Gondrezick suffers heart attack

Steve Carp

Wednesday, March 17, 1999 | 10:28 a.m.

On a day where the UNLV basketball program was dealing with bad news, there was another blow Tuesday afternoon.

Glen Gondrezick, the former UNLV star and the team's current broadcast analyst, suffered a heart attack.

Gondrezick, 43, had been suffering from chest pains since Saturday. He went to the doctor Tuesday and within mintutes was rushed to Summerlin Hospital where an angioplasty was done to clear the blockage in his left artery.

Gondrezick was resting comfortably in the hospital's intensive care unit and is expected to be there for at least the next three days.

"I'm very lucky," he said Tuesday night after undergoing the procedure, which took approximately four hours. "I was playing volleyball Saturday and I started feeling some pain in my chest and I was resting.

"At first, I thought I had a bad reaction to some grapes I had eaten. But when the pain didn't go away, I finally went to the doctor, and it's a good thing I did."

A member of the 1977 UNLV Final Four team and a six-year NBA veteran, Gondrezick recently concluded his seventh season at the mike for Rebel basketball broadcasts.

* SIMMONS GETS INVITE: There was one good piece of news to come out of the Thomas & Mack Center Tuesday. Senior forward Kevin Simmons has accepted an invitation to the NBA pre-draft camp in Portsmouth, Va., next month.

The 6-foot-8 senior co-captain said he plans to use the camp as an opportunity to display his skills and eventually join former teammates Keon Clark and Tyrone Nesby in the NBA.

* NO PITT: Assistant coach Greg Vetrone denied a report on the Internet that he was headed to Pittsburgh to join Ben Howland's staff.

"I don't know where that came from," he said. "No one has talked to me at Pitt about an opening. I've never talked to Ben Howland in my life."

There was also a report that Barry Rohrssen, the team's director of basketball operations, was a finalist for an opening on Bob Huggins' staff at Cincinnati. Rohrssen said he has not interviewed with the Bearcats.