Written by John Mark Adkison
It’s always hard trying to figure out how to write a story about death. It is especially hard when the story is real. It’s even worse when the story is still a fresh wound in the hearts of the characters who were only a few weeks ago living perfectly uneventful stories of their own.
But with every death comes a story, and Wes Leonard’s story is one that must be told.
You may have heard about him on the news.You may have heard about the 16-year-old basketball star from Fennville, Mich.,who made the final shot in a heated game on Thursday, March 3, with 20 seconds left, breaking the 55-55 tie and sealing the Fennville Blackhawk’s undefeated season.
But moments after he made the winning basket, after the crowd went crazy with joy, after everything seemed so perfect, Leonard fell to the floor as death stepped onto the court to cut the celebration short.
Leonard was proclaimed dead at the hospital an hour and a half later after several attempts to revive him. The autopsy revealed he died from sudden cardiac arrest and complications due to an enlarged heart, a hit Leonard never saw coming.
And so the media clamored to tell the story of the boy who died seconds after he scored the winning basket. It is a great story to be sure, a story of cold irony and epic tragedy, the sort that keep readers from flipping the page or viewers from changing the channel.
And Leonard was not alone this month in passing away during a sporting event. On March 8, 16-year-old Javaris Brinkley from Littleton, N.C., died while playing basketball at his church due to heart failure and the next day 17-year-old Sarah Landauer of Gainesville, Fla., collapsed and died during track and field drills at her high school.
Now doctors from Arkansas State University to Harvard University are looking into shocking studies of just how often young athletes are dying from cardiac arrest and heart complications. According to these studies, one student dies every three days from sudden cardiac arrest. Many doctors are now advising young athletes to seek electro-cardiogram screenings to ensure their hearts are healthy.
Wes Leonard, Javaris Brinkley and Sarah Landauer could not see what was coming those fateful days after the final buzzer or beyond the finish line, but we never know what the next minute holds. And so here I am trying to fit the story of the ironic death of a high school basketball player into a column, trying to reach past the facts and the hearsay, trying to grasp the soul of this story that is telling us all to play and live as hard as we can, because we’ve only got till the final buzzer sounds.
