Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Team once dealt with MRSA case
Previous scare left Heat well aware of battling the unseen
MIAMI — Neither the Miami Heat nor any of the teams in major sports leagues have been here, left to face anything like the new coronavirus pandemic.
But the Heat are well-versed as a franchise about the needed cleanup and emergence from such moments.
In 2006, after inviting Mike Gansey to summer league, the undrafted West Virginia guard was later found to have contracted a highly contagious bacterial infection called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or, as more commonly known, MRSA.
It proved to be an uneven five-game tryout on a Heat team coached by Erik Spoelstra in the Orlando Pro Summer League, on a roster that also included current Heat assistant coach Chris Quinn, as well as former Heat players Dorell Wright, Earl Barron and Robert Hite.
After those games, the infection was diagnosed, with Gansey losing a frightening 30 pounds during that fight.
“When I played Summer League in Miami, I was in a lot of pain,” Gansey would later tell The Michigan Daily in 2018. “But I just thought I was worn down more than anything.”
What followed by the Heat was closure and a high-level disinfection of the team’s practice court attached to American
Airlines Arena, one that sits alongside Biscayne Bay, the same one in use until now shut down due to the current pandemic.
It was a period that opened the team’s eyes to the seriousness of the unseen and one that well could serve as a blueprint for when the team and the league returns from the NBA’s shutdown.
“You can’t physically move,” Gansey told ESPN’s Outside the Lines of what he endured during that initial bid to make the NBA, at the time compared by then Sacramento Kings executive Jerry Reynolds to JJ Redick and Jeff Hornacek. “It feels like you got hit by a truck and you don’t even know it.”
The infection left him bedridden for two weeks, later developing a similar infection in his ankle.
Gansey reflected on the situation last year at the NBA draft combine.
“People were like, ‘If you’d waited a couple more days, people get their legs amputated,’ ” he told the Akron Beacon Journal. “It was not a good time at all.”
Among the parallels to the current situation is that, according to a study by the Journal of Athletic Training, MRSA is more common in hospitalized patients with weak immune systems and may also affect people in long-term care facilities.
The experience was not unique to the Heat. Among others who dealt with such staph-related infections were Paul Pierce with the Boston Celtics and Drew Gooden with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Both Pierce and Gooden have since moved on to broadcasting. Gansey, now 37, played in the NBA’s developmental G League and overseas, but never made it to the NBA, despite also getting a 2007 summer-league tryout with the Los Angeles Clippers. He since has moved on to a position in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ front office, sharing in the team’s LeBron James-led 2016 NBA championship.
“It feels like you got hit by a truck and you don’t even know it.” — Mike Gansey, who contracted MRSA in 2006