To Him, It Was Just a Little Heart-to-Heart : MISL: Yeah, he had a transplant, but Cleveland Crunch rookie Simon Keith doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it or anything.

The questions have never bothered Simon Keith. But he can’t stand the sympathy.

He meets so many people who want to mother him. This is strange, his father will tell you, because his mother doesn’t.

And perhaps that is because she knows what he is all about and knows better than to try to tell him what he should and shouldn’t do.

Simon Keith is a 24-year-old from Victoria, Canada, who plays forward for the Cleveland Crunch, an expansion team in the Major Indoor Soccer League.

Five years ago, when he was playing for a Canadian developmental team and attending the University of Victoria, Keith began experiencing unusual fatigue after games. His hands would get numb, his feet cold. After consulting a number of doctors and undergoing two heart biopsies, it was determined that he had an infection called viral myocarditis, which often results from complications of the flu and can do extensive damage to the heart.

The solution Keith was given by his cardiologist was clear, if not simple. He needed a heart transplant or he would die in six months. On July 7, 1986, Keith, who had been on life support systems for several weeks, underwent surgery at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, and was given the heart of a 17-year-old boy who had died the previous day of a brain hemorrhage while playing soccer in Wales.

The operation was successful. For the first time in months, Keith could feel his fingers and toes. It was such a dramatic change. He remembers nothing of the three weeks before the transplant.

“The blood was flowing through my veins again,” he said. “It’s very simple. I felt good.”

And he recovered at a rate that amazed everybody, except, of course, his family.

Now he is a rookie in professional soccer. Because his story is unique, he is constantly doing interviews for newspapers, magazines, television and radio. When the Crunch travels, his teammates nap on game day from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Keith talks to reporters.

A sample of the list: People, Sports Illustrated, Soccer Digest, CBS Today, P.M. Magazine, Inside Edition.

Keith has no problems with the attention. He is aware his situation is unusual, so he figures the question-and-answer sessions come with the territory.

“It’s just something that seems almost normal to me now,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me. I’ve heard every question in the book. People want to hear about it.”

Keith is also realistic about why people are intrigued. He has a pretty good handle on human nature, twisted as it may be.

“A lot of people come to the games just to see if I’m going to keel over,” he says. “It’s terrible, but I mean let’s face it, we all like to rubber neck at accidents and stuff. We all like to see stuff like that. If it’s good for the league and brings people through the turnstiles . . .

“I don’t think people are sitting there thinking ‘I hope he keels over.’ But if I go down, they’re thinking ‘That’s him. Let’s see if he gets up.’

“I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m not putting down human nature. But it exists.”

There are also the people who meet Keith but don’t know him well. They are the ones who want to be his mother, or his doctor, or whatever they can be to get their two cents in about the appropriate life style for a guy who has had a heart transplant. They might ask him if he should really be eating that kind of food, or doing that much exercise or drinking a beer. And that gets old. Fast.

One other thing.

Keith would just as soon not be viewed as a miracle of science. He is a good soccer player, who some day wants to be a great one. He makes the same mistakes all rookies do and sits on the bench for much of the game. For now, his potential is tucked away. He won’t be a standout until he learns the nuances of indoors, which is vastly different from the outdoor game he played with such skill at Nevada Las Vegas, where he was named All-Big West Conference in 1987 and 1988.

The way Keith looks at it, his medical history has nothing to do with his life. He lives. He plays. He even gets impatient with others who have been down the same road.

“A problem I find with transplant patients is that they’re so wrapped up in themselves,” Keith says. “They think that they really have survived the No. 1 futuristic operation of all time, and they think they’re so wonderful.

“I try to separate from that. It bothers me a lot. A lot of groups still approach me and say ‘Will you speak at this and speak at that?’ And it’s better for me to really say ‘No,’ because I’m basically going to talk down to them and say, ‘Look, you guys are conning yourselves.’ I really don’t think it’s a big deal. I think it’s a psychological big deal, and people have to get past that. And it’s sad for people who can’t.”

Keith went to one support group meeting after his transplant. About 25 people attended, all transplant patients from British Columbia. Keith was sitting next to one guy who stood up, gave his name and said: “I’m going back to work next week.”

Everybody applauded.

Keith asked: “How long ago was your transplant?”

He responded: “Almost a year now.”

And Keith was thinking, “I’m out of here. That’s it.”

“I couldn’t get out of there quick enough. I went once, and that was it.”

Keith, younger and in far better shape than most transplant patients going into the operation, had a much different timetable.

“We’re talking about a guy who was thinking about doing 440-(yard) repeats two months after the operation,” says David Keith, Simon’s father. “He came home from the support group session and said: ‘Aw dad, I can’t put up with this anymore. In all due respect, they’re a bunch of old weasels.’ ”

Witness the weeks following his operation. His brother, Adam, flew overseas to spend a few days with him. He expected to find him lying in bed with all kinds of tubes in his nose. Instead, a few days after the operation, Simon, weighing all of 125 pounds, was wandering the halls, pushing his I.V. stand in front of him. The only thing Adam could think to say is “What the hell are you doing?” And Simon just told him he was taking a little hike to the restroom.

David even warned Simon’s physical therapist in England what she was in for. She kept telling him “No, you can’t do that.” He would go to the surgeon and ask, and the surgeon would tell him if he felt he had the strength to do something to give it a try. So he would.

“He had (the therapist) reduced to tears,” David says. “She had to take a holiday.”

Two weeks after the operation, Keith was out of the hospital, recuperating in an apartment his parents had rented in Cambridge. On one typically wet and rainy day, about a month after the operation, Keith was home alone. He figured this was as good a time as any to see if he was capable of a jog, so he put his shorts on and away he went.

“And I maybe got half a mile,” he says. “Maybe. And that was it. I was huffing, sure. But I think that was the only time the psychological barrier might have gotten in my way. That was the only time.”

It might have been the only time in his life that his mind was a roadblock. Simon is the first to admit that Adam, who is a year older, was always a much better soccer player. Simon drove himself to keep up.

There were the juggling contests in the back yard. The object was to keep the ball in the air as many times as you could, hitting it with first the left foot and then the right. Adam picked it up the first time and did 300, which Simon says showed his unbelievable natural talent. Simon took his turn. He got to about 14.

So Simon began coming home every single day after school to practice. Hours and hours. And finally, he could do 500.

“And then he’d come back out and do 750,” Simon says of Adam. “And he’d never pick up a ball again.”

But Simon Keith has never been one to get discouraged. A setback is only one if you let it set you back. He doesn’t.

There is another story that is recalled by his father, a soccer coach who grew up in England. When Simon was 17, the coach of the Canadian national team took a look at him and told him he was good but not quite good enough. David says the coach was concerned that Simon was only 5-feet-7.

A week later, with the same coach watching from the stands, Simon scored the tying goal in the championship game for his senior men’s team, which went on to take the title. To do so, he out-jumped a player who was 6-3 and popped the ball in with his head.

“Walking out,” David says, “he made a point of looking at the guy. And I couldn’t resist saying, ‘Not bad for a 5-foot-7 guy who’s too small.’ ”

Hard to believe as it may be, Keith treated his heart troubles in about the same fashion as any old soccer game. The May before the July operation, a time when Keith was going downhill quickly, his best friend, Tak Niketas, went with him to the airport on the day he was to fly to London to see a specialist. Niketas was worried and was searching for the words to tell Keith how much he cared. But Keith was so matter-a-fact about the whole thing that Niketas never really said anything.

“He looked at me and said ‘I’ll see you at the end of the summer,’ ” Niketas says. “When he said that, I knew he’d be back.”

It seems that Keith’s biggest concern in all of this was that he wouldn’t be able to play soccer again. The transplant was his alternative.

“We had tried everything,” he said. “If I wanted to play soccer again, this was the only hope. It was a very simple equation. I’m sick and I’m going to die, or I get a transplant and I can play.”

Since the operation, he has had a successful college career at UNLV, where he played for three seasons with Adam. Some of the publicity started in college, but nothing like he has experienced in the MISL.

First, there were the skeptics who wanted to know how a guy with a heart that wasn’t even his own could possibly play at the fast pace required to compete in indoor soccer. Keith had to convince everybody that he was OK. Doctors. Lawyers. Owners. Then, he signed wavers.

Why not? He didn’t have anything to lose. His attitude was this: “I’ll give them anything they want. Just let me play.”

He understood their concern.

“If you’re going to invest money in something,” he says, “you want to make sure you don’t have spoiled goods, right?

“I know people within the Crunch organization who are still nervous about me being out there.”

Not Al Miller, the Crunch’s general manager. He opted to make Keith his team’s top draft choice, the first player chosen in last year’s college draft. So if Keith is indeed spoiled goods, he has done a nice job disguising it from Kai Haaskivi, Cleveland’s player-coach. Keith’s statistics sheet shows only one goal and no assists. But statistics don’t always tell much about a player’s future.

“I think he’s got the tools,” Haaskivi says. “I think he’s got the sharpness. He’s a good finisher. What he obviously needs to learn is the angles and the boards.”

Haaskivi isn’t going to give him any breaks. Keith is just another one of his players.

“I think the rest of us have pretty much taken the approach that he’s really no different,” Haaskivi says. “He doesn’t get any special treatment. I think, at times, I maybe push him a little bit more, because he likes to be pushed.”

Same as when he mixes it up with his friends on the basketball court. He gets his share of pushes and shoves. That’s the way he wants it.

“We give him a good elbow in the chest where his pacemaker is,” Niketas says. “We don’t treat him any differently.”

For Keith, the significance of his heart transplant is nothing more than a story to be told over a beer in the bar. He still must take anti-rejection drugs, but the greatest risk was in the first year after the operation. It has been 3 1/2 years.

“It’s a conversation piece,” Adam says. “But that’s all.”

Keith is realistic, though. He knows the curiosity will always be there. In his eyes, it is only an injury that has healed. To others, it is a miracle.

“I’m under a microscope,” he says. “There’s no doubt about it. But I like that, because it keeps me doing the right things all the time.”