THE PAIN REMAINS

It is freezing, and the light is fading from the harsh Philadelphia sky. In a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, a car creeps past the field of unkempt graves, then jerks to a stop.

“There it is, Hank Gathers,” the photographer yells.

In the back seat, Aaron Crump awakens and shakes his head. The search for his father’s grave had taken so long he had fallen asleep.

“Hurry, Aaron, we’re losing the light,” the photographer calls.

Aaron looks quizzically at the photographer, who realizes what he has just said and apologizes profusely.

Aaron finds the irony amusing. He has never visited his father’s grave, as far as he remembers, and here this guy is worried about the light.

Aaron Crump doesn’t remember much about the funeral, but what he does remember is vivid. He remembers a relative lifting him up to kiss his father in the casket. It was a decade ago, and he was only 6. Frightened, he refused.

The most disturbing memory, he says, is what he, and millions of others, saw on television: his dad collapsing, then convulsing, on a cold gym floor. His dad, dead, of a heart disorder. Television channels in Philadelphia played the scene over and over. Seeing it was unavoidable. In Aaron’s head, it still is.

Aaron shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and approaches the grave slowly. There is a simple tombstone with a picture of Hank Gathers in his Loyola Marymount basketball jersey, No. 44, and the dates bordering his life. Gathers died March 4, 1990. He was 23.

*

Saturday night at Loyola Marymount, on the court in Gersten Pavilion where Hank Gathers collapsed before he died, the school will honor Hank and Bo Kimble, childhood friends and later stars of the 1989-90 team, by retiring their jerseys at halftime.

It will be a high point for a basketball program that, in the aftermath of Gathers’ death has plunged to the depths.

It might also be a healing time. Loyola has invited Lucille Gathers, Hank’s mother, to the ceremony to represent her son. Bo Kimble plans to be there too. Albert Gersten Jr., a school booster who built the gym and a former friend of the Gathers family, says he will be in the stands.

There were issues between the Kimbles and the Gatherses, between Gersten and the family, between the family and the school.

Lucille Gathers and her family sued the school and the doctors who treated Hank. That suit, for wrongful death, resulted in a court circus and a couple of sizable settlements.

Lucille’s suit excluded Aaron, Hank’s only child. He remains somewhat forgotten.

Aaron Crump was not invited to the ceremony.

*

Aaron is built like a stick figure--nearly 6 feet tall, big feet, long legs, a short torso. He looks much like his dad before Hank Gathers exploded into the world of high school basketball and went on to become one of the best college players in the country.

Hank was headed to the NBA, a probable first-round draft pick. Strong and powerful. Dominating. That’s how the world thought of Hank. That’s how Hank thought of Hank. So learning that his dad was once a slight guy too comes as news to Aaron.

“Then there’s hope for me,” he brightens. “I thought my dad was a superstar forever.”

Also like his father, Aaron is a talker. And he is said to have inherited Hank’s delightful personality and sense of humor. He says he checks in with his father, usually before his Cheltenham High basketball games, where he wears his dad’s number, 44, and plays backup point guard.

“I say, ‘What’s up, Pop? I want some help. I know I can play. Bear with me,’ ” Aaron says, smiling at the thought.

“He told me he was going to take me to live with him that summer in California. And he showed me a picture of where he lived, and I remember it had a staircase with spiral steps and I thought about playing on that staircase. Man, I would kill to be with him right now.”

Aaron Crump may very well be the only high school basketball player in the country who owns a four-bedroom house. And, he’s probably the only millionaire, the money having been his share of the wrongful-death suit settlements.

Aaron’s mother, Marva Crump, pursued legal redress on her own after learning that the Gathers family, Lucille--Aaron’s grandmother--and two of Hank’s three brothers, Derrick and Charles, was suing without naming Aaron as a beneficiary.

Marva and Hank never married. Hank picked the boy’s name, Aaron, because he thought it went well with his name, Hank. Hank and Aaron. Hank Aaron.

Aaron says he learned of Saturday night’s ceremony when asked about it by a reporter. It happens often, he says. He hears about an event honoring his father. Maybe he reads about it somewhere, or someone mentions it, but he’s never invited. And it hurts a little, he says. Then he shrugs.

Despite Lucille Gathers’ efforts a few years ago to pull Aaron close, he and the Gathers family don’t talk much, he says.

*

At Hank’s funeral, Albert Gersten Jr. was the only white male in the family section. He had picked up the Gatherses in a limousine and taken them to the funeral, where at one point, Gersten says, he helped Lucille’s oldest son, Chris, wipe his nose because Chris’ hands were shackled.

Chris had been escorted to the funeral from prison, where he was serving a sentence for robbery.

Gersten also referred the Gathers family to Beverly Hills attorney Bruce Fagel. Later, when Lucille’s legal standing to sue was based on alleged monetary gifts from Gersten to Hank--a violation of NCAA rules that Gersten denies and the NCAA never pursued--he said he felt like their “sacrificial lamb.”

Bo Kimble and the Gatherses are no longer close--he said he felt animosity from them--and Kimble’s life has been far from smooth. He had planned on a pro career but his success in the NBA was brief, leaving him despondent and, at one time, thinking of taking his life.

Derrick Gathers, Hank’s younger brother, says there was never resentment toward Kimble and the family doesn’t understand why he went away. Kimble’s mother and Lucille are talking again, but other than that, Derrick says, in the last decade the family has been contacted by no one, not Kimble, not Gersten, not even coach Paul Westhead.

Understandable, says Gersten:

“There isn’t anyone I know of that they didn’t go after [with the lawsuit]. So if they say everybody went away, maybe that’s why.”

*

The Gatherses’ pain is no longer a bellow. Now tempered, it seems to rise from the heart instead of the gut, where the poison of greed and a frenetic quest for justice--an answer, maybe a reason--rampaged through the lives of many normally loving people.

“You don’t get over it,” Lucille says, “you just get through it.”

If they could do it over again, she says, there would be no litigation. They are sorry about it, now. After all these years of thinking about it, Lucille wishes she had been in her right mind at the time.

She says she clearly would not have hired that “fool” lawyer, Fagel. She wouldn’t have let people talk her into blaming the school.

Derrick, 10 months younger than Hank and nearly his twin in heart, feels the same way.

“My brother was the type of man, he was going to the NBA and there was nothing that was going to stop him but death, and that’s what happened,” he says. “I can speak for the family when I say, there’s no one to blame.”

At the time, though, there was plenty of blame. The $32.5-million suit--at one time a legal morass of 29 attorneys, 10 law firms and 14 defendants--had been in trial for three weeks when Lucille pulled out, leaving Fagel standing alone in the front of the judge in a Torrance courtroom, trying to explain. Lucille says her reason was simple: “I had had it.”

By then, there had been two settlements. After legal costs and fees, Aaron netted a little more than $1 million and Lucille about $447,000. Insurance carriers for Loyola had paid the most,

$1.4 million. Another million was paid on behalf of Vernon Hattori, the cardiologist who had treated Hank for his heart condition and cleared him to play.

The litigation was hard on Derrick, who was then 22. A student and basketball player at Cal State Northridge, he had stayed in Los Angeles to handle matters for the family.

Derrick was being treated for an irregular heartbeat, a more common condition different from Hank’s, but frightening to Lucille, who said she had lost one son and didn’t want to lose another.

Both Derrick, back in Philadelphia now and working for a mortgage company, and Charles, two years younger than Derrick and a schoolteacher, had been tested for genetic heart problems after Hank’s death. Charles was cleared, but Derrick spent the next seven years on medication before weaning off onto an herb program. Aaron Crump was also tested and doctors found a slight abnormality that has since reversed itself, his mother said.

Derrick says, “I was the one out there every day [in L.A.] taking the abuse. Bruce wanted to continue, so he was like, ‘You’ve got a chance, you’ve got a chance,’ But from what I had seen, we didn’t have a chance. [The suit] was a foolish move from the very start. I haven’t talked to him since that day.”

Fagel says that once an all-white jury was chosen, he knew he didn’t have a chance. Several attorneys involved in the case say, however, that Fagel got more money for the Gatherses from the two settlements than anyone thought possible.

“In the end, the best thing that happened was that a lot of people were educated . . . but nobody came out the better for it,” says Fagel, who has since dealt with his own misfortune.

Last year, he claimed bankruptcy under Chapter 11, which he filed while appealing a ruling against him for legal malpractice. He is still practicing law.

The money from the settlements did help Hank’s relatives improve their lives. Lucille, who lived in the housing projects of north Philadelphia, around the corner from Marva and Aaron, was able to buy a beautiful townhouse in a great area of the city. She has since married--her name is now Lucille Gathers Cheeseboro--but Derrick says the money is “all gone.”

Marva Crump, with Aaron’s money, paid $145,000 for a two-story house in a nice suburb on the edge of the city, where she and Aaron live with her other sons, Christopher and Christian; her mother, Phyllis, and, lately, her brother, Philip.

The house is in Aaron’s name and the rest of the settlement money has grown through investments governed under a co-guardianship with an investment house and Michael Horsey, a friend of the family, Horsey says. Marva works as a night auditor at a Holiday Inn.

Aaron receives annual payments under an approved budget, the money paid directly from the guardianship to the vendors. It doesn’t help him much now, Aaron says, because the guardians always seem to have reasons why he shouldn’t buy something.

“I want a car, but I don’t think they’re going to let me have one,” he says. “There’s always some excuse.”

When he turns 18, he will have direct access, with his mother’s signature. When he turns 21, the money is his.

“I’m not really looking to it, but it’s nice to know that if things don’t work out, I have it,” he says, alluding to playing in the NBA.

Derrick tried to stay in L.A. after the trial aborted but says he couldn’t handle it.

“I had an offer to play pro ball in Australia, and again, this makes me feel even more so that we shouldn’t have [sued] because when Hank left, I think the weight became on me and I needed to handle the weight but I didn’t,” he says. “I tried to take the easy road with litigation, whereas I should have played pro ball and taken care of my mom myself.”

Derrick was playing at Northridge when Hank was at Loyola, and they were close. But even after Hank’s first collapse, on Dec. 9, 1989, Derrick says they didn’t talk about it much.

“He was saying, ‘I’m fine and I’m going to continue.’ Hank was the type of man, he was going to do what he wanted to do regardless of who said what, and I’m sure that [then-Athletic Director] Brian Quinn, Paul Westhead, even Dr. Hattori and all the doctor staff would tell you he was the type of guy that was going to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it and there wasn’t nothing nobody could say and do about it but God. God was the only one that could stop my brother.”

For a year after Hank’s death, his heart remained in a jar of formaldehyde at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Experts never agreed on the cause of death, but the coroner’s report said that Gathers had died of myocarditis, a treatable inflammation of the heart.

Another expert, however, examined the heart at the request of the coroner and concluded that Gathers had suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an incurable condition that causes thickening and scarring of the heart and interferes with the heart’s electrical current. It is treated by limiting physical activity.

The coroner, however, stood by his report.

Gathers was to have had a biopsy when Loyola’s season ended. He was being treated with Inderal, a drug used to control a rapid heartbeat but one that can cause sluggishness. Over a three-month span, his dosage was reduced considerably.

Hattori made the last reduction six days before Gathers died, under the stipulation that he undergo testing to determine if the lower dosage was safe, before he played in the postseason West Coast Conference tournament.

But Hank never showed for his test and dodged calls from Hattori’s office. He finally called Hattori the night before the tournament began. After a long talk, a persistent Gathers was told to play, then come in for testing when the weekend tournament ended, either Monday or Tuesday.

He collapsed Sunday night, and his mother and brothers rushed to his side. At home in Philadelphia, Aaron was awakened by his maternal grandmother, Marva’s mother, and told that his dad was dead.

*

Bo Kimble has been talking about his venture into the real world, now that he has left the basketball one, when he leans forward and says he has something “kind of weird” to disclose.

He has been revisiting his experience with the Clippers, saying it was even worse than imaginable. He is nearly stuttering, unusual for this smooth talker, and his sentences are broken. The seemingly always-happy Bo Kimble is saying that he nearly took his life.

“My second year with the Clippers, I almost committed suicide, and nobody knows this,” Kimble says. “I was so overwhelmed with what the Clippers were doing to me, I actually, at least 15 times, thought about committing suicide. If it wasn’t for my great friends, my L.A. friends--but even my friends didn’t know it. I didn’t share it with them. Not at that time. But I was so devastated.”

After nights of sitting on the bench, the crowd chanting him into the game in the final minutes when he was stiff and lacked confidence and could do little to narrow the usual 20-point deficit, Kimble returned to his empty house in Bel-Air in despair. He thought about using pills, or running his BMW full-speed into a tree, he says. The humiliation overwhelmed him.

“I am sitting on the bench seeing this team lose and be underachievers and I watched these guys party and care more about partying than about winning. I was going nuts,” he says.

It was the antithesis of his college career, especially 1989-90, when he led the nation in scoring and his Loyola teammates to the NCAA’s final eight after the death of Gathers, his close friend of 11 years.

For the next five months, Kimble received 75-100 letters daily from the public. He remembers reading some of them on his way to Long Beach for the first round of the NCAA tournament and believes the kind words inspired him to take his game to another level.

“I felt I had the strength of Hank and myself,” he said. “It was my way of crying, letting out my feelings.”

That intangible strength empowered Loyola through four games in the NCAA tournament, one of them a stunning upset of defending national champion Michigan. The Lions lost in the round of eight to eventual champion Nevada Las Vegas.

Kimble paid his own personal tribute to Gathers during that time, shooting his first free throw left-handed, a practice he continued for several years until the strained relations between his and the Gathers family got in the way.

“Derrick and I are better now because time has made our relationship better,” Bo says.

Derrick Gathers says, however, that as recently as last month they had spoken only a few times since Hank’s death. They spoke last year at an annual memorial basketball game for Hank in which Kimble felt comfortable enough to play for the first time.

Charles Gathers says he has left phone messages for Kimble a couple of times, but they went unreturned.

“I believe Derrick thought I benefited from Hank’s death,” Kimble says. “But I was already leading the nation in scoring. I was already a lottery pick, and Hank and I were both going to make it to the NBA. It’s always been Hank and Bo, we have always dominated, all through high school and college.

“We both had that superstar valve that we turned down to be great together. Hank could have easily averaged 30-40 points a game and I could score 45. Scoring was easy for me.”

The Clippers made Kimble a lottery pick by taking him eighth in the NBA draft and signed him to a guaranteed $7.25-million contract. That was the only good part of the experience, Kimble says, because the contract set him up for a life that would not include a successful NBA career.

To this day, he says, he does not understand why the Clippers drafted a scorer and then told him not to shoot. He says then-coach Mike Schuler constantly reminded him that he wasn’t at Loyola, where Westhead had coached a successful and dazzling run-and-shoot program.

Kimble says he began hesitating on shots he knew he could make. His confidence dwindled. Critics questioned his defense, said his game needed structure. Even wondered what position he should play. In practice, Kimble made his shots. In the games, he didn’t. That’s why he sat, Schuler has said.

Kimble is still perplexed.

“I just didn’t have the support like you would have from a team that would help develop a young player,” he says.

He missed playing so badly that on days when there wasn’t a game, he would find a pickup game somewhere. It’s one of the things that helped him stay alive, he says. That, his friends, and the season ending.

“Time brought me out of it,” he says. “I kept a smiley face on, but inside I was destroyed.”

He was traded to the New York Knicks, where he didn’t play, either. Then it was off to France, Portugal, Taiwan and Greece before returning home to spend years in and out of the Continental Basketball Assn. All the while, he kept trying to make it back to the NBA but managed to land only one tryout after leaving the Knicks.

“If you don’t make it in the first three years, they look at you with old eyes,” Kimble says.

Now at 32, on a lazy Saturday morning in a north Philadelphia neighborhood some people would hesitate to drive through, Kimble hops out of his SUV with the newly installed television and leaves the vehicle running. The neighbors flood the street to say hello, slap his hand, give him a hug.

On the living-room window of the house where Kimble grew up, two faded bumper stickers remain, “USC”--he and Gathers started there before transferring--and above it, “Loyola Marymount.”

“The best Gathers story is, our senior year we were on the road against LSU and about 15 NBA scouts were there and all they wanted to do was see [6-foot-7] Hank Gathers play against these two 7-footers, Shaquille O’Neal and Stanley Roberts,” Kimble recalls.

“He got his first six shots blocked and, he knows all the scouts are there, then he ended the game with 48 points and 13 rebounds against two 7-footers. That was his psyche and his heart--he wasn’t going to allow these two 7-footers to stop him today. It was almost like his fear of failure was his strength of dominance. He was not going to return back to the streets of north Philadelphia without being something great.”

Kimble has returned to those same streets, where he plans to renovate houses and build restaurants and has started a foundation to help low-income families buy homes. He also does postgame commentary for a sports channel, is working with the mayor of Philadelphia, hopes to do some stand-up comedy, maybe a little singing. Heck, he would even like to return to L.A. some day and coach Loyola.

“I would like to help my school out,” he says.

*

Contrary to what some believe, Loyola did not try to remove itself from big-time college basketball after Gathers’ death. It did not raise academic standards so high as to preclude the common man. It simply went into basketball free fall.

Most agree that the lawsuit inhibited the school’s recruiting.

“Here we were, a small college in a major lawsuit,” says Quinn, then Loyola’s athletic director. “Who knew what the school was going to do? Was it going to cut back on its programs?”

Father James Loughran, president of Loyola when Gathers died, had always found the drift of big-time college athletics disturbing and distracting, even though it was he who hired a major league coach in Westhead.

Now president of St. Peter’s University in Jersey City, N.J., Loughran remains an outspoken critic of the NCAA. He was baffled by the publicity that Gathers’ death and its legal aftermath brought to the small Jesuit university.

“Twenty or 21 days in a row, there was something in the New York Times about Loyola Marymount and the NCAA,” Loughran recalls. “It was, ‘Good God, this isn’t World War III or the famine in Sudan.’ ”

The scrutiny and the allegations of negligence were intense--and far-reaching.

Quinn recalls his daughter coming home from school distraught because her teacher had set up a debate on whether Loyola had been correct in allowing Gathers to play.

“She said, ‘How am I supposed to do this, Dad? It’s about you.’ ”

Barry Zepel, then Loyola’s sports information director, was besieged by phone messages from investigative and medical reporters. Before, a call from a single reporter from a major media outlet had been a thrill.

Westhead, whose five-year record at the school was 105-48, seemed to have everything but his choice of toothpaste being dissected. He left after that season to coach the Denver Nuggets.

Chip Schaefer, Loyola’s trainer, was hired after the season by the Chicago Bulls, staying until Phil Jackson left. He is back in L.A. as an assistant trainer with the Lakers.

His name seems forever linked to a defibrillator the school had purchased and he carried to games and practices because of Gathers.

When Hank collapsed on March 4, the defibrillator was not used because the doctor at the scene said he had felt a strong pulse. A defibrillator delivers an electrical shock that can change an abnormally beating heart’s rhythm back to normal. Shocking a normally beating heart can cause an abnormal rhythm.

“The autopsy report stated that Hank had a grossly sub-therapeutic dose of Inderal in his system,” Schaefer said recently. “What that meant to me was that perhaps he metabolized it quickly or he took it upon himself to wait until after the game to take a pill, or he took less than he should have.

“There was always a lingering thought with me that--I hope he didn’t come to some juncture in the decision-making process and made a decision and thought, ‘Oh well, if anything bad happens to me, I know Chip can handle it.’

“I don’t feel like I let him down, but I hope I didn’t. I hope he didn’t do something he shouldn’t have done with the idea that I can handle it, that I will take care of it. I carried that with me.”

Gersten, a Sherman Oaks real estate developer, remains close to the university, having donated $100,000 since the tragedy. But he was caught in the center of the controversy.

The only way Lucille Gathers could sue as a rightful heir was if Hank had been her source of support. Since the NCAA allows an athlete to earn barely enough money to buy lunch, Fagel built his case on allegations that Gersten had supported Hank, who in turn helped out his mother.

“I felt put in a bottle,” Gersten says. “I didn’t want to hurt my school, and I didn’t want to hurt Hank Gathers’ memory by coming forward and saying that his family were liars when they had just lost their son. But the allegations were untrue.”

Derrick, back home in Philadelphia, acknowledges Gersten’s stance:

“He did what he had to do. I think it was clear what came out in the case. . . . How else would a guy from here, from a ghetto, live in a condominium with a brand new car? Gersten used to give me money.”

*

Saturday night, they will all return to the gym where Hank died. All except Aaron.

Bill Husak, Loyola’s athletic director, says they were looking for someone to represent Hank and thought Lucille was the appropriate person:

“The relationship with Hank and the university has gone through Lucille and that’s why we sent our invitation through her.”

Marva, Aaron’s mother, says her son is used to being overlooked. What gives her hurt away are the tears welling in her eyes.

Derrick says he hopes to be able to address the crowd during the ceremony, because he wants to apologize.

Kimble says he doesn’t think he will be able to talk and hold his emotions together.

Gersten says he’ll be happy to say hello to the family. Bygones.

Husak says it will be recognition of a special time, not a therapy session.

Kind of makes you wonder what Hank would say if he could be there. Maybe he would do his Muhammad Ali impression, or tell a joke. Hank could tell the same joke 200 times and it would still be funny, Kimble says.

Aaron says the only time he remembers his dad not smiling was when Hank threatened to send him home to his mom unless he ate all his dinner:

“So he left and came back with a belt and I hadn’t eaten all my food, and I looked at him, and he just started laughing. It was all a joke.”

It will be a celebration of what was “The Hank and Bo Show,” until that awful day that forced Bo and his teammates to go on alone. Instead, they took a nation along with them.

“Certainly there was drama,” Schaefer, the trainer, says of the ensuing NCAA tournament run, “and it was a good show. But it was not a movie. It was happening. It wasn’t like someone could say, ‘Now cue Hank, he can come back again.’

“Beating Michigan was wonderful, and Bo’s left-handed free throw was dramatic; but a mother lost her son, and a boy lost his father.”