Hughes' new doctor, Stuart Holden, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, was receptive to doing the surgery the following week.
But then Hughes encountered yet another major obstacle.
"I contacted the Clippers about medical coverage and they said the surgery wouldn't be covered," Hughes said. "I said, ‘Are you kidding me?' And they said if they did it for one person, they'd have to do for everybody else."
When Dunleavy learned the Clippers wouldn't cover the cost of Hughes' surgery, he mentioned it to his players.
Several of them, including now Milwaukee Bucks forward Corey Maggette, Chris Kaman, Elton Brand and Marko Jaric, were taken aback by the news and decided to offer their assistance.
"Kim was one of our coaches and he's a really good friend of mine, too," Maggette said. "He was in a situation where the Clippers' medical coverage wouldn't cover his surgery. I thought it was a great opportunity to help someone in need, to do something that Christ would do.
"It shows your humanity, that you care for other people and not just yourself. Kim was in a life-and-death situation."
It was indeed a dicey time for Hughes. After a biopsy was taken, he learned his prostate cancer was much worse than he believed.
The cancer had quickly spread and was on the brink of moving to other areas of his body.
There are a lot of different reactions one might have to that.
One of the most obvious is to add yet another well deserved log to the bonfire of owner Donald Sterling's reputation.
Henry Abbott posted this story on ESPN.com early today. But I wanted to point out two things here. First, it was noble for the players to step up and help their assistant coach when they had the means to do so. And secondly, the contrast between how the Clipper organization handled this situation and how the Lakers handled the Ronny Turiaf situation back in 2005.
Recently, Ronny Turiaf shared his experience when asked about Wes Leonard, the basketball player from Fennville (Mich.) High School who died last week.
On July 16, 2005, with no prior symptoms or related family medical history, Turiaf was diagnosed with an enlarged aortic root. The discovery came during a routine checkup while he was playing on the Los Angeles Lakers' summer league team. Alongside Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak and assistant GM Ronnie Lester, Turiaf met with doctors, who gave him two options.
"They said, 'Ronny, you are lucky to be here today; you could have died at any point,'" Turiaf recalled. "[They said,] 'We have two choices for you: Choice A, either you stop playing basketball and can't do any contact sports, and you have to take medicine for the rest of your life. Or you have the surgery done.'
Turiaf choose to go with the surgery. Even though the Lakers voided his newly signed contract for health issues, they paid for the heart surgery and the treatment to get him back on the court. If you follow the Lakers for any amount of time you know that Turiaf returned to the court and was able to play basketball again. He played well enough that in the summer of 2008, the Golden State Warriors signed him to a four-year, $17 million contract.
Is it a wonder why one organization is Champs and the other Chumps? The Clippers are not cursed, they just have a cheap owner who lacks compassion. I hope Blake Griffin remembers this when he’s a free agent in the summer of 2014.
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