The Media Learning Curve: The story beats again for 'The Heart of a Lion'

Expanding on today's media column (linked here):

Kyle Keiderling made some interesting finds about Hank Gathers in the process of doing his book "Heart Of A Lion: The Life, Death and Legacy of Hank Gathers."

For example, Gathers enjoyed gambling -- and he wasn't very good at it.

He would go to Los Alamitos race track with a booster named Peter Priamos, an attorney from Torrance who had known Gathers since he came to L.A. from Philadelphia to play at USC as a freshman. Priamos supplied him with the cash -- for that, as well as other things that the NCAA apparently didn't know about. Gathers would quickly lose it. That also happened during a time when LMU went to Reno to play a basketball game -- Hank was loose in the casinos.

In retrospect, all that was part of Gather's DNA that probably led to him gambling with his own life -- the way he wanted his heart medication reduced so that he wouldn't play so sluggishly, convincing the doctors trying to monitor his progress that if he could just get through the West Coast Conference tournament, he'd have a couple of weeks before the 1990 NCAA tournament started to adjust to new dosages of medicine.

It didn't work that way.

"My sense in all this is that Hank knew he was taking some risks, but he thought they were worth taking because the end result was getting him and his family out of poverty," said Keiderling. "I hope this book brings to people the nobility of his life and the legacy he left. I hope some parent will have the sense enough in youth soccer or Pop Warner to get their kids checked with an EKG. If it saves one life, then it's worth it to me."

Since Keiderling didn't know Gathers and only gathered information for his book from former teammates, friends, family and others, there's a different feel to the book than if there was a personal relationship already established.

"I don't know if that was a hinderance to me," Keiderling said. "That's hard to answer. I had the benefit of some great writing from people who covered the team. I benefitted from ther contemporaneous accounts of Hank's life and activities. Maybe it was an asset that they were able to cover him, and I could use it bring him to life again to the readers.

"A lot of things that happened in Hank's life weren't clear, and I'd get new nuggets of information as I'd go along. I could never get something that I could always hang my hat on, though -- things about his medication and who called what doctor."

One important tidbit that Keiderling got toward the end of his project was a phone call from Priamos' second-oldest son, Chris. He phoned him to tell him that his father had passed away. But he also wanted to relay a story that he'd never told anyone: Chris was born with a congenital heart condition and underwent surgery when he was five. He had the first of two heart attacks when he was 12. He'd been on medication, including Inderal, which Gathers was taking, for almost two decades.

"Hank quizzed me on the medicine he was taking and then told me he decided to take his medication every other day," Chris told Keiderling. Chris warned Hank that the medication didn't work that way, that he needed to take it continuously to have it build up in your system.

"I told him, 'You can't go off your meds,'" Chris said. And that was the last time he spoke to Hank, in early February, 1990.

Another revealing interview that Keiderling had was with University of Portland coach Larry Steele, who had similar heart conditions and wanted to talk to Gathers about it privately at the WCAC tournament -- days before Gathers died, on the floor, against Steele's team. Steele regrets they never had that conversation.

From the media end, another thing Kiederling points out: During a meeting at Gather's condo the next night, Hank's brother Derek, who was playing at Cal State Northridge at the time, was trying to figure out how to go forward. Bo Kimble had taken him to the office of attorney Leonard Armato, who recommended to him a lawyer to help him.

Kiederling writes that that Derek, LMU booster Al Gersten and Jim Hill, the KCBS Channel 2 sports anchor, "were discussing the options. Hill was emphatic that the Gathers family should proceed with a lawsuit. Derrick wasn't sure who the lawyer should be." Kiederling obtained that information during an interview with Gersten, who lives in Beverly Hills and works as a property developer at his company in Sherman Oaks.

Keiderling said Hill refused to be interviewed about that when approached.

Brian Berger, who with Keith Forman did the call on LMU student station KXLU, said this week that a recent reunion held at LMU for the 1989-90 team allowed the two of them to sit in the same seat they broadcast that game 20 years earlier and remember back to what happened.

"I had a lot of dreams, for years, after that game," said Berger. "I'd dream that I was sitting courtside again and I'd be thinking, 'What can I do to stop Hank from doing this?'"

Berger made it up to Portland and was doing PR for the Trailblazers in the early '90s when he came across the story of the Boston Celtics' Reggie Lewis, who was having heart issues. Berger said he wrote a note and gave it to the Celtics' PR department to give to Lewis.

"I told him that if what he had was similiar to what Hank had, he had to stop playing Russian Roulette with his life and stop playing," said Berger. "I wanted him to know that I thought he could die from this. Two weeks later, he died. I wish I could go back and change things there, too, but I can't."

Since 2005, Berger has been going through his video tape collection, converting them to DVD and downloading clips onto YouTube.com -- like the one above, and the clip of Gathers and Bo Kimble on the "Today" show we linked yesterday (linked here).

"I wanted to put them up, for those who'd never seen him, to see what kind of person he was," said Berger. "I think you get a pretty good idea what he was about after seeing them."

== More information on the book: www.hankgathersbook.com
== A special edition of the book from the LMU store: (linked here)
== The official 20th anniversary LMU website (linked here)
== The audio from the KXLU call of the game (linked here)
== An interview Brian Berger did on his Sports Business radio show in Portland that airs this weekend, after attending the 20-year reunion of LMU players on campus a few weeks ago (linked here). Those interviewed include Bo Kimble, Jeff Fryer, Tom Peabody, Terrell Lowery, Per Stumer, Marcus Slater and Marcellus Lee, plus author Kyle Keiderling.
== The foundation Kimble started for heart disease education in Hank Gathers' honor: www.44forlife.org
== A story Steve Dilbeck did for the Daily News on the 10th anniversary of Gather's death (linked here).