Poison, they called his dad, and Scot Pollard shares the genetic code. This is a story about a former Indiana Pacers cult hero, yes, but also one about life and death, and the secrets of the human body. Some secrets we never learn, while others wait decades to come looking for us in the form of a cough, a sneeze, an echocardiogram.
Pollard knows more about the heart than he ever wanted to know, more than most non-cardiologists ever learn, because of what is happening to him now, and what happened to his father more than 30 years ago.
Pearl Icean Pollard Jr. was a basketball player whose hook shot was so dangerous – some of his schoolboy scoring records still stand, and he is in the Utah Hall of Fame – folks called him “Poison Pearl.” He was a 6-8 hammer, big and strong and sturdy, but his body carried a secret that went undiscovered until 1991. He was 54 years old when the truck he was driving for the city of Solana Beach, California, rolled gently through a stop sign and into a parking lot, where it came to rest against some parked cars.
Pearl was behind the wheel, buckled up, dead. His heart had stopped.
Cardiomyopathy, according to the autopsy.
“His heart was twice the size of normal,” Scot Pollard says, a beautiful thing to say of someone figuratively, but a death sentence in literal terms.
Pearl had caught a virus a year earlier, and doctors say that triggered the condition lying latent within his heart. Cardiomyopathy is one of those mystery afflictions, genetic in certain cases, a disease some of us have and never find out unless the wrong virus, the wrong trigger, comes along and shakes it loose. Some of us, the lucky ones, live and die without ever knowing about the poison in our DNA.
Pearl Pollard wasn’t so lucky, and in so many ways Scot Pollard is his father’s son: the height, the basketball ability, the drive to care for his family. Scot was the free-spirited Pacers big man from 2003-06 who painted his nails at Kansas, introduced funky hairdos to the NBA and in 2016 competed on season 32 of “Survivor.” Years ago, paying homage to his dad – “I’m proud to be my dad’s son,” he says – Scot Pollard had three words tattooed onto his back, three words that explain the player he was, the man he has become and the secret that hadn’t yet revealed itself.
Son of Poison, it says.
Too tired to talk on the phone
Talking on the phone wears him out.
Scot, who lives with his family in Carmel, Indiana, has been doing interviews for days, since he and his wife shared his condition on social media last week with pictures of Scot in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines. He’s home now, with phone calls coming from the heartland and both coasts – ESPN has floated the idea of a documentary – and he’s exhausted.
“He did an interview with someone in Sacramento,” says his wife, Dawn Pollard, “and he had to hang up two or three times to catch his breath.”
That was last Thursday, and by that evening Scot was so exhausted he couldn’t attend his son’s rec league basketball practice. Scot had been among the team’s coaches, but as his condition has worsened, he now goes only to speak to the team and watch, when he can.
Talking tires him out, and walking more than a few feet is impossible. That’s one of the things he misses most: long walks with Dawn. They’d go for an hour, sometimes talking the whole way, sometimes silent, but together always. Scot’s trying to remember how long it’s been since their last walk.
“Three years?” he’s asking Dawn, who says something in the background that has Scot chuckling sadly.
“That’s right,” he says. “After my second ablation I was feeling good. We walked down the street and back and I was like: ‘OK, I’m done.’ That was a year-and-a-half ago.”
Pollard had been monitoring his heart for years, the news always good, even as two of his five older siblings were diagnosed with heart failure and given pacemakers and defibrillators. As recently as January 2021 his heart was testing fine, but he caught a virus in March – not Covid, he says – that left him dizzy and gasping for breath. Another round of testing showed he was in heart failure, and the decline has been steady since.
“They’re pretty sure it’s a genetic thing the virus unlocked,” he says. “Same as my dad.”
Waiting for a heart
He’s waiting for a phone call that might never come. Scot Pollard knows the odds of getting a new heart, and he’s done what he can to avoid those odds, from three ablations to getting a pacemaker and defibrillator to medications doctors stopped prescribing years ago because the risk was bigger than the reward.
Down to one option – a heart transplant – he knows what has to happen somewhere else, to someone else.
“It’s an odd situation to sit here and ponder for an undetermined amount of time,” he says. “The surgeon here said it’s like winning the lottery. We might get lucky next week, next month, next year. It might be longer. It’s like Tom Petty says: The waiting is the hardest part.”
Pollard has run into the same problem as his old man, their size shrinking the donor pool. A body this big requires a heart accustomed to providing that kind of power – “I’m not getting a little old lady’s heart,” he says – so he needs a heart from a large man, 6-1 or 6-2 minimum, and his O-positive blood type isn’t helping. Given that organ demand always exceeds supply, having the most common blood type works against him, not for him.
Pollard is working on those odds by registering at three hospitals: Ascension St. Vincent in Indianapolis, and the hospitals at Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago. The more hospitals in the Midwest, the better.
“The donations go regionally,” he says, “and they’re not going to fly a heart anywhere. The heart won’t come to me – I have to go to the heart. Vanderbilt does more (heart transplants) than anyone in the country, and the range typically is a four-hour drive. They accepted me even though it’s five (hours to Nashville).
“I told them my wife will get me there in four if they give me the call.”
Unable to work and often too tired to leave home, Pollard spends most of his days in sweats and a hat around the house, cold from circulatory issues. A good day is television on the couch, a bad day one in bed; he needs back surgery from his playing career, but doctors aren’t sure his current heart could handle the stress. His two sons are in school and his wife is a realtor, leaving Scot at home a lot with Monkey, the family’s bald cat.
“He looks like Mr. Bigglesworth,” Scot says.
Mr. Bigglesworth is Dr. Evil’s pet cat in the “Austin Powers” movie franchise, and Pollard has dabbled in cinema himself. About a decade ago he helped write and produce “The Association,” a movie about life after the NBA that didn’t make it out of the Hollywood morass. Audiences will never get to see Pollard in the starring role, a player based loosely on his own experiences.
“The main character dies of heart failure,” Pollard says. “The player talks about his dad dying, and it turns out he has the same heart issue.”
Pollard pauses. Something has taken his breath, whether the talking or the subject itself. He is his father’s son, the son of Poison, right down to the artwork on his back, and he is pondering a decade-old piece of fiction about a man fighting for his life.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “life is imitating art.”
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.