What Darcy and I were talking about, a tennis interlude.

An Ex-Tennis Star's Life, Full of Renewed Promise, Ends in a Grim Accident

By Susan Reed (October 3, 1994)

People Magizine

BEFORE ANDRE AGASSI, THE image-is everything kid from Las Vegas, there was Vitas Gerulaitis, the original flamboyant, leonine tennis star, who drove a yellow Rolls-Royce, partied at Studio 54, dated actresses and models and played in a rock band called Just One Kiss. "He was the No. 1 personality in the tennis world," recalls Eugene Scott, publisher of Tennis Week magazine and Gerulaitis's onetime manager. "He was like the Pied Piper. Everybody wanted to be around Vitas." And Vitas wanted to be around them, even when he might have been wiser to be more selective. In 1983 the party that had become Vitas's life was interrupted when he was named in a federal grand jury investigation into an alleged conspiracy to buy $20,000 worth of cocaine. Although Gerulaitis was not indicted, he knew his party image would never be fully erased.

So it was no surprise that when Gerulaitis, 40 and in apparent good health, was found dead in a Long Island guest cottage Sept. 18, a stunned tennis world was quick to suspect that drugs were the cause. To Gerulaitis's wide circle of friends, his death seemed particularly poignant and tragic, since within the past two years he seemed to have put his drug habit behind him. After the death of his father, Vitas Sr., he had successfully completed a rehab program in Houston run by pro basketball coach John Lucas, and had begun a successful career as a tennis analyst with ESPN and CBS.

The day before he died, Gerulaitis had flown from Seattle to Southampton, N.Y., to lend his name to a charity tennis clinic hosted by friends. Gerulaitis gave on-court pointers the next day, but was a no-show at a party that evening. His body was found the following day at a cottage on the estate of a friend, Martin Raynes. The cause of death was first given as a heart attack, which only fueled the speculation about drug use.

Then came a revelation that was, perhaps, even more shocking: An autopsy disclosed that Gerulaitis's blood contained lethally high levels of carbon monoxide, a deadly gas that police said had leaked from a faulty propane heating and air-conditioning system. Particularly insidious because it is odorless and colorless, carbon monoxide is the leading cause of poison deaths in the U.S., killing 5,000 people a year. Gerulaitis may simply have returned to the gas-filled cottage, been overcome by drowsiness and died.

The tragic death of Vitas Gerulaitis led New York City to institute a rule that all apartments must be furnished with a carbon moxide detector as well as a smoke alarm.