It was just another game; it was just another night. And it was just another chance to prove to everyone that the Loyola Marymount “run and gun” brand of basketball was not just about entertainment.
It was about winning games.
Loyola’s star basketball player, Eric “Hank” Gathers, was one of the premier basketball players in the country, and was on his way to become a lottery pick in the next year’s NBA draft.
He had great credentials; in the 1988-89 basketball season, he led the nation in rebounding and scoring with 13.7 and 32.7 respectively, being the first player since Xavier McDaniel of Wichita State to do so. He also was no slouch in the 1989-90 season when he averaged 29 points and 10.8 rebounds a game.
He had a good chance to lead his Loyola Marymount Lions to a postseason berth with a 23-5 record, and go dancing in the 1990 NCAA tournament.
Unfortunately, he also had something that essentially ended his life too soon — cardiomyopathy, a tragic heart condition in which the heart muscle deteriorates over time.
On March 4, 1990, at the West Coast Conference Tournament, all of those promises were changed to hope and prayers that the electric big-man and prolific scorer would just survive.
Sadly, those prayers were not answered. At 6:55 p.m. only about 40 minutes from his dunk, Eric “Hank” Gathers passed on.
Gathers always had a happy-go-lucky personality, and especially showed it after his successful alley-oop attempt with 13:34 left in the first half in a WCC tournament game against the Portland Pilots.
“He turned back from the dunk and was smiling, it was typical Hank Gathers,” Don Ott, the West Coast Conference assistant commissioner, said in a March 12, 1990 edition of Sports Illustrated.
Only seconds later, Gathers collapsed near the mid-court line of the Gersten Pavilion, located in downtown Los Angeles, and was struggling to get back up to his feet, where he had a seizure and sadly once again collapsed on the court.
It was unreal. I was not alone in my disbelief. Even though I was not old enough to watch it live, it was bone chilling to witness it on video tape.
It makes me wonder how a guy so strong and so athletic could just fall lifeless on the court.
Junior Cody Gruber feels the same way,and also feels to always give it your all.
“You give 110 percent, [and] you never know when it’s your last time on the court,” he said. Gruber added that it is very sad to see someone die on the court, and that he would feel sadness or confusion.
“[I would wonder] if the same would happen to me,” he said.
Running an offense like Loyola Marymount’s takes running, literally, because it is 40 minutes of up and down basketball, which takes a toll mentally and physically.
English teacher Mr. Jack Bunnenberg, who played three years of high school basketball, said that his practices at Springfield High in Akron were extremely intense and
took its toll on the human body.
“Our coach ran us til we puked; he was a nut about that stuff,” Bunnenberg said.
“By the end of the season we were just drained.”
Bunnenberg added that he felt invincible on the court, and he always played with reckless abandon, as did Gathers, and as did every player who ever stepped on the court.
Hoover, which has a very strong tradition of athletics, requires athletes in every sport to have a physical on file. The physical could determine if the athlete is healthy enough to play the sport — and if not, the physical can be a guideline to help treat the athlete.
Good. Maybe an incident such as this will never hit close to home.
There is still a lot of debate of what really happened to Gathers.
Gathers was supposed to take a beta blocker which slows his heart beat down, but he said it was making him sluggish and moody on the basketball court.
He tried to get the doasage taken down to help him with these side effects.
I think that this was an error in judgement, by both himself and his doctors
The amazing thing to me is how Loyola Marymount responded to his death. They ended up making it to the Elite Eight in the NCAA Tournament.
This incident shows how something so tragic can galvanize a team, and how people can respond to tragedy.