Guru of Go

Been a pretty basketball-heavy last couple of days in 30 for 30 land, but I'm not complaining. Watching these films has gotten me back in love with the game, and excited about the upcoming NBA season by extension.

This one also made me more than a little sad. In fact, this one brought my wife out of from making gingerbread in the kitchen and onto the couch to sit with me, the emotions in my voice evident when she asked me about something that was said in the film.

Guru of Go tells the story of basketball coach Paul Westhead and his style of play, known simply as "The System," focused primarily on his time at Loyola Marymount University.

The best way I can describe it is if you took the Mike D'Antoni era Phoenix Suns — Nash, Amare, Matrix, whoever played the 2 knocking down threes — and pressed fast forward. For the entire game. Every game. No matter who was on the other side of the court.

This was YMCA pickup hoops at the NCAA level, and it produced the highest scoring team in NCAA history. It also produced one of the saddest stories and most memorable NCAA tournament performances I can remember.


LMU was led by a best friends Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, two kids from North Philly who first went to USC together. A coaching change led to them being released from their scholarships, and they landed with a coach from Philly — Westhead — at Loyola, and proceeded to set the NCAA on fire.

Gathers was a 6'7" forward who led the nation in scoring and rebounding in 1989 while earning WCC Player of the Year honors.

At the time, he was only the second player in history to accomplish that feat, following Xavier McDaniel; Kurt Thomas did it one year at TCU later.

Kimble was a solid 6'4" shooting guard, the WCC Player of the Year in 1990, and a second-team All-American that same year.

In mid-December, Gathers collapsed to the floor during a game against UCSB. He was diagnosed with an abnormal heartbeat and put on various medications. The regimen of pills made him sluggish, and impacted his play, so Gathers cut down his doses.

On March 4, 1990, Gathers was heading back up the floor after completing an alley-oop when he collapsed; he was pronounced dead just a few hours later. An autopsy would reveal Gathers suffered from hypertrohpic cardiomyopathy, the same disease that later took the life of Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis.

Westhead gave the team the option to call an end to their season following Gathers' death, but Kimble and the rest of the team quickly chose to play on in memory of their fallen friend and teammate.

In one of the most memorable NCAA tournament moments of my lifetime, Kimble — a right-handed player — shot his first free throw of each game with his left, a tribute to Gathers who had been shooting lefty all season as a means to try and improve his poor performance from the charity stripe.

Even before watching Guru of Go, I could picture Kimble on the foul line, carefully setting up for the shot, than going through the motion without his right hand even on the ball.

LMU would defeat the defending National champions, the Michigan Wolverines, in the second round, and make it through to the Elite Eight before losing to the eventual National champions, Larry Johnson and the UNLV Runnin' Rebels.

It's weird how we remember different things.

The tragic passing of Len Bias is spoken of in hushed tones, a moment that has a "Where were you when you heard the news?" element to it. To this day, any basketball fan who was older than eight or nine at the time can probably tell you a thing or two about the Maryland forward and Celtics draft pick.

But Gathers' death — which stands as the more tragic of the two to me — is forgotten by many, remembered as the footnote to the passing of Reggie Lewis or several other athletes who each lost their life to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

I remember Hank's story.

I cried when I heard about it in 1990 and watched Bo Kimble take Loyola Marymount on an improbably run in the NCAA tournament, and I cried remembering it again last night.

Just so that we don't end on a sad note, here's a far less teary-eyed thought:

Bo Kimble stands out in my memory as the first outstanding college basketball player whose skills did not translate to the NBA at all.

He was the guy who taught me that being good in college didn't mean you were going to be good in The Association. There were probably others before him, and there have certainly be plenty of others who confirmed that hypothesis since, but Kimble was the first guy to stand out in that regard.

Sidenote: go back and look at some of those NBA Drafts from the early '90s — goddamn there were some horrible draft classes.

Anyway — that's Guru of Go and my Bo Kimble anecdote.

Tomorrow we stay with basketball but go off the court for No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson.