Nearly lost amid last week’s capital chatter about expanding Medicare, enlarging day care and saving Social Security was a one-day tourist named Ron Hecklinski.
More Top Picks Winter Will Never Pleasant For Shower But We Can Make It Pleasant With The 8 Best Electric Tankless Water Heaters
Hecklinski, 42, is the basketball coach at Anderson High School in Anderson, Ind. (population 60,000), and last week he came to Washington for the first time in his life.
“I was in awe,” he said after a one-day stay and a return home Thursday, “to be in our nation’s capital, to be a part of what I was a part of.”
What he was part of was the result of a life-threatening waiting game he endured and, ultimately, a grudging bureaucratic concession by high school sports officials in Indiana.
It will prompt an unusual charity event in Washington’s new downtown sports arena in which Hecklinski’s team will face DeMatha High School of Hyattsville, Md., a longtime national power whose alumni include many former college and professional stars.
It’s an incredibly big deal in Anderson if less so here. Anderson, once a big automotive manufacturing town, has seen industrial decline and a fleeing population. Basketball remains big.
The school has merged with another, though keeping its name, and everything has moved except the gym. Known as the Wigwam, it is surely one of the biggest high school gyms on the planet and still draws about 9,000 people a game.
It is safe to say that many of the diehards will find a way to be here for the DeMatha Invitational at the new 20,000-seat MCI Center, home of professional basketball’s Wizards and hockey’s Capitals. At least 150 people quickly snapped up seats for a charter flight to Washington.
They will come because of a rather amazing coincidence involving Hecklinski, a South Bend native, and Morgan Wooten, 66, the DeMatha coach for more than four decades and one of high school sports’ best known coaches.
It was 1988 when Hecklinski, who was coaching high school in Bloomington, Ind., found out through a routine blood test that he had primary sclerosing colongitis, a rare disease with a bleak prognosis.
It destroys the bile ducts and inflames the liver. At some point in his life, doctors said, the only hope would be a liver transplant.
The disease started really affecting Hecklinski, who is a rugged 6 foot 5 inches tall and 225 pounds, two years later while he was an assistant coach at Ball State University. Over the next four years, he became increasingly fatigued, lost weight, suffered from jaundice and an enlarged spleen.
He was very lucky to be hospitalized in 1996 when complications arose. He would have bled to death if not under good care.
At the same time, Wooten was having similar troubles and underwent a liver transplant. Hecklinski read about the famous Washington coach’s transplant in USA Today.
A day or two later, Hecklinski was informed that he too needed a transplant. He was put on the long, national waiting list, with no assurances.
Six weeks later, Hecklinski got lucky and a donor, whose identity he has never learned, surfaced. The 11 hours of surgery were completed in Lexington, Ky., and led to about five days of semiconsciousness.
While Hecklinski was recovering, a USA Today reporter gave him Wooten’s number. The two men talked.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post sports writer, William Gildea, had corralled a book contract after a two-part series on Indiana high school basketball. His publisher wanted him to follow four teams, and Anderson was one that he was considering.
He first met Hecklinski in October 1996, on the first day of practice at Anderson. Down a long, dark hall, he saw a man who was clearly weak and occasionally had to rest against a wall. Hecklinski had persuaded his wife to drive him from Lexington to Anderson so he could be present for the first day of practice.
“He was coaching out of a chair, with a megaphone, and wearing sweat pants because of the incision,” Gildea recalled last week. “Twice, later in the season, he almost passed out in hot gyms during games. I thought he was a pretty compelling, heroic figure.”
The idea of a game between Anderson and DeMatha was broached by Gildea, whose “Where the Game Matters Most” (Little Brown) is now on sale. Hecklinski was intrigued and applied to the Indiana State High School Athletic Association for a waiver of the rule barring teams from traveling more than 300 miles.
It turned him down, but he appealed to the full board, made an emotional request and turned the tide.
Gildea was there Wednesday when the two men met for the first time.
“These guys really don’t have anybody to really talk to about this,” he said. “But the look between them when they met, well, it was pretty remarkable.
“Being coaches, who are totally into numbers, like rebounds and points, they started talking about red blood cell counts and other medical stuff,” Gildea said.
For Hecklinski, it was a “very notable day. I was able to be with the person I think all high school basketball coaches respect the most and to share our experiences, which were similar.”
Surviving his liver transplant, Hecklinski said, “allowed me a second chance to live. The biggest thing in my life is to raise my daughter, who’s 9 years old now. It has allowed me to be her father.
“It changed me because I now realize how fragile life is. Before, I thought I was indestructible. I was the ex-athlete who pushed myself as hard as I could.”
More Top Picks Tractive Gps
Anderson has a bunch of games before heading to Washington for a Jan. 29 game to benefit the Mid-Atlantic Coalition on Organ Donation. One is Jan. 19 in Chicago against St. Joseph’s of Westchester at DePaul University. Then, his team will focus on coming here.
And, no surprise, Hecklinski won’t be apoplectic if he loses.
“My surviving the liver transplant was my state championship,” he said.
Cokie watch
Well, well, well.
So David Brinkley is taking money from Archer Daniels Midland to be their spokesman and his new ads started appearing on his old ABC show,”This Week,” now with co-hosts Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts.
After the first ad ran last week, Roberts offered on-air congratulations to Brinkley on his new role. It was rather unseemly and again underscored the terminal coziness here among media, pols and special interests.
The Washington Post noted the Brinkley association the next day in a TV column that tends to be a conduit for press releases. Three days later, its bright and very diligent media writer, Howard Kurtz, weighed in, quoting lots of folks, myself included, on the subject.
In a story about possible conflicts of interest and appearance problems, the reporter might have left out one involving himself. He recently completed a free-lance piece for ABC’s esteemed “Nightline.”
“It was a one-time, free-lance piece and the Post OK’d it,” he said during our chat on the Brinkley matter.
All well and good. But consider this: A well-known media writer takes money from a major organization he covers. In addition, he is a regular, paid panelist on a weekly show on CNN, another organization he covers.
It’s a slippery slope, even if one has a reputation for being tough-minded.
Consider: What if in the process of preparing his piece for “Nightline,” a show with which he might well like to have an ongoing relationship, he was leaked a critical fact about the show or host Ted Koppel.
Might there have been a tendency to, well, not exactly go full blazes in reporting it?
There are, of course, simple ways to navigate such prospective quandaries. When you’re a cop, don’t take money from anybody on the beat.