Monday, February 01, 1999
Super Bowl coach amazes bypass patient
BY DANA DiFILIPPO
The Cincinnati Enquirer
On the field, the referee called the play. On the sideline, a vein pulsed in Dan Reeves' forehead as he disputed the call.
“Too stressed out,” Skeeter Payne said, shaking his head at the television as the Atlanta Falcons' coach grew more agitated during Super Bowl XXXIII.
It's been 12 years since Mr. Payne, 63, of Trenton (Butler County) had bypass surgery after a heart attack, but he vividly remembers the pain, exhaustion and shortness of breath that marked his months of recovery.
Sunday, he watched Mr. Reeves — back to work in football's biggest game of the year barely two months after undergoing a quadruple bypass surgery — with a mixture of amazement and admiration.
“It just shows you how much progress the medical profession has made in terms of correcting problems (associated with heart ailments),” said Mr. Payne, who worked at Middletown High School for 30 years coaching football, basketball, baseball, cross country and track, before becoming athletic director.
But Sandy Payne doesn't share his appreciation.
“I think he's a fool,” she said, as she alternately watched the game and played with her grandson. “He's crazy for putting himself, so soon after major surgery, back into the same environment that probably contributed to his problem.”
Sandy Payne remembers her husband's post-surgery anxiety about overexerting himself — an anxiety that led him to retire within days after returning to work in 1987.
Since then, doctors have sewed a defibrillator and pacemaker into his chest. Last July, he spent 141 days at University Hospital, awaiting, and finally receiving, a new heart.
Although he now swims and plays golf, his activities are far more limited than the days when he jogged to keep fit and worked sometimes as much as 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
His new heart requires long warm-ups before he can be physically active, a lesson he learned recently when he ran too quickly to plug a leak in his house's water pipes.
“I just couldn't catch my breath for the longest time,” he said, remembering his household sprint.
The couple hopes Mr. Reeves' high-profile heart problems will raise awareness about cardiac care and the need for frequent checkups — regardless of fitness or age.
Mr. Payne said he never saw his cardiac problems coming. He exercised several times a week, ate healthy foods and didn't smoke or drink alcohol. Chest pains and a family history of heart attacks prompted him to visit his doctor before his attack in 1986.
With February designated as Heart Month, Mr. Payne last week mailed educational fliers to neighbors and friends alerting them to the symptoms of cardiac problems and soliciting donations for the American Heart Association.
“People think they're invincible, that it won't happen to them because they take care of themselves,” Mr. Payne said. “I thought that, too.”
He's glad to be done with the parents' complaints, scheduling headaches, ticket-sale worries and gender equity concerns that dogged him as Middletown High School's athletic director.
Yet he misses coaching and working with students. And he still goes to root for the Middies as often as his health and schedule allow.
But he has no delusions that he could ever return to that kind of work.
“If Dan Reeves feels he can handle his health situation and do the job that he loves to do, that's great,” Mr. Payne said, before adding with a smile: “But then, he brings his cardiologist to the games with him.”
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