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For sports fans of a certain age, seeing what was happening to Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin during Monday night’s game between the Bills and the Bengals brought back some tragic memories.
As the 24-year-old Hamlin was prone on the field receiving life-saving medical treatment after collapsing and going into cardiac arrest, many fans remembered a similar situation that occurred in 1990.
In March of that year, one of the best college basketball players in the nation, Hank Gathers of Loyola Marymount, was playing in the West Coast Conference men’s basketball tournament alongside his buddy Bo Kimble when he too unexpectedly dropped to the floor unconscious.
Much like with Hamlin, the play preceding his collapse was nothing out of the ordinary.
Gathers had just scored on an alley-oop dunk from point guard Terrell Lowery, turned to go back on defense, fell, briefly tried to get up, then collapsed and stopped breathing.
Less than two hours later, the 23-year-old basketball star was pronounced dead at nearby Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital.
What makes Gathers’ situation a bit different from Hamlin’s is that the basketball player had previously collapsed during a game earlier that season and was supposed to be on medications. After struggling, which he blamed on the meds, the dosage was decreased.
The kid was good too. Damn good. In one game during his senior year against LSU he scored 48 points and grabbed 13 rebounds while being guarded by two behemoths, Shaquille O’Neal and Stanley Roberts.
On the court with him on those days was his high school teammate Bo Kimble. Kimble, a consensus second-team All-American as well as the conference player of the year in the West Coast Conference that year, rallied the Lions to a series of upsets in the NCAA Tournament in honor of his fallen friend, making it all the way to the Elite Eight. Kimble even shot his first free throw of each game left-handed in memory of Gathers (and made them all) during the tournament.
On Monday, Bo Kimble says he was about to sit down and watch the Bills and Bengals play when he got a phone call from a booster from back in his days at Loyola Marymount.
“He was in tears,” Kimble told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Kimble, who runs a non-profit – The 44 For Life Foundation – that wants to place defibrillators in all public places, especially in schools, told the Inquirer, “We buy expensive cars. We buy expensive jewelry. We take vacations. We buy houses. We do all these flamboyant things in life, but we don’t buy defibrillators and have them at home or at the workplace. If you can’t afford it, learn CPR. There’s a lot of things that we don’t do for ourselves but we’ll do anything for our children. So what I say to parents is that it’s unacceptable to have a child — any age, but particularly a minor — and not know CPR. It’s unacceptable. Do it for your kids. Do it for your loved ones. You never know whose life you might have to save.”
Kimble added that it actually wasn’t Hank Gathers’ death that pushed him into action with the non-profit. It was the death of another basketball player, a guy he hardly knew, that did it.
Bo says that he was playing in a summer basketball league at a YMCA in New Jersey when 38-year-old Robert Carter collapsed on the court, just like his friend Gathers did.
“I got so upset because here’s the second time this crap happened and I couldn’t help this guy,” Kimble said. “I knew in my heart that if I knew CPR, he probably would have made it. No different if we did CPR for Hank. You must do CPR within two to three minutes of a sudden cardiac arrest. That’s why Damar made it [Monday] and in my opinion, why Hank and Robert Carter didn’t make it.”
Still, the moment on Monday where medical personnel were trying to save Hamlin’s life right there on the field hit hard.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Kimble said. “It’s stressful to see. You know it’s a serious issue when you see CPR being administered and you witness the AED being used and trying to revive him. That’s extremely, extremely traumatic, not just for the team but for the fans in the stands. You don’t want to see that. But it’s better to do that and save him than not being public or having the team exposed to it. From what I hear, Damar is a great community guy. He’s a young man with the rest of his life ahead of him.”
On the positive side, as Bo Kimble did turn the game on and saw the medical treatment Damar Hamlin was receiving, he was reminded that his friend Hank Gathers did not die in vain.
“Unfortunately, it takes a high profile athlete in a Monday Night Football game or a Hank Gathers death, it takes something at a high-level exposure wise to get on people’s radar,” he added. “What I’m saying is let’s be proactive instead of reactive.”