Roy Tarpley’s death on January 9, 2015, did not surprise anyone. At fifty, Tarpley had long struggled with liver problems, no doubt the product of his years of excess during the 1980s and early 1990s. A Dallas Mavericks star who made it to the Western Conference Finals in the 1987/88 season and stayed one game away from eliminating the Magic Johnson Lakers, Tarpley always had that “damn player” aura earned from suspensions. and suspensions for alcohol and drug abuse
Recalling his figure, Norm Sonju, general manager of that magical team that brought Tarpley together with Derek Harper, Rolando Blackman, Mark Aguirre, and Sam Perkins, could not avoid referring to the use, according to him, very widespread, of cocaine, not only in the NBA but in professional sports in general. The talented center had to twice leave the best league in the world to land in Greece with a checkbook blow and was still forced to beg for Asian minor leagues in his later years. He always gave the feeling that he could eat the world but he never put in the effort or the discipline necessary to achieve it.
His death, so young, I say, was interpreted as the toll to be paid when the sheep strays.(how to cut your body)
More surprising, to be sure, was the news of Jerome Kersey’s passing. Kersey was not known a bad life before, on the contrary: he was an excellent professional, versatile forward converted occasionally to power forward in the Portland Trail Blazers that reached the finals of 1990 and 1992, he fulfilled a more physical role in Los Angeles Lakers and was happy to even win a champion ring, already a veteran, in 1999, with the San Antonio Spurs.
Kersey was a sensational athlete, fast for his stature and of consolidated prestige in the league. He entered the hospital for a routine knee operation and the following week he died in that same hospital from a pulmonary clot. The official version was that the clot had formed in the thigh during the operation and had traveled through the body to the lungs, killing it. These types of complications are relatively common in patients with circulation problems, but it was still a tragedy: Kersey was fifty-two years old and the attending physician, Dr. Lewman, did not rule out that the clot was even before the operation. “It is common in sedentary people,” he said.
Two deaths of legendary players in the late 1980s and early 1990s in less than a month were shocking. Both had very different explanations, but they were striking in a league not used to dealing with the premature death of their former players. According to official statistics from the United States Government itself, the age expectancy for men in that country is 77.4 years. Although the number drops to 67 among elite athletes and reaches a dramatic 58 years among NFL players – a figure later nuanced by the prestigious statistics blog fivethirtyeight.com -, the NBA presents encouraging figures, with an average survival set at 81 years.
Taking into account that excessive height and the weight that this type of constitution usually carries are already negative factors in themselves, it is a hopeful figure and seems to show that, despite exceptions such as the aforementioned Tarpley, the former NBA player tends to take care of himself and to lead a healthy and long life. Or at least that had happened so far, because just ten days after Kersey’s death, another star from the 1990s passed away without even turning forty-nine: former New York Knicks player Anthony Mason.
Heart attacks outside and inside the field
Mason’s carelessness had been evident in recent years. Gonzalo Vázquez, probably the best NBA analyst we have in Spain, has already pointed out in an article how “difficult to surround” Mason was. In his time as a Knicks and Hornets player, he stood out on the contrary: he was a fibrous player, very muscular, relatively agile for his height, which allowed him to occupy the position of point forward, that is, a forward who can make the base functions at certain times, directing the team’s attack from outside and then going to the low post and doing the dirtiest work.
Mason had his NBA glory moment, as Starks, Ewing, McDaniels, and company when the Knicks were one pitch away from winning the 1994 championship against the Houston Rockets. The rest of his career was of a fairly high standard for what was expected of him when he came to the league as 53rd in the draft in 1988, but without the brilliance, he has been given after his death. A good player with serious limitations who fulfilled his role.
The overweight that Vázquez alluded to in his article took him up to 158 kilos for a man who barely exceeded two meters. On January 23, 2015, fat as a demon, he appeared smiling in a YouTube video to undergo an interview about his career. It was hard for him to breathe so his diction left a lot to be desired but it wasn’t a pathetic image either, of a WWE fighter completely out of steroids. Just over two weeks after that surgery, on February 11, Mason was admitted to the hospital for a routine check-up of heart problems that had been tormenting him for years. Just before entering the test he suffered a massive heart attack.
In his last seventeen days of life, Mason had to undergo four open-heart operations, some improvement, and one last relapse that killed him on February 28.
Heart disease is relatively common among elite players. Some have paid for it with their lives even when they were active, such as Reggie Lewis, a Celtics player who died in the summer of 1993 after having collapsed months earlier in a playoff game. Something similar happened in 2011 to Robert «Tractor» Traylor, the immense 130-kg center who, after a more than dignified NBA career, decided to retire in Puerto Rico, despite taking with himself a significant overweight and an aortic operation performed in 2006. Hank Gathers or Jason Colliers are other names to add to this list of unexpected victims.
Other players were luckier and their problems were caught early. They are called “Zipper Brothers”, an association that helps integrate into a new life those professionals who have had to abandon the sport overnight due to their heart problems. Among them, illustrious names such as Fred Hoiberg or Chris Wilcox, plus others who did manage to return to play after a time such as Channing Frye, Ronny Turiaf or Jeff Green.
The appearance of three cases of sudden death in a row forced experts to look back, but back, as we said, there were not so many antecedents, or not at least among players with an established career: in 2007, Dennis Johnson, legendary base of the Boston Celtics, during his heyday in the 1980s, passed away at the age of fifty-two from a heart attack while coaching the Austin Toros in the D-League, the second division, so to speak, of American professional basketball. A year later Kevin Duckworth passed away, the center of those Blazers in which Kersey excelled for almost a decade. Both Johnson and Duckworth shared a certain physical abandonment, something common when you leave the discipline of elite sport. In fact, the center was over 150 kilos on the day of his death, at just forty-four years old.
This was not the case of Orlando Woolridge, star of the Bulls and Lakers in the eighties and who went through European basketball in the nineties to end his career. Woolridge died at the age of fifty-two after suffering his second heart attack in less than a year, the result of chronic heart disease diagnosed shortly after retirement. Nothing this time pointed to physical abandonment but we did have a dangerous past: in 1988, Woolridge was removed from the NBA for a few months due to problems with cocaine use, the drug that, according to Norm Sonju, was at ease in the league during that decade.
The flexible anti-doping policy of the NBA and the complaint by Derrick Rose
Death, even the coincidence in time of several deaths, does not need a reasonable explanation. No one can assure that every athlete who dies before or around the age of fifty has had relationships with steroids or cocaine or other types of substances such as growth hormones. Another thing is that you have to investigate the years that some experts call the «wild, wild West», that is, the last eighties and the first nineties.
The problem is not doping in the strict sense of the word but the lack of awareness in the major professional leagues that the use of certain substances could be fatal to health. Steroids invaded the world of football, baseball – the cases of Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds or more recently A-Rod, the Yankees star – are still in memory, they continued to wreak havoc on wrestling professional, where the joke “if you don’t test positive for steroids, you can be fired” became popular and, logically, they had to be part of the preparation methods of certain NBA players, especially when the game got dirtier, harder, more physical, in the early nineties.
The league’s stance on the matter has been expected in a company obsessed with the good name of its brand: denying everything. When Congress, alarmed at the avalanche of steroid abuse cases in the MLB and NFL, called the commissioners of the four major professional leagues in 2005 and asked them about their anti-doping policies, Stern not only denied the use of anabolics or steroids in the NBA but resorted to the usual mantra in this type of sports: “No one would take those drugs in a game where what matters is speed and agility.”
It is a huge bullshit but we hear many times, also applied for example to football. Doping substances, as well as anabolics, steroids, or growth hormone, generally associated with bodybuilding, weightlifting, or professional wrestling monsters, not only make you stronger but also aid in your recovery. In any case, even if they only made you stronger and helped you gain muscle mass, how can you deny that this is vital for a center who has to defend his hoop and attack the opponent against moles of 120 or 130 kilos? How to claim an alleged “loss of speed” when steroids have been the favorite substance of hundred-meter runners for decades?
Little and little is said about the anti-doping policy of the NBA. For example, in Europe, it is often insisted on the topic that the American teams that participate in the Olympic Games do not pass controls. It is a lie. They pass them like any other athlete who is under the control of USADA and the IOC. The problem is precisely when they are not under that control, that is when they are under the protection of their own league. After the Congress bluff, Stern installed a random checks policy … that could only be done to rookies. The other professionals only had to go through a couple of controls, usually in the preseason, and on notice.
After the BALCO case and the Lance Armstrong scandal NBA changed its policy again in 2011: All players — novice or not — currently have to go through four random checks during the season and two during the summer. Considering that these controls are only for urine – the players’ union has for years opposed blood controls as they are considered “invasive” – that the chosen ones do not have to report their whereabouts, so they must be notified with long enough to be able to clean any prohibited substance from your body, and that many substances such as EPO, growth hormone or certain types of steroids are not even detectable in the analyzes, the surprising thing is that there are players who still test positive: since 2000, yes, only ten, including two Europeans – Hedo Turkoglu and Nick Calathes— and only one real star, Chris Webber, who received a five-game ban in 2004.
According to Lloyd Baccus, the league’s chief medical officer in 2005, in the six years prior to his appearance before Congress there would have been as many as twenty positive cases “condoned” by the commissioner, according to Baccus as being primarily “pseudoephedrine” intake, a substance found in a large part of the flu that are sold over the counter in supermarkets in the United States. The identity of those twenty amnesties did not come out at any time.
In the change, at least facing the gallery, of the NBA’s anti-doping policy, two factors aside from the Armstrong case had to do: on the one hand, certain journalists such as Henry Abbott, from ESPN, began to investigate and ask for clarification. Without generalizing, without blaming anyone for free, simply highlighting the obvious: if these substances are in all sports, they improve performance and there are cases of players who have tested positive even in third-world controls … it is illogical to think that they are isolated cases.
On the other hand, in May 2011, the official ESPN magazine included an interview with Derrick Rose, newly named MVP of the league, in which he rated the steroid problem with a seven out of ten and clarified: «It is a problem huge, we need this to end as soon as possible and we all compete on equal terms ». The interview had taken place in November, so Rose was caught on the wrong foot, in the middle of the playoffs, and could only issue a somewhat confusing statement in which she denied having made those statements and later admitted that if by any chance the had done would be because he had not understood the question well. The NBA and Miami Heat captain Dwyane WadeThey immediately went out to the media to give the same version: “We have never seen anyone or heard of steroids in this league.”
The latest cases: Christian Welp and Jack Haley
We were in that debate when on March 1, 2015, a fourth former NBA player from the 1980s and 1990s died of a heart attack on Hood Canal, near Seattle. It was the German Christian Welp. Because of his nationality and having played almost his entire career in Europe, Welp’s case was treated as a European issue, removed from American problems, but that approach is not exact: Welp came to the NCAA as a teenager thanks to the recommendation of Detlef Schrempf and remains the highest scorer in the history of the “Huskies” at the University of Washington.
Chosen in the first round of the draft by the Sixers, Welp’s NBA career was anecdotal for a serious knee injury that forced him to return to Germany at age three. Still, he always felt like an American. As I said in an interview: «I play in Germany, but I live in Seattle, I feel like Seattle. I catch a flight to Europe the day before training starts and return the day after the season ends. My life is here ». The circumstances of Welp’s death coincide neither with previous drug abuse of any kind nor with marked physical neglect. He was fifty-one years old.
As if four deaths in two months were few, on the sixteenth day came the fifth and until the last moment: that of Jack Haley, the charismatic player of Bulls and Lakers among other teams. Haley was also an inside player, like Tarpley, like Duckworth, like Welp and like Kersey at the end of his career. He was never anything like a star, but he gained a certain prestige as a charismatic, happy man, among those who “make up a team.” He was featured in video clips and movies during the 1990s, waved the towel during the season when the Jordan Bulls and Pippen set the record for victories in seventy-two games and was known primarily as Dennis Rodman’s “babysitter .”
Rodman and Haley had met in San Antonio and immediately became close friends, with what that means. Haley, more cerebral and more practical than Rodman, was instrumental in convincing the erratic Bulls rebounder that it was not a good idea to leave the 1996 final against Seattle after Game Five. “Imagine the party you’re going to miss” was the argument that convinced the “Worm”, who went to nineteen rebounds – eleven in attack – nine points and five assists in the sixth game, which gave the Bulls the quarter of its six rings.
Haley was a public relations and still was at fifty-one, when again a heart attack ended his life. Always smiling, in shape, he seemed the furthest thing from the figure of the former professional player who consumes himself after retirement and ends up looking like homeless in the skid row of Los Angeles. His death was traumatic due to the enormous affection that fans and colleagues kept for him … and due to the accumulation of tragedies. The debate was already adjourned.
Coincidence or causality? Research, at least Five deaths in two and a half months are many, which is beyond doubt. It deserves an investigation. Gonzalo Vázquez himself commented the other day on Twitter: «Things are so fine right now that we are only one death away from breaking ties. As it is”. Far from the intention of this article to blame the dead for their own misfortune. It would be unfair and accelerated. However, it is advisable to be cautious and investigate exactly what happened in those years of the late eighties and early nineties, when the drugs advanced far beyond the medicine itself and the control of the authorities was practically nil.
All in all, the NBA maintains its prestige and an enviable life expectancy. No one wants this to end like WWE, where the data is chilling: Thirty-two of his fighters have died before their fiftieth birthday of heart attacks or drug overdoses so far this century, including the former player of Argentine basketball Jorge «El Gigante» González. If you witnessed the television phenomenon that was the Pressing Catch in Spain in the early nineties, surely you remember El Último Guerrero, Terremoto Earthquake, British Bulldog, El Poli Loco, Mr. Perfecto, Randy Savage, Dino Bravo or Bad News Brown. Twenty years later, they are all dead.
Discounting WWE, Pro wrestling magazine puts at two hundred and seventy-eight the professional wrestlers who have died so far this century, almost the same as in the entire previous century, with peaks of thirty deaths per year, as in 2007, or thirty and one in 2009, an incidence seven times higher than in the other American professions.
The NBA has never been WWE, we agree on that. Premature heart attacks not only affect athletes, but we also agree on that and there are the unfortunate cases of Moncho Alpuente and Pedro Reyes in less than a week. The irresponsible thing, however, would be not to investigate, not to look back on the years in which these players stood out and find out to what extent certain substances became too common a support, not just for cheating but as something normal, which It takes everyone, and it wasn’t even penalized by the league itself.
Perhaps that will prevent this bleeding from continuing or perhaps this bleeding has already stopped and will not be repeated because it was all a huge coincidence. Hopefully, we are facing the second option. In any case, an investigation into this is never unnecessary.