Choosing Life Over Football : Reactions to athlete’s decision perpetuate intolerable machismo attitude

Parents of young athletes must have shivered when they read the criticism of Jimmy Laister’s decision to quit the San Diego Chargers because of the recurrence of a heart ailment.

Teaching a budding young football, soccer, basketball or track star how to keep sports in proper perspective is difficult enough without professional or college coaches publicly ridiculing a player who made concerns for his health a higher priority than the game.

When the Chargers were unable to dissuade their sixth-round draft choice from leaving town last week, general manager Bobby Beathard implied that the 22-year-old draftee was homesick and was using the heart problem as an excuse; that mini-camp was just “too much for him to handle.”

Coach Dan Henning called it a case of cold feet.

And there was no solace from his former coach at the Oregon Institute of Technology, who acknowledged the heart problem, but said he thought it was just an “anxiety type of thing.”

Disappointment--even pique--over the loss of a talented player and a draft pick was understandable. Laister should have been more forthcoming about the heart problem.

But Laister has a real medical problem, arrhythmia; he has been treated for it since age 16. Sometimes “the heart beats so fast it doesn’t put out blood. That’s not anxiety,” said his Oregon physician. Surely the Oregon coach knew that. And even if Laister did not fully discuss his condition, Beathard admitted that the Chargers knew “something about his heart.”

Maybe Henning and Beathard figured that Laister would continue the same approach he used during college games. When Laister’s heartbeat got out of rhythm, he would go to the hospital for a quick treatment and return to play, “because my team needed me.”

That attitude causes scores of injuries with lifelong consequences. And it can lead to death. Comments like those made by Henning and Beathard just reinforce such machismo.

Would playing have endangered Laister’s life? His doctor doesn’t think so. Did he quit too hastily? We may never know if he sticks by his decision and lives a long life.

Loyola Marymount basketball star Hank Gathers ignored the warning signals of heart disease and dropped dead during a game just a little more than a year ago. After his death, there was much discussion of how such tragedies could be prevented.

Laister looked at what happened to Gathers and decided to take his own preventive steps, saying: “I don’t want to be 22 years old and dead on the football field.”