The Death of Reggie Lewis

...and the dreams of a very distant boy

There’s been a lot of earnest posting lately. And I love earnest. Nothing wrong with earnest. But I thought I’d write about Noughties music — and got as far as making a playlist of my favourite 101 songs from the decade (it’s taken months to compile, to be honest). But the words to accompany the list aren’t there yet. And so, for now, here’s another terribly earnest piece I published on the weekend.

He lay with the others in a box beneath my bed: Reggie Lewis, Celtics guard, captain and All-Star. The box contained my basketball cards, precious things which were jealously guarded even if my collection was largely made from the donated scraps of friends. We were not a wealthy family, and I received no pocket money, but the subsequent scarcity of cards only enhanced my respect for them.

I could spend a lot of time with those cards, and find great satisfaction in their study, just as I could be grievously pained by their loss or accidental defacement. I would arrange and rearrange them according to different taxonomies, and I came to memorise all of their player stats. For example, Reggie Lewis was 201cm, 88kgs and averaged 20.8 points in his All-Star season of 1991-92.

And now he was dead.

*

Reggie Lewis was once a Dunbar Poet, the famed basketball squad of Baltimore’s Laurence Paul Dunbar High School. With a starting five that contained four future NBA draft picks – a record crop – the Poets went undefeated over two seasons between 1981 and ’83.

One of those teammates was Muggsy Bogues, the shortest man to ever play in the NBA, and the two friends would meet again in Lewis’s final NBA game. It was the start of the first round of the ‘93 playoffs, and even before tip-off there was special significance for their respective sides: for the Celtics it was their first playoff game since the retirement of the legendary Larry Bird, and for Muggsy’s Charlotte Hornets it was their first playoffs game ever.

In the first quarter, Lewis is running back on offence. He’s on the left side of the court when he staggers, then collapses. Play continues, now on the other end of the court, as Lewis sits up. He’s confused, and starts stretching, before the game pauses to allow him to walk to the bench. “We thought that he just tripped because he was doing so well in the game,” Bogues told me in 2022. “And he actually came back into the game.”

It’s true. Lewis returns to the court but then later in the game, feeling unusually dizzy, retreats to the bench again. He can’t figure what’s happening. After an explosive start – Lewis had scored 17 points in 13 minutes – he’s now faint and short of breath. After days of testing, a battery of cardiologists diagnosed Lewis with a rare and life-threatening heart-condition. His career seemed over.

*

Lewis & Bird

Like most children, I had an exaggerated faith in the security my bed could provide – as I did in the privacy of the space beneath it. It was not the counsel of adults I sought when anxiety’s shadow lengthened, but the shelter of a blanket. And having sovereignty over little, and few places to go, the small place under my bed was a sacred repository. That’s where I kept the drafts of my short stories. And the cards. And then the Reggie Lewis shrine.

*

A dozen cardiologists had formed their consensus: Lewis’s heart was gravely compromised and he should never play again. Lewis, just 27 and only now reaching his glamorous prime, fought the diagnosis and went shopping for a favourable one. He received it from the cardiologist Gilbert Mudge, who declared Lewis to be suffering merely from a benign fainting disorder.

Falsely buoyed, Lewis began preparing for the next season. Just three months after collapsing against Muggsy’s Hornets, Lewis joined some friends in the Celtics’ practice gym at Brandeis University for a pick-up game. He collapsed again, and was never revived. An autopsy confirmed the original diagnosis of myocarditis. His wife Donna was then pregnant with their second child. “The hardest part is, sometimes, I can go look at old footage, old VCR tapes, just old, grainy video… and I don’t remember that season,” Lewis’s teammate, Dee Brown, told the New York Times 30 years later. “Like, I was in a fog the whole year, and I think everybody was also in a fog the whole year.”

*

Lewis’s death had a considerable but mysterious effect upon me, oblivious as I was to its being a proxy for more intimate things. Four years before, when I was eight, my father was told that he would likely die soon. It was melanoma, and the prognosis was grim: Pathologically speaking, the cancer had achieved Clark’s level 4, a now-abandoned scale for measuring the depth of the melanoma’s invasion into the skin. Level 1 denotes minimal invasion; level 5 that the tumour has penetrated the subcutaneous fat. Doctors assured my father that they would do all they could, but that he should prepare to die.  

And so he did. Modestly and practically. “I wasn’t traumatised,” he told me decades later. “There was just a general sadness. I thought that if I was going to die then there was nothing I could do about it. I thought – and this was my major thought at the time – that I was the one least affected. There were three kids who needed a dad.”

I remember visiting him in hospital. He was intubated and frail. His skin was yellow, and in his startling weight loss he seemed mummified. I felt immediately nauseous, and a kindly nurse shepherded me to the TV room and pressed a paper cup filled with water to my lips. Elderly patients were gathered watching Wheel of Fortune, but upon seeing me changed the channel to one showing a cartoon.

*

As Reggie Lewis had once fought the diagnosis, after his death his family fought Dr. Mudge – as well as various newspapers that had suggested cocaine use might have contributed to his death. Mudge was charged with gross malpractice, but his 1999 trial dissolved after the jury was deadlocked. The next year, in a second trial, the doctor was acquitted. An appeal for a third trial was dismissed in 2004.

There were lessons in evidentiary thresholds, which of course I was oblivious to, as I was to the ruthlessness of the league that Reggie Lewis was once part of. The NBA imposes a salary cap upon teams to help maintain competitive parity, but when Lewis died, the NBA did not then have the power to void the contracts of dead players. The Celtics budget had to reflect two more years of Lewis’s substantial salary, unless team owners voted to relieve them of it. They declined to do so.

*

When he thought he was dying, my father was contemplating contracts and paperwork too. There was a mortgage and three kids, and a wife that was despairing and unsure how to acquit the debts. Quietly, my father did sums in his study. He called insurance companies and accountants.

Nothing was said to me, and so I was left to absorb and interpret the prevailing tension. I sought the security of my blanket. Wrote childish stories on scrap paper. Memorised the stats of NBA players. And stashed the cards and my creative excretions beneath my bed.

*

Just eight days after the funeral of Reggie Lewis, Muggsy Bogues lost his dad. He’d overdosed in a squat in Baltimore’s slums, just a few blocks from Dunbar High School. His father had put food on the table for him, Bogues told me, but when he went to prison for armed robbery Muggsy was still a child – and an NBA star when he came out.

I asked him how he’d eulogised his dad: “You know, [I said] how proud I was of him, and that he wasn’t the typical type of father where he went out there and played ‘ball with me and taught me the game of basketball. It was more or less as a provider for the family.”

Unlike Muggsy, I wouldn’t lose my father – he defied expectations – and no comparison is meant between my childhood and that of the short kid from Baltimore’s ghettoes who made the NBA, but it was wonderfully strange to talk with a man who had once occupied my inner life as a child – one in which the experience of abuse and the intimation of death was filtered through the lives of distant NBA stars like Muggsy and his late friend.

*

The year Reggie Lewis died, a younger boy at school suffered terrible injuries when cycling home. Only a year or two earlier, this same boy’s father was killed in a mining accident. This poor boy was first made socially repellent by his grief, and then again by the facial scarring that followed from being smashed by a car and dragged beneath its wheels.

Such injuries should invite warmth, of course, and the tightening of social embraces. But I remember the opposite. I don’t think his repellence had much to do with his being a reminder of our own fragility, but that his suffering had made him exotically distinctive when uniformity and anonymity were the most cherished social conditions.

Of course, I could be wrong. I hope that I am. I hope that there was greater sympathy and support for this boy than I remember. But I know that I embraced that Reggie Lewis card much more than I did my father, or that fatherless boy with the scarred face.