Tom Gugliotta's Near-Death Experience

Tom Gugliotta, also known as Googs, is one of my favorite 1990s NBA players, and I think I know why. A while back, I was watching a rerun of the Vancouver Grizzlies’ first-ever home game back in 1995, which was a super exciting victory by the Grizzlies over the Minnesota Timberwolves. (There’s this awesome buzzer-beating tip-in in overtime by a guy named Chris King— definitely worth the watch.)

Googs was playing for the Wolves at the time, starting alongside Christian Laettner, so I must have subconsciously labeled him as the “good white guy” to Laettner’s “evil white guy.”

Gugliotta was selected 6th overall by the Washington Bullets out of NC State. He played for the Bullets for two full seasons, and then right after the beginning of his third season in Washington, he was sent to the Golden State Warriors for Chris Webber, who had just forced his way off of the Warriors after just one season due to a conflict with head coach Don Nelson. Just three months after Golden State acquired Gugliotta, they traded him to the Minnesota Timberwolves where he and Kevin Garnett were a really good 1-2 punch at the two forward spots for a few years.

Just to give you an idea of the caliber of player that Gugliotta was at his peak, in his lone all-star season, 1997, he averaged 20.6 points, 8.7 rebounds, 4.1 assists (3.6 turnovers), 1.6 steals, and 1.1 blocks per game. He shot about the same amount of long 2s as he took shots at the rim and was pretty efficient from those spots, but he was never a good 3-point shooter. So, he was solid, for sure, but had some flaws.

But his biggest flaw was that he was allergic to the bag. Gugliotta left about $26 million on the table to leave the Minnesota Timberwolves for the Phoenix Suns in free agency after the lockout in 1999, in large part due to how tired he was of hearing Wolves starting point guard Stephon Marbury talk about how much he wanted to be a New York Knick and how annoying it was that Kevin Garnett was the star and the highest-paid player on the team.

There’s a New York Post article I found that is so candid and funny in comparison to today’s basketball media landscape. One of the reasons I love reading articles from before the advent of social media and especially before the year 2000 is because some of these guys will just say anything on the record. Gugliotta rips into Marbury in this article.

Let’s jump to December 17th, 1999. Gugliotta had been playing for Phoenix for parts of two seasons at the point. The Suns were 15-7 and had gotten a new head coach, Scott Skiles, just days beforehand because Danny Ainge stepped down as head coach.

Ainge’s resignation was completely out of nowhere for most people. There were rumors that Jerry Colangelo forced him out or that Ainge was frustrated with the way the Suns were playing— something that Jason Kidd felt was the real reason— or that Scott Skiles had done a move that I like to call “The J.B. Bickerstaff” where you go behind the head coach’s back and undermine him and then you become the head coach, but Ainge maintains that one of his teenage sons told him he was becoming too distant and that he and his siblings wanted Danny to be at home more. He’d been missing holidays and major milestones, especially in his younger kids’ lives, which made him realize that at this moment, his family needed him more than the Suns did.

“I love coaching,” said Ainge, “but anybody can coach. My wife has just one husband and my children have just one father. Some of you may think I’m jumping ship, well I’m diving overboard to save my family.”

Even with the abrupt coaching change, the Suns hadn’t skipped a beat in the transition to Skiles, who had been the lead assistant and was described in the Arizona Republic as “the bad cop to Ainge’s good cop.”

On the night of the 17th, the Suns won a road game against the Portland Trail Blazers to move up to the 5th seed in the Western Conference. After the game, the Suns got on the team bus to head to the airport to get back to Phoenix for their game against the Sacramento Kings the next night.

Leading up to that game, Gugliotta had said he had had trouble sleeping after games, only getting to sleep at around 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. He complained about that to a friend from high school, who told Gugliotta about a supplement he’d heard could help.

This supplement was sold under a lot of different names (including but not limited to ReActive, Verve, SomatoPro, Blue Nitro, Regenerize, Zen, Rejuv@Nite, Ultradiol, Enliven, N-force, Liquid Gold, Soma Solutions, Amino Flex, Dormir, and Rest-Q), but they were all the same substance, something called furanone di-hydro. Furanone di-hydro is an organic compound known as a gamma Butyrolactone, abbreviated as GBL. Once it is ingested, the human body transforms the GBL into a GHB— a date rape drug.

So these substances that were marketed to Gugliotta’s friend as a sleep supplement and were marketed more heavily as a strength enhancer, the latter of which made it semi-popular among bodybuilders and wrestlers, were actually something that sleazy guys slip into women’s drinks at parties.

That’s terrifying.

But what’s more terrifying is that it was perfectly legal for these companies to sell and market this dangerous substance in a number of different ways with absolutely no evidence backing up their claims of it being a natural, herbal sleep supplement because this substance, according to the Council for Responsible Nutrition, was found in trace amounts in some nuts and some melons.

That’s true more broadly as well, but this specific compound wasn’t banned because it wasn’t the date rape drug— it was something that sometimes turned into it. GHB was banned by FDA, but its precursor was not.

These companies were allowed to do that thanks to DSHEA, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which weakened the FDA’s ability to regulate supplements. That act allowed manufacturers to sell whatever they wanted without the same FDA approval that drugs require (if they were able to make their substance meet other requirements) because dietary supplements were deemed to be food instead of a drug. The result was, as Gugliotta said, these “supplements” didn’t have to undergo the clinical trials and peer-reviewed research proving them safe or effective to get on the market like a prescription drug would need, and in order to be taken off the market, they had to be proven unsafe— with numerous or at least notable cases of severe bodily harm or death causally linked to the supplement.

(You can thank a bipartisan effort in the Senate for DSHEA.)

Gugliotta’s friend, not having heard the news of date rapes and a handful of deaths at the hands of this particular supplement within the previous year, not having heard about the FDA reaching out to the manufacturers and advising them to voluntarily recall the product (which they did not do), bought a bottle and sent it to Gugliotta.

The first time Gugliotta took the supplement, it worked like a charm, so after the win over the Blazers, he took it again, hopped on the bus, and called his wife. While they were on the phone, Gugliotta said that he began to feel like there was electricity coursing through his body. Then he started to hear a humming noise grow louder and louder. Then his face started twitching. Then he started to feel sick.

His wife said that Gugliotta eventually just started babbling, all the while getting quieter and quieter. Gugliotta says that with his last ounce of consciousness, he tried to end the call so his wife wouldn’t be scared but he dropped the phone as his head rolled back. The sound of Gugliotta dropping his phone onto the bus floor and his abnormal posture alerted his teammates to what was happening. Toby Bailey, a rookie guard on the Suns, rushed to Gugliotta and called for strength and conditioning coach Robin Pound.

Bailey and Pound started calling for an ambulance. The bus was still right outside of Portland’s Rose Garden, so the EMTs and the Trail Blazers’ team doctor were able to get onto the bus quickly and begin treating him. As he was being loaded into the ambulance, he began to have a seizure, and on the way to the hospital, he stopped breathing.

As Gugliotta notes in an article he wrote for ESPN The Magazine, because he seized up and stopped breathing, he was very lucky that he took the supplement when he was about to get on a bus surrounded by his teammates instead of on the airplane.

If they’d been on the plane and weren’t able to hook him up to a respirator relatively quickly, he may have died right there on the plane.

If they’d been going to a different road game and he took the supplement alone in the hotel room, he likely would have been found dead in his hotel room the next morning.

But because he was surrounded by his teammates and close to the EMTs, he lived.

Another thing that helped Gugliotta out was some quick thinking by his wife: he’d been on the phone with his wife, Nikki, and she heard the commotion that ensued and the calls for an ambulance. When she heard that, she called her friend, Rex Chapman’s wife. Chapman and Gugliotta had been teammates in Washington and now were reunited in Phoenix, so Chapman was on the bus with Gugliotta.

A game of Telephone broke out. Nikki Gugliotta called Rex Chapman’s wife and told her to tell Chapman that Tom had taken the supplement and that it was in his bag somewhere. Chapman got the phone call from his wife, and relayed the information to the EMTs. They rifled through his bag, found it, and once Gugliotta got to the hospital, the doctors were able to counteract that substance and save his life.

But it didn’t end there. His road to recovery took a couple of weeks. He was on the respirator for a few hours, completely unresponsive to any external stimulus. Gugliotta had multiple spinal taps performed on him to check him for meningitis, which he didn’t have, but those multiple spinal taps gave him a headache that persisted throughout his recovery. (The headaches were what kept him out of games in the end.)

13 days later, on December 30th, Gugliotta was cleared and he returned to play on January 4th against the Charlotte Hornets. Gugliotta said that his first game back was really rough because he was in a lot of pain and was out of shape. He missed all but one of his shots but grabbed 10 rebounds in 16 minutes of playing time. It took him a while to round back into form, but he had a good February and was really turning it on in March until he, unfortunately, tore the ACL and MCL in his left knee and was never the same after that. (He was 30 years old when he blew out his knee, but that certainly exacerbated his decline.)

Gugliotta returned after eight months and play parts of four more seasons in Phoenix, but his performance in that time was pretty lacking. His playing time was halved and he was no longer a starting-quality player. He went from averaging 15 points and 8 rebounds on league average or better efficiency to 5 points and 4 rebounds on below-average shooting. That’s unfortunate, but he was alive, and that’s what was important.

Right when he returned to the court, Gugliotta said, “I’m hoping something good can come out of this other than my recovery. If anybody is even thinking about this stuff, furanone di-hydro, there is no way the positives— if there even are any— can outweigh what can happen.”

Something good did come out of it. The FDA was able to directly link furanone di-hydro to 19 cases of people who had either had a seizure or gone into a coma immediately after taking it, as well as 6 deaths. Then, in 2002, a Justice Department survey of emergency departments in 22 major US cities turned up just over 11,000 ER visits with mentions of furanone di-hydro from 1994-2000. It’s now been classified as a Schedule 1 controlled substance. As of 2021, only three manufacturers have DEA clearance to produce it, and in order to purchase it, you have to have DEA clearance as well. Its use for human consumption has been regulated out and now it’s primarily used as an ingredient in tire and rim cleaner, among other cleaning solutions.

Yes, you read that right— 25 years ago, the stuff you can pick up at AutoZone today was going into people’s bodies.