Be A Good Sport, Guard Your Heart

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By Mike Ferlazzo

Some athletes with an undiagnosed heart condition can learn the hard way that being in shape doesn’t guarantee heart health.

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Fred Hoiberg was in the prime of his 10-year career as a professional basketball player and felt like he was in the best shape of his life. But today the former sharpshooting guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves realizes he was playing with a ticking time bomb in his chest.
           
Hoiberg, now assistant general manager of the Timberwolves, had known he had a defective heart valve since his playing days at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He had been monitored with echocardiograms—ultrasounds of the heart—through most of his college career and by his first two teams in the National Basketball Association, the Indiana Pacers and the Chicago Bulls. Then he signed with the Minnesota Timberwolves, who at the time did not routinely test their players.
           
He opted to have an echocardiogram (ECG) while undergoing a life insurance exam during the 2004–05 season. That test probably saved his life. It revealed a bicuspid aortic valve, a congenital heart deformity. He had a bulge in his aorta that was on the verge of rupturing.
           
“Had I taken a big blow to my chest, it could have caused a rupture,” he says. “It was just a matter of time.”
           
Untreated, he could have suffered an aortic dissection (a sudden tear in the lining of the aorta)—the same condition that killed actor John Ritter.
           
While a bicuspid aortic valve only afflicts 1 to 2 percent of the population, it doesn’t discriminate based on fitness level. Soon after Hoiberg’s diagnosis, he underwent an eight-hour open-heart surgery that effectively ended his playing career. Yet he considers himself lucky.
           
A former Timberwolves teammate, Jason Collier, died of a sudden disturbance in the heart rhythm caused by an abnormally enlarged heart. He was 28. Former Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis died from sudden cardiac arrest more than a decade ago. And last February, Hoiberg’s boyhood basketball idol, former Iowa State player Barry Stevens, died at age 43 from a heart attack caused by atherosclerosis, the buildup of plaque in the arteries. Stevens ate a healthy diet and worked out vigorously six days a week.

“The pathologist did tell me that Barry would have been a candidate for a double bypass,” says Sarita Stevens, Barry’s widow. “But you wouldn’t have known it. He thought that his fatigue—because he did experience fatigue—was just being out of shape. That’s why for that last month he was really in the gym all the time, trying to get in shape. And physically and visually, he was in shape.”