Legend's widow demands millions

Six years after his untimely death, Reggie Lewis remains something of a New England icon. The City of Boston named its marquee indoor athletic facility in honour of the Celtics' captain, who collapsed and died while shooting baskets at the age of 27.

A charitable foundation was established in his memory, and replicas of Lewis' Number 35 jersey (which hangs in a place of honour from the rafters of the Fleet Centre where his old team plays its home games) remain a briskly-selling item. in sporting goods stores.

That legacy is threatened by a civil trial which got underway in Boston's Suffolk Superior Courthouse this week. In a proceeding which potentially will outlast the NBA play-offs themselves, the player's widow Donna Harris-Lewis has brought a malpractice suit against a physician she claims misdiagnosed her husband's ailment.

Whatever the outcome of the court action, it is virtually guaranteed that by the time defence lawyers have finished having a go at Reggie Lewis's reputation, the name of the late basketball player will have been as thoroughly tarnished as that of Dr Gilbert (Punky) Mudge, the cardiologist Mrs Harris-Lewis is suing.

Harris-Lewis claims that Mudge's faulty diagnosis and flawed treatment of Reggie Lewis' heart arrhythmia directly contributed to his death.

It is already clear that the linchpin of Mudge's defence will be a contention that Lewis' failure to come clean about his history of cocaine use was responsible for the misdiagnosis, and previously sealed records of drug tests administered during Lewis's student days at North-eastern University have been subpoenaed.

The bare bones of the case's history are uncontested: in April 1993, after Lewis mysteriously collapsed on the court in the midst of a game between the Celtics and the Charlotte Hornets, Celtics management, opting to leave no stone unturned, assembled a "Dream Team" of the nation's most prominent specialists to examine Lewis at New England Baptist Hospital. Although the dream team was unable to finish its work - Harris-Lewis, in a huff, had her husband transferred to Brigham & Women's Hospital because, among other reasons, they were asking too many uncomfortable questions about a possible history of drugs - it did collectively arrive at the conclusion that Lewis was suffering from a potentially life-threatening, and almost certainly career-ending, ventricular arrhythmia.

Enter Mudge, who, having been summoned by Harris-Lewis to render a second opinion, invited every newspaper and television station he could find to a press conference at which he proclaimed that the dream team doctors had erred in their collective diagnosis and that he, Mudge, had found the true answer: Lewis, he announced to the world, had a congenital neurological disorder which produced fainting spells and, with proper treatment, could lead a normal life, including a resumption of his basketball career.

Less than three months later, Reggie Lewis collapsed and died while shooting baskets at Brandeis University in suburban Waltham. He left a two year-old son and a wife pregnant with a second child, who is now almost six years of age.

Mudge subsequently claimed that two weeks before his death, Lewis had confessed to having used cocaine, an admission he previously had denied. The player's failure to make a clean breast of it from the outset, contended Mudge, ultimately contributed to his own death.

"It would be the same as if I went in with a stomach ache and never told my doctor I'd eaten a two-week-old meatloaf," was the way defence attorney William Dailey Jr put it in his opening statement on Monday.

The dynamics of the case have already produced some interesting juxtapositions. Dr Robert Miley, an internist at New England Baptist, testified as a witness for the plaintiff, and said he did not test Lewis for cocaine because he had "no reason not to believe" Lewis when he denied using drugs.

But Miley was a member of the dream team, from whose aegis Donna Harris-Lewis ordered her husband removed because she was angry by its members' persistent questions about drug use.

Dr Arnold Scheller, the Celtics' team physician who helped assemble the dream team, said he attempted to warn Mudge by telephone about the group's consensus diagnosis.

"I was telling him I was concerned about Reggie, that he had a ventricular arrythmia," said Scheller in testimony on Tuesday. "He just stopped me and said `We know how to take care of this at the Brigham.' He just cut me off. I stared at the phone in shock."

Mudge's apparent willingness to dismiss the possibility of drugs as a factor before making his very public diagnosis marks him as, at best, gullible. In the late 1980s, when Lewis joined the Celtics, cocaine use was fairly rampant among his NBA peer group. (Len Bias, the team's number one draft choice the year before it picked Lewis, died of a cocaine overdose less than 24 hours after he was selected.) There was also the lingering cloud of suspicion from his North-eastern days, particularly a mysterious incident late in his senior year when Lewis suffered burns to both his hands while "making French fries."

Moreover, drug use loomed as an obvious medical explanation. Yet Mudge says he discounted the possible causal effects of cocaine at the time because his patient told him he didn't use drugs.

One is forced to wonder: had a patient exhibiting all the outward symptoms of pregnancy showed up at Mudge's office and protested "that can't be! I'm a virgin!" would he, on that basis, have proceeded to treat her for a stomach tumour?

As Mudge's own lawyer, Dailey, put it, Lewis had about nine million good reasons for lying about cocaine: that many dollars remained to be paid over the remaining three years on his Celtics contract, which could have been placed in jeopardy by an admission of illegal drug use.

Technically, Mudge is one of three doctors named in the suit. (A fourth, Dr John Rutherford, reached an out of court settlement even as jury selection was under way.) The defence of the other two at this point seems to be that since they were not the primary physicians they should not have been sued, and, given Mudge's eagerness to grab the limelight six years ago, they may have a point.

Harris-Lewis, who maintains that the action is "not about money," is nonetheless suing for the $100 million or so her husband might have earned had he lived. Through her lawyers she attempted to bar any testimony about drugs as "irrelevant." Having failed in that quest, she has all but ensured that the brunt of the defence testimony will be directed toward linking Lewis' name with cocaine.