From his vantage point across the court, Richmond coach Chris Mooney saw his big man take a spill, roll over from his back, stand, take a few steps and fall again. As the freshman slid head-first like a base runner trying to steal second, Mooney muttered to himself, ‘For crying out loud. Get up, Grant!”
Sitting behind the bench in a bright red sweater, Craig Golden, the big man’s father and a former hoops player himself, yelled just that: “Get up!”
At the far end of the Spiders’ bench, strength coach Jay DeMayo and trainer Adam Smith all but laughed out loud as Grant Golden flailed about near midcourt, each thinking the same thing: Grant sweats so much he fell in his own perspiration slick.
Waiting to check in at the scorer’s table, T.J. Cline pulled no punches. He screamed at his teammate, “What are you doing? Get the (expletive) up and get back.’’
Even the television announcers chimed in: “Grant Golden slipping on the floor. It’s really wet.” Stuck at home a couple of hours away in Winchester, Va., watching the game while she nursed a torn rotator cuff, Ellen Golden shook her head at her eldest son’s clumsiness.
Grant Golden did as they all wished during that game against Texas Tech last December. He got up. He put his hands on the court, pushing himself onto his feet. Only this time, instead of trying to rejoin the action, Golden walked toward the bench, waving to Cline to replace him. His eyes, his teammate and roommate De’Monte Buckingham would remember later, frantically searched the stands.
Grant stumbled as he walked. Buckingham reached out to steady him. “You O.K.?” he asked. Grant never answered. Instead he went down again, this time crashing face-first like a felled redwood.
That’s when the yelling stopped. Not just from the imploring coaches, frustrated dad, amused staff members and aggravated teammate. The entire audience at Robbins Center, all 6,700 fans, went silent. “You could hear a church mouse scurrying,’’ Craig Golden recalls.
“His heart was beating so fast,’’ Smith remembers, “we couldn’t detect a pulse.’’
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It’s a week before the start of the 2017-18 season, and Grant Golden is crouched in a defensive position, waiting on Mooney’s whistle, ready to slide from one side of the lane to the other. He does the drill repeatedly before joining his teammates for transition work, sprinting up and down the court. He never begs for a break, never even looks winded. With his wavy long hair held back by a white headband, Grant looks the picture of teen magazine health.
That’s because he is. There is nothing to prevent him embracing his basketball career with gusto, of enjoying a long and productive life. When he took the court for Richmond’s opener last Friday night against Delaware, he entered with the doctors’ clearance, his parents’ blessing and his own self-assuredness.
It wasn’t always like that, especially the last part. The road back from that frightening night was far from linear, more a circuitous path through doubt and fear, timidity and trepidation. Grant remembers everything, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. The memory of an 18-year-old’s heart suddenly going haywire fueled panic attacks and concerns as Grant worked his way back. “I kept thinking, Oh, man. Am I going too far?’’ he says. “It took a while to relax.’’
The technical term for Grant’s condition is atrial flutter. It manifested itself in a heartbeat so rapid he thought he felt his heart pounding into the court while he was sprawled in front of the bench. “Somewhere in the very upper 200s, like 270,’’ Smith says of Grant’s heart rate when he collapsed. The condition is congenital, but unlike his father, who suffered from fibrillation and could sense his heartbeat change intuitively, Grant’s came without warning. One second he was jumping up out to defend a Red Raider, and the next he felt woozy. In less than a minute he opened his eyes to a halo of concerned faces.
So unexpected was the collapse, Smith and Mooney thought Grant had banged his head and suffered a concussion. In fact they would have begun concussion protocol were it not for a fan who suddenly forced his way into the Richmond huddle. His name is Leo Gazoni, and he’s one of Mooney’s best friends. He’s also a cardiothoracic surgeon in Richmond. That night Gazoni and his anesthesiologist wife, Farnaz, decided to attend the Spiders’ game, and Mooney set them up with tickets right behind the bench.
“We were trying to figure out what’s going on and he jumps in — ‘Chris, it’s his heart,’’ Mooney says of Gazoni. “He knew it immediately and just took over.’’
Adds Smith: “Everyone just deferred to him.’’
Craig Golden ran from the stands, while a family friend called Ellen. “I was hysterical,’’ she says. Grant was alert almost immediately, talking and fully aware of where he was, but his heart rate wouldn’t slow. EMTs hooked him up to an IV in the tunnel before rushing him to the hospital. After a good 20-minute delay, the game resumed. No one remembers much of what happened. “I have no idea how I played,’’ Buckingham says. “We went to the huddle and our coaches are trying to keep our heads in the game, but we weren’t paying them no mind. All I cared about was my brother, my roommate.’’
The Spiders staged a furious rally but couldn’t overcome a double-digit deficit, lost by three, promptly shelved any frustration with the defeat and arrived en masse at the hospital. Grant’s heart had snapped back into rhythm in the ambulance, so he seemed like the same old goofy guy when they walked in. “We went there to make him feel better, but seeing him helped all of us,’’ Buckingham says.
Doctors determined Grant would need an ablation, a relatively non-invasive procedure in which a thin tube is inserted through a blood vessel and guided to the heart. Heat or radio energy is used to scar the tissue where the irregular heartbeat is occurring. Doctors were confident Grant would make a full recovery. The news was good, certainly, but the emotional toll wore on everyone. Buckingham returned to his empty dorm room. Craig Golden checked into a hotel to be near his son. Back in Winchester, Ellen had a sleepless night.
By the time he got home, Mooney was drained. Some 11 months later he still has no idea how he got through the game. Though terrified for Grant, he tried to keep a calm front for his players, but when he knelt beside his kids for bedtime prayers, the veneer cracked. “Let’s just say,’’ Mooney says, his eyes reddening and his voice thickening as he recalled the night, “Grant was included in our prayers that night.’’
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Grant was hospitalized for three days, went home for a week and then returned for the ablation. He was discharged the next day, on Dec. 22, and told he could resume normal activities within a week. “It was like, Do you want fries with that?” the straight-talking DeMayo says with amazement. “Pat you on the rear end and send you on the way.’’
Technically it could have been that easy, and that’s what everyone — Grant included — was hoping. He had every intention of returning to basketball before season’s end. Because Craig had gone through multiple ablations, the family understood that the procedure was minor and endorsed the resumption of his career. (The only issue was that, because Grant is 6-foot-10, the tube was too short to go through a vein in his leg; doctors had to enter through his neck.)
His parents naturally worried, but Ellen likened her concern to the decision for Grant to attend a Maryland prep school for his final two years of high school. She missed him terribly, yet when friends asked why she had allowed her son to leave, she said it wasn’t her choice. “It’s his dream,’’ she says.
After the holiday break, Grant returned to campus and began rehabbing with Smith and DeMayo. Smith, who attended every doctor’s appointment with Grant, strapped a heart monitor around Grant’s chest and got him on a treadmill, starting with an easy pace at short intervals. The first panic attack came shortly thereafter, Smith realizing that the monitor and its constant beeps and reactions were giving Grant more anxiety than comfort. They did the logical thing. They ditched the monitor, Smith relying on his 15 years of experience to gauge Grant’s progress. Grant worked his way up to 7 mph, a steady but certainly not pressing pace for a Division I athlete.
“And then he just stopped,’’ Smith remembers. “I thought, O.K., this isn’t going well. Right then we scrapped everything. We had been planning to work him back during the season, but we just told him, ‘We’re not pushing you anymore. You do what’s making you comfortable.’’
Physically there was nothing wrong. Grant’s heart was fine, never nearing a rate that would cause concern. But Grant was terrified. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened,’’ he says. His father tried to talk him through it. A basketball player at Fairfield, Craig had to call it a career when his kidneys failed, requiring a transplant. He’s been beset by health issues ever since. Four years ago he had another kidney transplant wrought with complications so severe he was helicoptered to a hospital on Thanksgiving Day, doctors telling Ellen they weren’t sure he’d survive the flight. He endured five surgeries and a 127-day hospital stay. “Golden Strong,’’ Ellen calls it.
“When you have a serious health scare, it’s always in the back of your mind,’’ Craig says. “This could happen again. I understood that, but I told him you have to keep doing stuff. The more you do, eventually those thoughts go away.’’
