As a standout basketball player for Loyola Marymount University, Hank Gathers was all the things that sports fans love to celebrate. He was talented, for starters, but perhaps more importantly he was tough, relentless, charismatic, passionate and inexhaustible. He was the type of athlete that fans and coaches like to say played with a big heart. And yet when it comes to Gathers we don't dare utter those words because, sadly, they're all too true. Gathers really did have a big heart, and, in a depressing irony, it was that physical abnormality that helped to trigger his sudden and sickening on-court death just over 20 years ago. One moment Gathers was slamming home the business end of an alley-oop. The next moment he was flat on his back. A few moments later, he was being lifted onto a stretcher in front of a horrified crowd that was as silent as Gathers' body was lifeless. Hank Gathers, once the nation's leading scorer and rebounder, was dead at the age of 23. Sport went from ecstasy to catastrophe, just like that.
If you're a fan of college basketball, you surely remember Gathers, or, perhaps more accurately, you can't manage to forget him. Gathers' death and the inspired performance by his teammates that followed it respectively rank among the most tragic and then uplifting sports stories of the past three decades. That's why it's entirely appropriate that these events should be remembered in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" documentary series, and that's why it's altogether puzzling that they aren't the explicit and exclusive focus of Bill Couturie's film, Guru of Go. No, as you might be able to tell from the title, the film isn't the Hank Gathers story or even the Loyola Marymount story. It is instead a profile of Gathers' head coach, Paul Westhead, the mastermind of the fast-breaking, hard-pressing, never-resting offense that Westhead called "The System." Couturie's film is the documentary that should have been made had Gathers lived and led Loyola to a national title, dominating all-comers with an offense of organized chaos. Trouble is, that's not what happened.
