When the Health Risk Seems to Be Worth It : Medicine: Doctors say it isn’t easy to persuade an athlete to give up a lucrative career.

Reggie Lewis, two doctors said Tuesday night, is not the first athlete to try to continue his career despite warnings that he was endangering his life.

Even after his collapse and death Tuesday, they say, he will not be the last.

The names change, the symptoms and proposed remedies are often different, but for ailing high-profile athletes and the doctors who attend to them, troubling ethical and medical issues remain a constant part of the relationship.

And the list of elite players who must decide whether to walk the tightrope between the games they play and their health grows longer and longer.

Hank Gathers . . . Longtime NBA veteran Terry Cummings. . . . Baseball’s John Olerud. . . . The University of Texas’ Stephen Larkin. . . . Earnest Killum, who died in January of 1992 while a member of the Oregon State basketball team. . . .

Lewis’ story joins Gathers and Killum’s as tragic, but others, such as Cummings, Olerud and Larkin, resumed their athletic careers after battling health problems apparently without serious damage.

And potential tragedy cannot always overwhelm the athletes’ desire to continue doing what he or she does best.

Lewis, for example, listened to two well-respected teams of doctors tell him different things--one urged him to retire, the other said that under prescribed care, he could return to action--then made his own decision to try.

“You couldn’t have an athlete more versed in his diagnosis and have more opinions confronting him,” said Robert Huizenga, former Raider team physician. “From my understanding, he was a very intelligent person, someone able to make the decision from a very confusing difference of opinions between two high-profile teams of opinions.

“Someone once asked about this case, ‘Gee, what do you think of people giving diametrically opposed opinions. . . . How do you know who’s right?’ Only way to know, I guess, is to wait. Medical science, unfortunately, isn’t always 100%. If he collapses, the first opinion is right, if he doesn’t, the second was right. Sometimes, that’s the only way to tell.”

Both Lewis and Gathers were talented basketball players with heart problems. The impact of their deaths, one doctor said, will be widely felt by both the athletic and medical communities.

“We know that two elite, high-profile athletes died and this is going to get enormous publicity,” said Larry McLain of the National Center for the Study of Sudden Death in Athletes.

“But you have to realize hundreds of thousands of people are out there playing basketball in pickup games. What we do have to do is try to pay attention to any unexplained symptoms in an elite athlete.

“You get into the Hank Gathers situation, where pro basketball is maybe his only hope of achieving fame and wealth and security for his family. To me, it’s reasonably easy to understand why he wanted to continue to play basketball.”

Gathers collapsed during a Loyola Marymount basketball game in March of 1990 and died soon after. He was found to have a heart problem after fainting during a Loyola game in December of 1989.

“For society to say you can’t play because you have a one-in-100 chance of dying, you may be stepping over an athlete’s personal freedom to do what he wants to with his life,” Huizenga said.

Cummings has enjoyed a 12-year career despite being found to have an irregular heartbeat after fainting on court in December of 1982 as a San Diego Clipper. Taking medicine, Cummings has suffered no major problems since the fainting spell.

Olerud, the Toronto Blue Jay first baseman, collapsed in January of 1989 when he was a junior at Washington State and a little more than a month later had a hemorrhaging brain aneurysm removed.

Olerud wears a batting helmet on the field as a precaution, but apparently has had no difficulties since the operation.

Stephen Larkin, entering his junior season as an outfielder-first baseman on the Texas baseball team, had dizzy spells while at Cincinnati’s Moeller High and was found to have a heart condition. But last summer, Texas Coach Cliff Gustafson said Tuesday night, Larkin, the brother of Reds’ shortstop Barry Larkin, had a pacemaker implanted and hasn’t suffered any dizzy spells since.