The Ghost Of Hank Gathers Hangs Over Sports

PHILADELPHIA - He came home that night, had something to eat and disappeared into the darkness of his bedroom. Surrounded by trophies, photographs of sports stars and other artifacts of adolescence, Stephen Larkin slid a videotape in a VCR and sat back on a pillow, his eyes drawn to the flickering image of himself taking a handoff for his former high school football team.

While Larkin watched himself dash across the screen for a 12-yard gain and collapse beneath a pile of tacklers, he looked up and saw his mother, Shirley, standing at the door. He asked her to come in.

``See that?'' he told her. ``That was the last time I ever carried the ball for Moeller.''

Shirley Larkin sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. ``Maybe,'' she began optimistically, ``you could give a sport like golf a try. The doctors said that would be OK. Golf is something I know you could do very well.''

Stephen shrugged and replied: ``Golf is for sissies.''

``Oh, Stevie,'' she continued. ``I just want to see you do something positive.''

``Golf is for sissies,'' Stephen shouted. ``I never want to hear the word golf again!''

Two other words Stephen Larkin would prefer not hearing are these: Hank Gathers. When the Loyola Marymount University basketball star died of a heart seizure during a game on March 4, 1989, it left athletic administrators shuddering with fear that it could happen again and Stephen Larkin the subject of intense scrutiny.

The brother of Cincinnati Reds shortstop Barry Larkin and the youngest member of a truly gifted family of athletes, Larkin had been a promising first baseman and running back at Archbishop Moeller High School in Cincinnati when he was diagnosed a year ago as having a potentially fatal heart defect and prohibited from participating in ``strenuous'' sports.

Larkin, 17, still hopes to play and has sued both Moeller and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati for that right.

The immense shadow of Gathers also looms over others. The former Murrell Dobbins Tech star seems to have grown larger in death, and becomes larger still each time an abrupt blip appears on a heart monitor or an unexpected speck surfaces on an X-ray.

In the cases of Stephen Larkin and other athletes who have encountered potentially perilous physical problems since Gathers's death, passions in the athletic community have flared and sides have been divided on one ethical question: ``Who should decide when or if an athlete should play?''

That question has but one answer to Shirley Larkin.

The family should decide.

``A priest from the archdiocese told me we have a moral obligation to protect Steve,'' Shirley said. ``I told him, `Who has a greater moral obligation to this child? I love him more than you ever will.'''

She says that as she sits on a sofa in her suburban Cincinnati home, and a sense of utter despair enters her voice. Still not convinced that the evidence regarding Stephen is conclusive, Shirley Larkin sets a worried gaze upon her son and sees how difficult it has been for him to cope.

When Stephen once told her, `I am just another ordinary person now,'' she told him it was ``OK to be just another ordinary person.'' She has tried to persuade him to focus his attention on something else, but Stephen tells her:

``If I have to die, mom, I want to die on the baseball field.''

Morning comes quietly to the place where Hank Gathers rests. Covered with vases of flowers, a U.S. flag and a fragile, wooden cross tilted to one side, the plot at the Mount Lawn Cemetery in Sharon Hill stands as a tranquil counterpoint to the swirling chaos this sad loss has stirred. In the year that has passed since Gathers died at age 23, lawsuits and countersuits have been filed, accusations have been hurled between litigants and reputations have been skewered. Medical issues have been debated, legal questions have been scrutinized and widespread apprehension has prevailed.

Yet, while Gathers' death and the entanglements it created have caused athletic administrators to pause and err on the side of safety, the incident has done little to sober athletes with physical defects to the potential risks and keep them from attempting to pursue their careers. Some deep conflicts have developed.

``The death of Gathers was like a smart bomb exploding in a Baghdad bunker,'' said Joseph Torg, the director of the Sports Medicine Center at Penn and a preeminent expert on the cervical spine. ``What we have seen is an ultraconservatism take hold. This was such a dramatic, chilling event that whenever a kid faints - regardless of the cause - he is precluded from participating in sports. Gathers has caused the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction in this respect.

``But am I surprised that the athlete is oblivious to the potential hazards?'' Torg said. ``No. Athletes have always believed that it could never happen to them.''

Some would appear to believe exactly that: The Philadelphia Daily News found six athletes whose careers have been disrupted by health defects since the beginning of 1990, and five either still are participating in sports or hoping to resume. In addition to Stephen Larkin - who batted .312 last year for his summer league team and still hopes to land an athletic scholarship to college - the cheerless parade of collegiate and high school athletes consists of:

-- Ron Copeland Jr., a hurdler at the University of Southern California. Because his father and brother both were athletes who died suddenly of heart seizures, USC prohibited Copeland from competing in January 1990. He continues to practice on his own.

-- Jeff Gray, a high school linebacker in Portsmouth, N.H. Gray suffered a chipped vertebra while tackling an opponent during the 1989 season and was told by an orthopedic surgeon last August that death would be possible if he continued his career. (Torg, incidentally, served as a consultant in the case and concurred.) Gray pursued a second opinion, contested his case before a special hearing of the school board and won approval last September to participate in athletics.

-- Joe Rhett, a forward on the University of the South basketball team. Rhett passed out on an airplane and again in his dormitory room last February and was diagnosed as having an irregular heartbeat. He had the problem corrected with a pacemaker nine days before Gathers died and this season is the team's second-leading rebounder.

-- Mark Seay, a wide receiver on the Long Beach State University football team. Seay lost a kidney and had a bullet lodged an inch from his heart during a 1988 drive-by shooting. The school attempted to block his comeback last spring, but relented and allowed him to participate when he began legal proceedings.

-- Monty Williams, a forward for the Notre Dame basketball team. Williams was diagnosed as having probable hypertrophic cardiomyopathy - the same potentially fatal congenital heart defect that afflicts Larkin - during a preseason physical examination in September. Noting that Northeast Missouri State linebacker Derringer Cade had collapsed on the sideline and died of the same condition the previous Saturday, Williams announced his retirement from basketball and is an exception to the other cases in that he considers himself fortunate that ``nothing happened to me on the floor like Hank Gathers.''

Athletic administrators share Williams's concern. When Gathers fainted during a December 1989 game - and Loyola continued to permit him to play - it shed a poor light on collegiate sports and the people who administer them.

Marvin Cobb, the assistant athletic director at USC, summed up the situation when he said that ``Gathers has left all of us sensitized'' to the potential health problems of athletes, and that administrators have an ``absolute obligation'' to stop an athlete from endangering himself.

``There is no question that Gathers got our attention,'' Cobb said. ``How could it not? None of us want to be perceived as irresponsible or abusive or have a lawsuit dropped in our laps. I empathize with the athletes, but Gathers taught us something: We have to be careful.''

Stephen Larkin would say too careful. Neither Larkin nor Todd Portune, the family attorney, believe Moeller would have been so inflexible were it not for what happened to Gathers and the attention his death received.

``That created a shift in attitude among universities, colleges and high schools,'' Portune said. ``Steve would not have encountered this resistance before Gathers.''

Larkin concurred and added: ``This would not have been a big deal.''

``I have dreams at night and I can see myself running the football or hitting a baseball,'' Larkin said. ``I hear what the doctors are saying, but I also know that every athlete is taking some kind of risk.''

That is the prevailing view among athletes in questionable health: Potential danger is everywhere. Although Rhett remembered that tears came to his eyes when Gathers died, and others were equally as shocked and sorry, each points to his own case and says, ``Gathers had something entirely different.''

Gray says exactly that, but adds that he would not have attempted to come back if each of the doctors he consulted had told him he was endangering himself.

``I had confidence in the specialist or I would not have jeopardized myself,'' Gray said. ``I had no problem.''

The injury Gray sustained occurred while he was making a tackle in the second game of his junior year. Portsmouth principal David Matthews remembers that the ``hit was so loud it could be heard on the top row of the bleachers.'' Gray remembered that he experienced a ``tingling sensation'' in his fingertips.

Although Gray left the hospital that night under his own power, his season was finished. Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Thomas Barton concluded that Gray would be risking serious and debilitating injury if he played again.

But another orthopedic specialist, Stephen J. Lipson, disagreed: ``I believe that he can play tackle football without any reservations.'' Gray returned to football this season, and both the University of Massachusetts and the University of New Hampshire have courted him with scholarships.

The very same week that Stephen Larkin fainted while working out at Moeller, just five days before Gathers died on March 4, a 6-7 forward for the Manchester Giants collapsed during the opening period of a basketball game in England and died. His name was Tony Penny and he had the same condition that afflicts Stephen Larkin: an enlarged heart with a deformed left ventricle.

He was 23 years old.

The sad tale of Tony Penny sheds light on the dilemma that confronts sports administrators and physicians. A former basketball player for Central Connecticut State, Penny had been diagnosed as having hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in 1986. When team physician Dr. Milton Sands characterized him as a ``time bomb'' and told Central Connecticut State of the tremendous risk it would be bearing by allowing him to play, Penny consulted nine other cardiologists, found a doctor who insisted that basketball did not present greater danger than his daily routine and received clearance to participate from the Connecticut state attorney general. He sued Sands for interrupting his athletic career and was playing in his native England after finishing college when he died.

The question Sands asked himself in this and cases like it is: ``How can I preserve the health of this athlete but also his quality of his life?'' The same question surely presented itself when Gathers passed out at the foul line during a December 1989 game: How can we do our jobs as doctors and still allow him to pursue his dreams of an NBA career?''

``None of us is God,'' Sands said, ``and no matter what any doctor says, in these delicate situations with problematic athletes, we can only guess. This is Russian roulette.''

Sudden death in athletes has been a truly confounding problem; five athletes have died since the beginning of 1990 from cardiac arrest and other causes. In addition to Gathers, Penny and Cade at Northeast Missouri State, the group also includes John Karkoska, a Baylor football player who succumbed at practice of viral gastroenteritis, a stomach virus.

``The problem is this: Where do you draw the line?'' Matthews said. ``Had every doctor told us Jeff should not play, we would have handled the whole situation differently. But that was not the case. When one of the doctors cleared him to play, it became an issue for the parents to undertake.''

An envelope came to the Larkin house one day during the summer and Shirley Larkin opened it. Inside were some handwritten letters and an obituary that had been clipped from a newspaper. The letter was from a bereaved women in Texas; the obituary announced the death and funeral arrangements for her beloved son.

The woman introduced herself in the letter to Shirley Larkin and said she wanted her know how she felt now that her son was dead. He was 19 years old, had been a baseball, basketball and football player in high school. She said in the letter that the doctors had placed no restrictions on her son, but wished they had. She would have insisted he stop playing sports. Instead, on the very day she was loading the car to take him off to college, her son said: ``OK, I'm going to take a jog.''

``He started running,'' the letter said, ``and died of a heart attack before he reached the corner.''

Shirley Larkin read each word of this letter very carefully and then walked upstairs. She handed the letter to Stephen and asked him to read it. When he came to the end of it and placed it back in its envelope, Shirley Larkin looked at him closely and asked: ``How does this make you feel?''

Stephen Larkin looked up at her and replied, ``Not one bit different. He died jogging.''

He handed the envelope back to her and added: ``I want to play.''