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, March 07, 1990. Hank Gathers, the Loyola power forward who died the other day, is being remembered in the traditional way. It is likely the gymnasium where he went into convulsions and died will be named for him. His teammates wept, and the press was there to wring every nauseating tidbit of sentiment and hypocrisy from the whole schlemiel. It is not enough. Hank Gathers deserves a law. Gathers died because he should not, arguably, have been playing athletics at all. He had a defective heart, and both his team and his family knew it as well as he did. Even so, a heart such as Gathers, one with an abnormal rhythm, could easily have been corrected by a relatively simple device. If the condition had been known to doctors who attended him, the correct machine might have been able to save him. But he died, one more athlete sacrificed to the god of professional sports. Now, naming the gym after Gathers is nice, but let us look at the photograph in the paper yesterday. It shows Gathers right after collapsing and convulsing on the floor, when for a brief minute he regained his mind and he sat up. Look at the eyes. Here is a man who peers into eternity, who knows he is going to die. Look at the eyes. Oh, my god. He could have chosen another way, but he was channeled into sports, and at the age of twenty-four, was still in college and winning for it. You can just bet that the welfare of Hank Gathers was in everyone’s mind. Oh sure, he was told the risks no doubt. But what chance does a black male with questionable academic skills have these days? Certainly, nothing to compare to the NBA. And yet, here is the tragedy. The NBA, like all professional sports, would have done a very thorough medical on Gathers. Would a team have taken him with his risk? His insurable liability? I doubt it. Gathers may have labored in vain. And his college coaches no doubt knew it. So here is the Gathers Law, for and of the black meal tickets fueling the economy of mostly white coaches and owners. All college athletics must provide the same medical investigations that the professionals do. And colleges, if they tell a kid he can play at no or small risk, had better back that up with fiscal liquidity. And any coach who does not lay out the risks and options, and does so in order to increase his winning record, should be convicted of manslaughter and banned from sports at any level when he leaves prison. These are very young men, and they should not be risking their lives for doubtful income from professional sports. This page gets hundreds upon hundreds of hits in the course of a year, which is a lot for this site. I suspect it is from kids writing about Mr. Gathers, perhaps from his hometown or college. If so, and would like to submit some to me, I'll post them on this site unless I get absolutely inundated. Send them to darkcloud@boulderlout.com. |
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