"Someone help my baby," Lucille Gathers screamed.
"Do something for him," yelled Hank's teammate and friend, Bo Kimble. ''Help him. Help him. Help him."
Then Hank Gathers' chest stopped heaving. His eyes rolled back into his head. Suddenly, his body surrendered to his defective heart, there at center court in the gym on the campus of Loyola Marymount University, a world away
from his childhood home in the projects of North Philadelphia.
*
Not long after Hank Gathers collapsed and died on March 4, 1990, his family brought a $32.5 million wrongful-death suit against Loyola Marymount and 13 other defendants.
In August, Lucille Gathers and another son, Derrick, gave lengthy depositions for the suit. The depositions became public as part of motions by one of Hank Gathers' doctors, who is seeking dismissal of the suit. Arguments on those motions are scheduled to be heard beginning today in Los Angeles.
Neither Lucille nor Derrick Gathers has granted interviews since Hank's death. None of the other principals would agree to interviews for this article, which is based almost entirely on the Gatherses' depositions.
Lucille Gathers' deposition provides an inside look, from a mother's viewpoint, at the world of big-time college athletics.
During Hank's freshman year of college at the University of Southern California, she says, he began receiving small amounts of money from a USC booster. During his three years at Loyola, according to the depositions by Lucille and Derrick Gathers, the payments Hank recieved got bigger as he got better. By the time Hank was a senior, the depositions say, he was driving a new car, living in a $1,150-a-month apartment and receiving larger and larger chunks of cash.
Lucille Gathers watched her son become a star with growing unease, and at times confronted him, asking him to stop taking money.
Her pleas were ignored.
