Bills' Demar Hamlin Left Field Alive Because of Two Previous Tragedies

Former Arkansas NCAA tourney opponent's death, horrible night on Arkansas high school football field echoed forward in history in positive way

Author:
Kent Smith
Updated:
Jan 3, 2023 11:46 AM EST
Original:
Jan 3, 2023

In this story:

Arkansas Razorbacks

FRISCO, Texas – As I drove through the darkness of the Texas night, the light of from a text coming through to my cell phone filled the cabin, lighting up both my face and my daughter's.

Seeing a stoplight up ahead, I waited to check it, figuring my wife wanted us to stop at the store to pick up a few essentials after ping-ponging back and forth between Texas and Arkansas for the past month.

It wasn't from my wife.

Instead, it was from allHogs owner and managing editor Andy Hodges.

"I may have just watched an NFL player die in a game. Bad. Really bad."

I switched on the radio to the Monday Night Football broadcast and we listened as Westwood One play-by-play announcer Kevin Harlan wove his way through the difficult job of trying to explain what happened to Buffalo Bills' defensive back Damar Hamlin and the fallout of events unfolding afterward with limited information.

As I glanced at my daughter and the concern in her eyes, I realized a young lady who has little concern for sports outside of when Arkansas plays Oklahoma State in baseball may have just had her Hank Gathers moment.

The rest of the way home, I was time-warped back to my 10-year-old self on a couch in small-town Arkansas.

The talk all week had been about whether Arkansas could hold off Paul Westhead's 12-seeded Loyola Marymount, the only team in America thought to be able to run and play full court pressure basketball at the same speed an intensity as Nolan Richardson's Razorbacks.

The other topic being discussed was whether Arkansas-Little Rock could upset No. 4 seed Louisville to set up a game against UALR in the second round during a time when the Arkansas philosophy was that the university on the hill was too good to lower itself to playing in-state schools.

The Trojans nearly pulled it off. Louisville had to hold on at the end for a 76-71 win.

We watched in amazement as Hank Gathers, Bo Kimble and Jeff Fryer ran Arkansas ragged. All three finished with 24+ points, including Gathers who led his team with 28 points and 17 rebounds.

They truly were the West Coast version of the Razorbacks.

Had Mario Credit not played out of his mind with 34 points, that game might have turned out differently.

After that, the Lions became sort of an adopted secondary team in our house. They didn't play on television often, which was the case across the board back in those days.

Loyola-Marymount was making noise the following year and we watched when we could. Gathers, despite being the nation's leader in scoring and rebounding, had decided to come back his senior season instead of opting for the NBA draft.

The result was stunning as the Lions broke records left and right. At one point, Gathers led Loyola Marymount to 181 points in a single game. Four of the five highest scoring games at that time came as a result of Gathers and his teammates.

Arkansas had a team everyone thought could compete for a national championship in the 1990 NCAA Tournament, but the one team everyone wanted to avoid was Loyola Marymount, including the Razorbacks.

Gathers had problems with his heart earlier in the season. Doctors gave him a series of medicine, which eventually got him to where he could physically keep up again in Westhead's trackmeet style of play.

The pace had been ratcheted up from the year before, which meant only those with the most perfect of hearts should have been on the floor in a Lions uniform.

However, now 11-year old me didn't understand that.

On Sunday, March 4, I convinced my dad to stay up to watch Sportscenter so we could watch highlights from Loyola Marymount's semifinal game against Portland in their conference tournament semifinals.

He agreed, so my dad, wearing his new Cotton Bowl sweater with puff paint making a boll of cotton appear 3D from the recent loss to Troy Aikman and UCLA, settled down beside me to be awestruck by America's most explosive offensive team.

I genuinely wondered whether this would be the night they broke 200. I wanted to make sure I saw such a historic moment if they did.

Unfortunately, I witnessed a much different historic moment.

ESPN, literally the original with no spinoffs, was breaking ground as the world's first sports-only network, so there were about three channels a college basketball game might show up on in those days.

The Lions had to be caught in highlight packages and since the WCC championship game would be on ESPN the following night, we knew the highlights from their game would be on Sportscenter.

The show was a few minutes in, but a West Coast Conference semifinal game wasn't important enough to have in the opening, so I knew we were fine.

When I saw Loyola Marymount on the screen, I knew something big had happened.

They had to have broken the scoring record, so I was glued in.

A few minutes into the game, Gathers went up for an ally-oop.

Everything was fine and normal for a few seconds. Then we saw him collapse near the feet of future Miami Heat coach Eric Spoelstra.

Gathers tried to get up, so we thought he might be OK. The training staff knew he wasn't.

While I was too young to comprehend what was happening, the tone in the ESPN commentator's voice made clear to us know he wasn't either.

America's best college basketball player told them he didn't want to lay down as he fought against them.

Almost immediately, Gathers stopped breathing on our television and televisions across the country. Before the sun could set that day in California,

The game was suspended and eventually the entire tournament was cancelled.

Loyola Marymount opted to play in the NCAA Tournament as an 11 seed. In the team's first game, Bo Kimble, who had become friends with Gathers while at USC before they transferred together their freshman year, shot a left-handed free throw in honor of his teammate, bringing America to tears upon realizing what had just been done.

The Lions most likely would have been national champions that year had Gathers not died. Loyola Marymount went on to defeat defending national champion Michigan in the second round, took down a hot Alabama team and forced eventual national champion UNLV, considered one of the greatest college basketball teams ever, to score 131 to put them down in the Elite 8 without Gathers.

I, along with most of Arkansas, had a second Hank Gathers moment seven years later.

For those who have never lived in the state, there are few schools that play football relative to surrounding states. Because of this, if you didn't know a fellow Arkansas high school athlete personally, you knew of him because of the amazing job Steve Sullivan did with his Friday Night Flights program on Channel 4, a precursor to the Friday Night Touchdowns segment he brought with him on the move to KATV.

It was required to rush home after the game to try to catch Sullivan run through the highlights of all the big games regardless of where they were in the state. This was a habit I couldn't break in 1997, despite being in my sophomore year of college.

It was a way to connect to home even though I wasn't there.

Because of this, and I don't recall if Sullivan was the one who showed it or if I had flipped over to KATV for a moment, but I watched high school football highlights alongside hundreds of thousands of other Arkansans that Friday night.

What we saw looked innocent enough.

North Little Rock's Kenyana Tolbert, expected to be a future star at Oklahoma State, went down on what seemed to be a rather innocuous tackle.

It wasn't anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing life-threatening from the look of it when it happened.

Had there been, the highlight wouldn't have been shown on statewide television knowing the men in charge of those programs. It just looked like a big time player had gotten hurt like happens so many times in those games.

It was news because of who he was, not what anyone thought had happened.

But word eventually came out that a mundane play had paralyzed one of state's best players. The relatively small community of Arkansas high school football meant everyone in the state felt emotional pain for what had happened.

Before Tolbert could get out of a Dallas hospital, an anonymous donor purchased a wheelchair accessible house in Maumelle and gave it to the family. Oklahoma State offered to honor his scholarship should Tolbert decide to attend college.

That never happened. Instead, he stayed in the community that did so much to try to life him and his family up when they needed it most and attended UALR.

When Tolbert passed away in 2009, the whole state's heart broke alongside his family's and at the loss of what everyone thought was the end of his ability to make an impact going forward.

The positive of these two moments came full circle Monday night. Because of Hank Gathers, heart conditions are monitored more heavily and players are discouraged from continuing to play if one is discovered.

In the event something goes unnoticed, AEDs are placed everywhere in college and pro venues. Highly trained medical staff are kept on constant high alert.

NFL stadiums are essentially designed to be emergency trauma centers to help avoid the next Hank Gathers or to deal with the next Kenyana Tolbert.

In 2003, the L.A. Times reported on one of the first videos put together with cooperation from the NFL about how to "see what you are hitting" when tackling to avoid neck and spine injuries.

It was an eight-year passion project that was distributed for free to tends of thousands of high school programs in 48 states. Featured on the video as part of a movement that eventually made the saying as common on high school football fields as stretch counts is Tolbert's story.

The lives of these two men, while tragic, have helped potentially avoid so many life threatening moments and led to positive results when they can't be avoided.

Highly skilled emergency professionals were to Hamlin within 10 seconds. From what we know, he avoided complicating matters with a spinal injury through years of proper technique because of the movement, but required an AED because of cardiac arrest.

Everything he needed from knowledge during the hit to the perfect response after the game allowed him to leave the field with a chance to not only survive, but potentially live a normal life.

And for that, we can thank Hank Gathers and Kenyana Tolbert.

No matter how tragic that might be.