Friday, March 11, 2005 | 9:46 a.m.
The Great
Ricky Morgan, UNLV
A junior guard from Pontiac, Mich., Morgan went 18-for-19 at the free-throw line Thursday in the Rebels' 70-63 victory against Wyoming in the Mountain West Conference tournament in Denver.
When it mattered most, he sank all 14 of his attempts in the final five minutes. He had entered the game having hit 60 percent of his freebies this season.
The Good
West Virginia
The Mountaineers (20-9) solidified a spot in the NCAA tournament by upending Boston College, the top seed in the Big East tournament, at Madison Square Garden on Thursday.
By splitting their past eight games, the Eagles have lost an abundance of luster with the NCAA's selection committee.
The Bad
Maryland
Losing to Clemson on Thursday for a third time this season should break a streak of 11 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances for the 16-12 Terrapins.
That was Maryland's fourth defeat in a row, and sixth in its previous seven games.
The Ugly
Adam Morrison, Gonzaga
No offense to the Zags' talented forward, but we wouldn't want to see him in a murky alley.
His look is some combination of "The Killer," the greasy character played by Andrew Robinson in "Dirty Harry," and Jim "Lizard King" Morrison.
Louis Amundson saw "MRSA" in large type just below the title of the two-week-old Sports Illustrated article and nodded.
Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.
Amundson rattled it off as if it were the name of a relative.
"It's so scary," he said. "It progressed so quickly. I think I stepped on something, got a little cut ... then they had to do a surgery to clean out all the infection, and if it got any worse they'd have to amputate my toe."
Three summers ago, Amundson went from somehow nicking the big toe on his left foot during a pick-up game in Boulder to nearly losing that digit during a week-long hospital stay.
"I thought it would just be an infection I'd have to deal with," he said. "But it just kept getting worse and worse. Quickly it goes from something that's hurting you to something that is seriously wrong."
In a three-page report on MRSA in the Feb. 28 edition of Sports Illustrated, a San Diego doctor called it an emerging epidemic.
It had been an infection confined mostly to hospitals, where patients contract it via compromised immune systems. Since about 2000, however, MRSA has been infecting the sports world at an alarming rate.
In the past two years, SI noted, Miami Dolphins linebacker Junior Seau and Cleveland Browns linebacker Ben Taylor have been hospitalized with MRSA infections.
Some San Francisco 49ers contracted it from St. Louis players when those two teams played each other, and Southern California and Georgia are among the college football programs that have had players experience MRSA outbreaks.
After undergoing surgery on his right knee 13 months ago, Iowa center Brian Ferentz nearly lost his right leg when a staph infection went undetected by doctors for two weeks.
Rashad Anderson, a guard who leads the Connecticut basketball team in scoring, was given medical clearance to return to his team Tuesday after missing the last seven games of the Huskies' regular season.
Anderson was hospitalized for two weeks in February after contracting a bacterial infection from a skin abscess.
Lycoming College wide receiver Ricky Lannetti died from an MRSA infection in December 2003, four days after first calling his mother to complain about nausea.
Amundson zipped through the SI article, all too familiar with its description of the infection and its statistics.
About a third of healthy people carry staph on their skin or in their noses, but conditions must be right for it go grow. It can adhere to a minor abrasion, and it can cause a more severe illness once it enters the bloodstream.
Antibiotics from the penicillin family can usually serve as treatment. But when a few bacteria survive the medicine, they can mutate into a more virulent strain that resists those drugs.
As part of its 2005 program to research and treat MRSA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has enlisted officials at approximately 300 U.S. hospitals to report data on health care-assisted infections.
Kyle Wilson, UNLV's director of athletic training, said he doesn't know of any other Rebels athlete who has contracted MRSA.
He has talked with Amundson about containing the highly contagious infection, and increased sanitary measures -- ensuring that shower stalls, restrooms and locker areas are regularly disinfected -- have been taken.
"You want to make sure they wear shower slippers and that they're not sharing towels, for example," Wilson said. "Unfortunately, athletes can get a lot of cuts or scrapes. Anytime they have a break in the skin, there's a chance of some sort of virus entering the system and causing infection.
"If they have an open wound, or cut or scrape, we want to make sure they report it and have it cleaned right away. Those are things we're constantly doing. When someone gets some kind of infection, we keep an extra watch on it."
Amundson went to a Boulder medical facility after that day of pick-up ball to treat his injured toe. He said he was given an antibiotic.
"But they didn't take a culture of it," he said. "They assumed it was a streptococcus, a regular strain. Then it just kept getting worse and worse. All of a sudden, I had flu-like symptoms. I had chills and was throwing up.
"I knew something was wrong."
Three days after those games in Boulder, he was back in that hospital. Medical personnel took a sample of the infected area and determined it was a staph infection.
"They had to operate to get all the infection out of there," Amundson said. "If it got into the bone, they were going to amputate my toe ... they took out half my toe."
He spent a week in a hospital bed as doctors sought the correct combination of antibiotics that would work, settling on four -- led by Vancomycin and Bactrim -- that saved Amundson's toe.
When he left the hospital, doctors had placed an IV tube, which would periodically feed Vancomycin into his system, on his left arm. He calls Vancomycin "Vanco" as if it's an old friend.
Amundson's mistake, he said, was initially walking around that facility with a bare left foot.
"That's where staph infections usually grow, because they're resistant to most antibiotics," Amundson said. "I'm assuming I had a normal infection, and walking around without a sock on my foot led to a staph infection."
A year later, it returned in his right thumb while the Rebels were preparing for the 2002-03 season. He immediately sought treatment at a hospital in Summerlin.
"I knew," he said. "It just started hurting. It can be a tiny little cut, that's enough to get it infected. There were no doubts that it was a staph infection and it was going to be something I'd have to clean out. It was something serious."
Serious enough to shelve him, as a medical redshirt, for the '02-03 season.
Both wounds required Amundson to clean and dress them on a daily basis, to ensure that bacteria was being killed so no strands could fester.
"The good thing is that, after that first infection, I know an infection is most likely staph and I won't have to be on antibiotics that won't work for me," Amundson said. "I know Vanco and Bactrim will work."
Earlier this season, a toe on his right foot became infected. He said he has been treating it with the same cocktail of antibiotics for nearly four months.
Amundson's stamina has waned in recent weeks, but he was able to start a Mountain West Conference tournament game in Denver on Thursday.
"When you're not in your season, there's not so much stress in your body," he said. "You don't get nicks or cuts. I've been careful with it. I make sure I take care of everything. The infections have not been contagious, as far as I know.
"No one really knows a whole lot about it. Very few infectious-disease doctors can give me a straight answer as to why I keep getting these and why I'm having such problems. They haven't gone away, and it's kinda scary."
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