The moment still stands out in my mind. The memory is hazy, like a dramatic television flashback.
I’m not sure of the finer points of that Tuesday night. I know I was at my house in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I’d just turned 20 and I was working as a coach at the Providence College basketball camps, so there's a chance I was fresh off a full day of teaching, playing, and talking basketball.
The Celtics were in their post-Larry Bird era. Robert Parish and Kevin McHale were still holding on in what should have been the Len Bias era, but that was snuffed out by cocaine seven years prior. I think we were all still wondering what a prime Bias would have been like on this team, especially with Reggie Lewis as a partner.
Lewis represented hope for the Celtics. He was just coming onto his own after two nearly identical seasons of being a 20-point-per-game scorer for Boston. He did everything on both ends of the floor, including giving Michael Jordan fits defensively, and he looked like he could lead the next generation of Celtics to a title.
We thought Boston was destined to win a title in the 90s. They’d won every other decade, so why would that stop?
I remember the big box of a television on top of my dresser. It was a big, gray, monster holding a cathode ray tube that hummed and warmed the room when it was on. But nothing felt colder in that moment than the news anchor, breaking in with a special report.
Reggie Lewis collapsed while working out at Brandeis University. He was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.
I did what everyone else watching in that moment did. I cried. I yelled, I swore, and I cried. I cried some more during his funeral. The aerial shots of the lines of people trying to pay their respects still stand out to me. The love he was shown was a reciprocation of the love he had shown his community in Boston.
An adopted Bostonian from his days at Northeastern, living an improbable dream as the star and captain of the Celtics, was not supposed to go like this.
Thirty years later and I still well up thinking about it. No one had any idea what was going on. Hank Gathers had just collapsed and died on the court a few years before Lewis. When Reggie fell to the floor against the Charlotte Hornets, we feared the worst, but we thought he might have been in the clear.
And now to hear LeBron James’ son collapsed the same way, it all comes rushing back.
The sad fact is that sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death among young athletes. The risk is greatest among basketball players. According to government statistics, sudden cardiac arrest will impact one in nearly 9,000 basketball players, and Black men are three times more likely to be impacted.
Another Reggie Lewis is inevitable, and you may never hear about him, unless steps are taken to screen for these potentially life-threatening conditions in young athletes. This should be the standard everywhere.
Time passes and the memory of Lewis fades as the years roll on. What he was and could have been will be debated from time to time. Videos of him blocking Jordan get passed around social media whenever someone gets the twinge to make a point. His name will always come up in conjunction with Rick Pitino when people say, “If only Reggie lived, then we wouldn’t have suffered through the Pitino era.”
He meant a lot to the Celtics on and off the floor. He was one of the greats when it came to community service, uplifting Boston’s less fortunate communities every chance he could. We were robbed of a great young basketball player and an even better young man.
But we still treat his passing too much as an anomaly and not enough as a lesson to be learned. There are underlying heart conditions in children and teenagers playing sports right now that are undiagnosed. Bronny James is bringing this to the forefront again right now.
Lewis’ life was cut short, and James’ career might be over, but there's an opportunity to make sure our young athletes don’t suffer the same fate.
We’ve already cried enough.