Remembering Manny Antwi and other Sacramento-area athletes who died young
Every so often, a young man comes along in sports, and he radiates goodness.
He changes lives. He dazzles with charm and athletic ability, with leadership and scholastic achievement. He fires up a locker room, anchors a team and sometimes a campus. And then, too often, they’re gone.
Just as they were getting ready for the rest of their lives, theirs ends. Suddenly and without warning, leaving a wake of sadness and anguish that doesn’t go away for those who remember them.
We lost one of those March 19 when Emmanuel “Manny” Antwi collapsed on his Kennedy High School sideline in Greenhaven during a game, having played his best football game, having given it every ounce of his 300-pound frame. There were no red flags, no signs of distress. Antwi died at UC Davis Medical Center, the cause undetermined. There is an autopsy, though results can take months. The family fears a heart issue.
I didn’t know Manny, but I found out who he was in talking to his coaches, teammates and family. He wasn’t a tragic figure. He was a real person, as funny as he was kind, a good student, a good teammate, a big brother, a doting son to his single-mom, Diana. He passed his physical to play football. He enjoyed playing center, snapping the ball, being a leader, being involved. Everything seemed fine.
“We want players here in our program to strive to be better, to improve, to care, and Manny was the definition of that,” Kennedy coach Brian Lewis said. “We will feel Manny’s loss forever.”
The tragic loss is a reminder of other regional players who died while competing or in season.
Claus Atkins, Grant High School, 1979
Atkins was the Grant Pacers basketball team captain, a 6-foot-2 senior forward, and he was everybody’s friend on campus. Coaches liked his work ethic and teachers appreciated how he involved everyone in class discussions.
Atkins and the Pacers played in the Anderson Tournament, near Redding, just before Christmas of the 1979-80 season. Exhibiting no signs of trouble that day, Atkins collapsed in the bleachers some 30 minutes after his team played. Team trainers were able to get him to resume breathing twice while waiting for rescue units to arrive. He died at a nearby hospital within the hour.
Atkins’ parents, Arthy and Loretta “Bessie,” urged the Pacers to play the final night of the holiday tournament because their son would have wanted them to. They did. Grant that same day lowered its American flag on campus to half staff and suspended classes. Mike Alberghini, the baseball coach then and still the school’s football coach, told the student body in a packed gym of the sad news.
At the funeral services in an overflow church in Sacramento, six Grant players served as pallbearers. Each wore their Pacers team warm-ups. Atkins was buried in his. An autopsy revealed Atkins had an enlarged heart.
It’s been 42 years and this still pains Steve Williams, Grant’s basketball coach then. He thought of Atkins when he read up on Antwi of Kennedy.
“After all these years, it all comes back,” Williams said. “It’s so sad to lose such a great young man, so full of life, with so much to look forward to, at such a young age. Claus was the same type of young man (as Manny), such a special kid, loved by everyone, in a class by himself, as an outstanding student/athlete and someone who others gravitated to.
“This all brings out so many emotions and takes us on an emotional roller-coaster ride and reminds all of us that there are no guarantees — a bittersweet pill for sure, to lose someone who represented so much good and had such a bright. Doesn’t really seem fair does it?”
Leon Richardson, UC Davis, 1981
Richardson was a San Francisco native, the student-body president at Balboa High, a star at City College of San Francisco and the team captain for UC Davis his senior basketball season of 1981-82.
A 6-foot-5 guard, Richardson was the first player introduced for the Aggies for a December home game against College of Notre Dame of San Mateo County. Richardson was not his usual active self as the game wore on, leading UCD coach Bob Hamilton to wonder during the game, “What’s wrong with Leon?”
Richardson told teammates that day and evening that he felt sluggish, with heavy legs, that his chest hurt, and he wondered if it was from staying up late and consuming so much coffee for finals as a psychology major. When the ball rolled through his legs during the game and he barely moved, Hamilton pulled him.
A moment later, seated on the bench, Richardson slumped to the floor. Doctor Paul Donald bolted out of the stands to assist and give CPR. Richardson was wheeled off the floor on a stretcher, though medics stopped at midcourt to continue mouth-to-mouth. They were losing him. The game was canceled.
“I’ll never forget Leon’s mother, down the hall at the hospital, in hysterics, just devastated,” Bob Dunning of the Davis Enterprise recalled to me this week. “She lost her son. It was the saddest thing. I don’t think Coach Ham ever got over it.”
He did not. Hamilton told me years later, “You never recover from something so tragic like that. You feel so sad, so hopeless, in losing such a good young man.”
An autopsy determined that Richardson died of an enlarged and diseased heart.
John Bloomfield, Sacramento State, 2012
Bloomfield grew up in the Bay Area and spent his teenage years in Del Paso Heights, where he was a key figure on Grant’s 2008 CIF State championship football team, the first in regional history to do so. Bloomfield so cherished his state-title ring that he was buried with it, in 2012.
His mother, Stella, invited me to visit her at Mercy Hospital to share his story and her grief of standing vigil over her dying son. By this time, Bloomfield was a 6-foot-2, 240-pound linebacker for Sacramento State, closing in on his degree, and strikingly reduced to a hospital bed, hooked to tubes and wires.
One of Bloomfield’s lungs collapsed following a season-opening game at New Mexico State, at an altitude of 4,000 feet. One surgery led to two, then three. There were complications and internal bleeding, and then he lapsed into a coma.
Said Stella then, holding her son’s hand, weeping, “As you mother, you can’t do this alone. We have to decide this weekend when to take John off life support. He’ll be in God’s hands then. This is something a mother should not have to do.”
The mother had one final plea of her son as she slowly stroked John’s face and his shock of hair that matched hers, “Please come back for just a moment, John, wake up and say one last thing before you, go, please.”
She knew the message would have been mutual: Goodbye.
Bloomfield died days later. His jersey No. 42 is retired by Sac State.
This story was originally published March 29, 2021 at 7:58 AM.