What disease did Reggie Lewis have?

Reggie Lewis was an American professional basketball player for the National Basketball Association’s Boston Celtics from 1987 to 1993.

Raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Lewis achieved his high school education at Dunbar High School, where he played basketball.

In his collegiate career, he committed to Northeastern University in Boston. Over his four years at Northeastern, Lewis scored 2,708 points, still the record at the university.

Lewis’s Northeastern teams won the ECAC North all four seasons and played in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament every year.

In the 1987 NBA draft, Lewis was selected in the first round in the 22nd overall by the Boston Celtics.

At the time, Celtics were looking to add some youth to the team, especially for the aging “Big 3” of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish.

Lewis was selected to play in his first and only NBA All-Star Game held in Orlando, Florida in 1992. He played 15 minutes, scoring 7 points and grabbing 4 rebounds.

On April 29, 1993, in Game 1 of the Celtics’ playoff series against the Charlotte Hornets, Lewis suddenly collapsed on the court and remained on the ground for several seconds.

What disease did Reggie Lewis have?

Autopsy results later confirm that Reggie Lewis had an enlarged heart, an inherited defect called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which produced an errant heart rhythm under exercise stress that led to his sudden death on July 27, 1993, during off-season practice at Brandeis University in Waltham.