Guru of Go

By the mid-1980s, Paul Westhead had worn out his welcome in the NBA, leaving him with offers from a modest college with little basketball history. In the same city where he had won an NBA championship with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Westhead pursued perfection of his relentless run-and-gun offense at Loyola Marymount. The shoot-first system looked doomed to fail until two Philadelphia-born stars, Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, arrived at his doorstep. With Gathers and Kimble at the helm of a record-breaking scoring surge, Westhead’s approach stunned college basketball and upended conventional thinking. But early in the 1989-90 season, Gathers collapsed during a game and was diagnosed with an abnormal heartbeat. Determined to play, Gathers returned three games later, but less than three months later, he died on the court.