252, Tribune staff reporter
When Jimmy Collins blacked out for a few seconds after leaping up from the Illinois-Chicago basketball team’s bench against Penn on Dec. 21 to protest a referee’s call, he was concerned. When things went dark and woozy again as he cheered a Jermaine Dailey dunk, he worried more.
And when Collins blacked out a third time, as he checked into a Memphis hotel at the end of the same road trip, he said, “Oh, wow.”
That was the beginning of a three-month ordeal that threatened Collins’ life, required eight hours of surgery on an aortic aneurysm, removed the coach from the UIC bench for the rest of the season, cost him 26 pounds off his 6-foot-2-inch frame and nearly drove the 11-year Flames coach into retirement.
Briefly, Collins, 59, wondered if he would die.
“I was that sick,” he said Monday in his UIC office, speaking of his trials for the first time. “At the very beginning, when I first got sick, there was a possibility I wouldn’t come back. There were a lot of people who did not think I was coming back.”
Collins, who said he didn’t decide to return to the Flames until the end of the regular season, has been at work for about two weeks and has been out recruiting part of the time for a team set to return most of its key players.
“I’m doing fine,” Collins said. “I’m starting to get some strength back.”
Collins absorbed 12 1/2 hours of tests at the UIC Medical Center on Dec. 23, and doctors told him if he had spent another day going through his regular work routine, the aneurysm might have exploded near his abdomen and killed him. They told him being in good shape — he ran 4 or 5 miles daily — helped him.
Collins was ordered to rest over Christmas and New Year’s and underwent surgery Jan. 3. Then he began an arduous recovery.
At first he couldn’t walk up the stairs in his home. Mostly, he slept, read the Bible, checked out basketball publications, watched the college basketball season unfold on television instead of in person, read the sports pages about his Flames and listened to their games on the radio.
Other than fatigue, Collins exhibited no signs of illness before the blackouts, although friends told him he was losing weight.
“I was so drained, and everybody was telling me that,” Collins said.
He was truly frightened after the battery of tests because of a pounding in his stomach.
“I knew it was serious because I could see it pulsing,” he said.
Collins has been a fixture on the Illinois basketball scene since 1983, first as a longtime assistant at Illinois and then as head coach at UIC. But he turned over operation of the Flames to associate head coach Mark Coomes for the rest of a tumultuous 14-18 season.
After his four-day hospital stay, Collins went into home lockdown for most of three months but for about 10 days in early January he and Coomes, his 11-year assistant, conversed by telephone about the team’s fortunes. Following UIC’s upset of Loyola on Jan. 13, however, Collins let go.
“Eventually, he said do what I think is best,” Coomes said. “When he first got his operation, he was as weak as a kitten. I missed Jimmy being the head coach a lot. I was not prepared mentally. That took an adjustment for me.”
A bizarre stretch of problems ensued that neither coach had ever witnessed in a single season. Assistant coach Lynn Mitchem was charged with sexual contact with a player in a case that is still in litigation, two players quit the team, one became ineligible because of grades, one was suspended and others were hurt.
UIC suited up only seven players in one game, including two walk-ons.
“There was a cloud [over the team],” Collins said.
In a continuation of the Flames’ misfortunes, first-team Horizon League forward Othyus Jeffers is doing well after being shot in the left leg attempting to intervene in a domestic dispute Friday.
Out of public view, Collins felt weak all of the time, and fell into a depression at home. He was buoyed when friends called and was touched that former player Martell Bailey, who completed his career with the Flames in 2004, telephoned about five times a week.
“Five or 10 minutes at a time,” said Bailey, 24, who was working out with current UIC players Monday and is back in school finishing his degree. “I didn’t want to stay on too long. I was worried. These were very serious issues. I was praying he could get up to full strength.”
Making things worse, Collins’ brother, Maurice, 50, died of a heart attack in St. Louis and Collins made a painful journey — physically and emotionally — to the funeral.
Another steady contact was Collins’ boss, UIC athletic director James Schmidt, who several weeks after the surgery met with Collins and discussed his coaching future.
“There was definitely some question whether he was coming back,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt said he was “150 percent behind” Collins’ return as long as he was still enthusiastic about coaching. However, Schmidt was irked that roughly two-dozen coaches coveting an NCAA Division I job pounced on the rumor of Collins’ departure.
“I got resumes within two weeks of his sickness,” Schmidt said. “And agents for others calling. They circle like piranhas.”
Schmidt said he is happy Collins is back at work and feels he will restore “some normalcy” after last season’s peculiar run.
“We want to get this train back up on the tracks,” he said.
Even when Collins questioned making a return, his wife, Hettie, said, “Oh, you’ll be back.”
She was right. Collins is back, working full-time, talking one-on-one with returning lettermen and seeking two players for the 2007-08 season.
“You don’t cash in the chips,” he said. “You don’t quit.”
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lfreedman@tribune.com
