Brent Warren overcomes aneurysm, heart surgery

Xavier's Brent Warren will play in the Aflac All-American Game on Saturday just eight months after having open heart surgery. Aflac

Brent Warren, the cardiac kid with the chicken-leg build, was running on empty, breathless from legging out a triple in a mid-April baseball game.

It was a Sunday afternoon at the Marion (Iowa) High baseball field last spring, and there was the 6-foot-4, 170-pound Warren, standing on third in the first inning with a stand-up triple. Rounding the bases like he was running for his life, he strode with his usual gracefulness, but soon enough a sudden shortness of breath caught up to him. "I was just so out of breath," Warren says. "I'm lucky I didn't have to slide."

Forgive Warren for not diving headfirst like Pete Rose to add a dramatic climax to his three-bagger. Just six months earlier, Warren, 17, was diagnosed with an aortic condition. Open-heart surgery followed and ostensibly ended his chances to continue on as major league baseball prospect, but after months of taking step-by-step, day-by-day precautions, Warren was going base-to-base following his first at-bat since the surgery. "I crouched down with my hands on my knees," says Warren, who will play in Saturday's Aflac All-American game in San Diego of his triple's aftermath. "I was so tired, yet so happy."

Late last October, after returning home to Robins, Iowa from the Wood Bat Games, an elite showcase for top baseball prospects, in Jupiter, Fla., Warren went to his doctor for a standard school sports participation physical. Expecting to cough once, kick his knees out and be given the usual green light to play basketball, Warren instead was informed by his doctor that his blood pressure, 170/40, was far above the normal 120/80. An EKG was immediately ordered, and the doctor came back with some bad news. Two heart defects were detected, including an aortic root aneurysm as well as a narrowing in the descending aorta and a malformed bicuspid aortic valve.

The diagnosis was not death, but his athletic career was in doubt. His worries were no longer growing as a player. Now he was concerned with staying alive. "My whole thing wasn't to play sports again," Warren says. "I just wanted to be able to stay alive and live normally."

Warren was first scheduled to have surgery at the University of Iowa, but then his family sought a second opinion. When put in contact with a Stanford University-based surgeon, he was referred to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. There, Dr. Thoralf Sundt performed the surgery, reconstructing and restoring the valve while staunching any further worsening of the aneurysm. "I couldn't get out of bed for a month," says Warren. "I would have to roll out of bed and I just had no strength. The muscle mass I developed from lifting before junior year was gone I just had to work back up."

With an eight inch scar running down his upper chest and three holes from the draining tubes that were put in him, the surgical incisions have left their indelible marks, but so has the outpouring of support. Shortly after the surgery, a letter arrived from one of Babe Ruth's granddaughters, who has since become a pen-pal buddy.

1 of 2