Derrick Gordon Alive Because of Public’s Generosity : Man Quietly Lives His Life With a Transplanted Heart

Derrick Gordon, 21, who dreamed of being a professional basketball player only to find a different kind of fame, folded his 6-foot, 5-inch frame down into the sofa of his mother’s Crenshaw-area home and was clearly uncomfortable to be talking yet again about his health.

“I’d rather not,” he said of attracting so much attention since more than 17,000 people donated money toward the $125,000 his family could not afford for the new heart that was planted in his body by Stanford University surgeons in October, 1983.

He did not say a great deal more.

“He was quiet like that even before his illness,” his mother, Annette Gordon, volunteered.

Disease Killed Brother

Derrick, a victim of the same baffling heart disease that took the life of his older brother, Frederick, in 1982 and that has shown evidence of itself in several other members of his family, continues to go to UCLA Medical Center every two weeks for checkups.

He must take an array of drugs at least three times a day for the rest of his life to battle rejection of the heart by his body.

The drugs lower his ability to fight off the simplest ailments. The common cold could threaten his life. He must head for the hospital at the slightest symptom.

But he is alive, an achievement that seemed improbable when he was diagnosed as having idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, an irreversible degeneration that left his heart enlarged, fibrous and weak.

Enrolled in College

He said he now plays some basketball in the local gyms and has enrolled in business courses at Southwest College.

Is he tired of the hospital?

“Pretty much.”

Many of his friends, he said, do not believe that he has had a heart transplant. They do not understand how he could be so active. He does not argue with them.

In addition to playing some basketball and seeing his girlfriend, Derrick spends much of his days with his brother, Lorenzo Jr., who at 6 feet, 8 inches, was playing basketball for the University of Hawaii and came home when Derrick was ill.

Lorenzo Jr. was one of those diagnosed as having symptoms of the same disease. Three months ago, his mother said, he was told that he also will need a heart transplant. He has been going to Stanford once a month to be checked by the doctors there.

The other Gordon family members who exhibited signs of having the disease when a County-USC Medical Center physician called them all in for tests do not seem to have had any further problems, Derrick said. They are his sisters, La Toynia, 22, and Crystal, 18, and his father, Lorenzo Sr., 45, who is estranged from Annette Gordon.

With the family on welfare much of their lives, it was only through the generosity of people such as television producer Aaron Spelling (who contributed $100,000), baseball star Reggie Jackson, comedian Richard Pryor and thousands of others that Derrick Gordon was able to pay for the heart transplant, something Medi-Cal does not cover.

“Thank God everybody was so generous,” his mother said.

She added: “After we lost Freddie, then six months later it looked like we were going to lose Derrick, it shattered a lot of dreams. Lorenzo and Derrick were going to go pro and we were going to move into this big house. . . .”