HOUSTON -- It's OK to panic.
There's an epidemic out there that has no name. It's killing our children, and no one seems to know exactly why. It seems now that at least once a year, a football player dies somewhere during an offseason conditioning drill. High school, college, even pro. Different reasons, different circumstances, but it keeps happening.
 Fifty years ago, Bear Bryant took a bunch of kids into the desert of West Texas and drove them to exhaustion. Many of the legendary Junction Boys quit, but no one died. And that era seems like the Stone Age when compared to what we now know about health, exercise and nutrition.
In an age of modern medicine, designer foods, nutritionists and state-of-the-art training facilities, an average of 2.4 college and high school players per year have died of heat stroke in the past decade.
One minute last week, Missouri coach Gary Pinkel was vacationing in Las Vegas. The next, he was on a red-eye back to Columbia wondering what to tell the parents of Aaron O'Neal, who collapsed and died after a supervised workout.
A preliminary exam proved only that O'Neal, a redshirt freshman, didn't die of trauma, infection or foul play. Meanwhile, the kid's heart was shipped to Miami for examination. A neuropathologist in Missouri will examine the brain. Toxicology will be done in St. Louis.
"When we get all the information, it could come back inconclusive," said Missouri safety Jason Simpson here on Wednesday at the Big 12 preseason media days. "That would tear me up not to know what killed Aaron."
Is anyone else scared witless about this ongoing national mystery? When you send your kids to college, you don't expect their hearts being shipped to Miami in a cooler.
"I tell people if this continues happening, the NCAA is going to close summer workouts," said South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier. "They started to (limit) spring football because of all the injuries, because coaches scrimmage, scrimmage, beat the hell out of their guys. One guy would get hurt (and it was), 'OK, bring another one in.'"
That from a coach who lost Florida freshman Eraste Autin to heat stroke in 2001. Like O'Neal, Autin was a hustler, a loveable kid who didn't stop trying until the heat killed him.
Meanwhile, kids at Florida, South Carolina and everywhere continue to operate in a culture that was created by the coaches themselves. Year-round workouts are the norm now and about as "voluntary" as a court appearance.
John Burns played on Missouri's last Orange Bowl team in 1969. Like most of the other players, he held down a summer job to make money and to build strength from whatever manual labor was involved.
"The problem (now) is everybody is doing it or you're behind," Burns said. "Ninety percent of players are there (in the offseason) if you're in football. You pick up the paper every year and it happens on somebody's campus."
But mention doing away with those "voluntary" workouts, and even Pinkel is against it.
"If you don't have offseason workouts, you have a lot more problems come August," Pinkel said. "It used to be you didn't do anything in the summer, you had to get yourself in shape in August."
Funny, but players didn't seem to be dying then, either. Supposedly, Autin was counted as one of the 24 heat-stroke victims in the past decade in numbers compiled by the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. In the previous 10 years there were only six.
Why the increase? Just a hunch, but if you add in supplements, steroids and overwhelming pressure from coaches for players to participate in those offseason workouts, it seems like a mortal stew has been brewing.
Except that no one can assign absolute blame or a reason why. Four summers ago, Autin was one of three high-profile football players who died during offseason workouts. Northwestern's Rashidi Wheeler and Minnesota Vikings lineman Korey Stringer were the others. Arizona's McCollins Umeh dropped dead last year with an enlarged heart that was never previously detected.
"They're going to keep happening, that's the bottom line," said Dr. Michael Krauss, for 12 years Purdue's team physician. Krauss is the incoming chairman of the NCAA's competitive safeguards committee that oversees the medical aspects of college sports.
He spent 10 years of his life researching sudden death in athletes and just presented a paper in March in Austin. The conclusion: more than scary.
The most common single cause of sudden cardiac death, he says, is something called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It's also the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young U.S. athletes. A part of the heart muscle grows abnormally over time. The symptoms essentially manifest as the individual grows older and exerts himself. A full screening can cost $1,000 per person. Krauss developed one for Purdue that cost $35, but only because it's incomplete.
"And these are the people with all the resources," he said. "Even if the people with all the resources can do some of this screening stuff, then what are you going to do with I-AA, Division II, Division III, high schools?"
This isn't meant to imply the NCAA has been negligent. In light of the 2001 deaths, it moved rapidly to drastically cut down on offseason workouts. But players keep dying, and a culture goes on.
"Some people say it's a heart problem, something you can't test for," said Simpson, who practiced with O'Neal that day. "If you can, it costs way too much, but you might not ever find anything in most cases. A lot of times it comes back inconclusive."
So should offseason workouts at schools be banned?
"We definitely have to work out," Simpson said, "If you're not working out, you don't know if another team is."
It's a case of macho vs. maddening: O'Neal was in shorts and T-shirts when he passed. The temperature was in the mid-80s, certainly not oppressive. When O'Neal initially collapsed on the practice field, Simpson didn't give it a second thought. He'd seen teammates slow down a million times, called it "sandbagging" because they didn't want to pay the price.
"That's what really frustrates me," Simpson said. "Every team has people that do that. If they didn't, we would have given more attention to Aaron faster."
The cause of death remains a mystery, but Krauss has a feeling that it might be heart-related.
"This sounds suspiciously cardiac, no doubt about it," Krauss said.
"You've got to wait for the lab results," he added, "but the bottom line is that these kids with some of these cardiac defects are essentially undetectable."
In 10 years, Purdue's heart exams have caught one abnormality -- in a female track athlete. The question then -- for all of college athletics -- becomes: With only that one hit at Purdue, is it worth the expense to make an echocardiogram a standard exam for every player?
"That girl is still alive," Krauss said. "I'm not sure what we did saved her life. The detractors would say, 'You spent 10 years, all this money and how many lives did you save?'"
That's why football players and their parents should be more than concerned. Football players make up the overwhelming majority of players who work out in the summer. All that work, all the physical and emotional investment by their loved ones, and families still can't be sure what is killing their kids.
"The way I was taught was is, the first symptom is sudden death for a lot of these problems," Krauss said. "Your best physical and best exam won't pick them up sometimes."
Yes, it's OK to panic. | |
