Memories in the Bank : A Year After Gathers’ Death, Family Recalls the Good Times Rather Than Legal Squabbling

He wasn’t rich or famous, at least by Hollywood standards. Outside of the college basketball realm, he was a virtual unknown. One day, that would all change.

Hank Gathers knew he would have it all--or at least, more than he grew up with. As far as he was concerned, he could take that to the bank, riding atop his basketball prowess.

Hank (The Bank) Gathers, as his Loyola Marymount coach, Paul Westhead, sometimes referred to him, would be a star on and off the court. Someday, he would share the rewards of his hard work with those he loved most, just as he so freely shared his joy for life.

But he would do it by living, not by dying.

It was a year ago today that Hank sank his last basket, a slam dunk, and collapsed into convulsions while playing for Loyola in a West Coast Conference tournament game. He died less than two hours later of a heart disorder. But television stations throughout the country showed replays of Hank’s final moments, as he lie dying on the court.

In Los Angeles, his mother, Lucille and brother, Derrick, ran to Hank’s side as he lie helpless on the floor. In North Philadelphia, His 6-year old son saw his father dying on television.

Days later, dressed in a tuxedo, little Aaron Crump sat in the first pew of a Baptist Church, hung on to his Uncle Derrick, and stared ahead at his father, whose dreams for him and others now lay quieted in a casket.

Yet the aftermath of Hank’s death has been anything but peaceful. His dreams have not been allowed to die, instead remaining alive in a twisted way. A legal battle that started even before he was buried seems to worsen daily, resembling a tangled, sordid octopus with all arms pulling in.

Hank’s family ultimately may achieve some wealth from an ongoing lawsuit and escape the dehumanizing oppression of living in the government projects of North Philadelphia, where Hank grew up. That was the ending to one of his dreams.

And Hank, somewhat malevolently, is now famous: “He’s that basketball player who collapsed and died on television. . . . Gee, is that still going on? It was a heart condition, right?”

How could any of this be right?

Lucille Gathers felt like talking, which was unusual, because she has said little to reporters since her son died. Even more unusual was listening to Lucille while her talkative, controversial attorney, Bruce Fagel, sat silently nearby.

“Up and down,” is how this year has been for Lucille, who wasn’t quite sure where to spend the anniversary of her son’s death. Would it hurt less in Los Angeles or back home in Philadelphia? Only the hurt remains certain.

“It always will hurt,” Lucille said recently while in Fagel’s office in Beverly Hills. “I miss him so much. Hank was so full of life, so happy, and he wanted everyone else around him to be happy, too. You couldn’t be with him five minutes and not feel good. I know now that Hank was an angel from Heaven sent to me for a time. There’ll never be another Hank.”

She decided to go back to Philadelphia.

Derrick Gathers, Hank’s younger brother by 11 months, shook his head as he listened to his mother talk. “Some days she feels like talking, and some days she won’t say a word. Today, you can’t stop her,” he said.

Her eyes bright, Lucille talked a lot about Hank . . . how when he was 9, his father left home; how hard Hank worked at everything he wanted to do; what it was like rearing four boys in the slums of North Philadelphia.

“You know, I look around and I see other kids who were brought up there, doing drugs and all, and I am so grateful that my children are so different,” she said. “It shows me that it doesn’t matter where you live, it’s how you live.”

Lucille said she won’t even walk near the high-rise apartments of the Raymond Rosen project, where Hank lived as a child. She was able to get her family out of the high-rise area and upgrade them to another apartment in the projects around the corner. That’s where she still lives.

“The high-rises weren’t great then, but now it’s much worse,” she said. “I used to have to grab the children and lay on the floor when there was shootings, but now you can get shot just walking through there.”

Derrick gives a lot of credit to Father Dave Hagan, a neighborhood priest who befriended the Gathers family when Hank was young. He gave the boys a vision of a better world.

“Father Dave used to take us to his friends’ houses in Maryland and other places in the summer and we would stay for a week,” Derrick said. “And we would look around and say, ‘You have got to be kidding.’ We had never seen anything like that. We used to tear the houses apart, but they would always invite us back. It taught us that there is more out there, and he showed us ways we could get those things the right way. We owe Father Dave a lot.”

Lucille’s oldest son, Chris, did not escape the snare of the projects. He was sentenced to 18 1/2 to 40 years in prison last summer for robbing a jewelry store. At Hank’s funeral, Chris was allowed to attend, but was brought to the church in shackles. A family friend, Loyola booster Albert Gersten, kindly stood in front of Chris to try and hide the shackles from those at the funeral.

In the bitterness of the legal battle that surrounds his death, the joy that was Hank often gets lost. Those who were close to him always seem to smile when telling Hank stories, laughing at the man they claim always made them laugh. His brother, Charles, 21, recently stumbled on an audio cassette tape that Hank had made in the year before he died. It was a tape of Hank interviewing friends and family members, something he liked to do.

“Charles said, ‘Mom, you have got to hear this,’ and I listened to it, and it was like Hank was right there with me. Then we called Derrick and played it for him, and he was busting up. Hank was the best comedian. He wanted to be a sportscaster, you know, and he would have been a good one,” Lucille said.

On Feb. 11, what would have been Hank’s 24th birthday, Lucille made her first trip to the cemetery since he was buried. She said several friends from Los Angeles had remembered Hank’s birthday and sent cards and flowers. She said she was happy they remembered.

Many times, Lucille said, she has questioned if she is doing the right thing--suing Hank’s school, his doctors, his coach. Many times she has asked God if she should just stop it all.

“But I pray about it, and the answer is that this is not about Hank,” Lucille said. “I have to go through with it, because maybe it will help the next parent whose child goes away to Loyola and other schools. Maybe they will be more careful. We want some answers about what happened, but sometimes we wonder, will there ever be any answers? How can they be lying? If they love Hank, as they say they do, how can they say so many things that are untrue?

“I’m doing this because they tried to play God with my son.”

There are few day-glow rollerblades on the block where Aaron Crump lives in North Philadelphia, but he doesn’t seem to notice. With young innocence, he resembles his father in looks and mannerisms. Unlike Hank, however, Aaron does not know a different life.

Aaron’s mother, Marva Crump, had a relationship with Hank when she was 19. They never married, but she says he always took care of her son, as she has. Hank often told friends that as soon as he made it to the NBA, he would send for Aaron.

When Marva read that the Gathers family had hired an attorney to file a wrongful death suit, she did the same, saying she wanted to protect Aaron’s rights. But she, too, has fallen under scrutiny for greed. A recent article in Sports Illustrated quotes a former coach of Hank’s ridiculing Marva’s behavior at Hank’s funeral.

But Marva wasn’t at Hank’s funeral. Instead, she and her mother, Phyllis Crump, waited across the street from the church in a schoolyard, along with hundreds of other onlookers. They peered through a chain-link fence, waiting for Aaron to arrive. They watched as he got out of a limousine with his Uncle Derrick and made his way up the steps into the church.

“We just wanted to make sure Aaron was OK,” Marva said later.

For those who loved Hank, life is still not OK.