Oklahoma City Thunder forward Keyontae Johnson promotes CPR, AED education for high schoolers

Keyontae Johnson could relate to the teenage ballers he spoke to earlier this week.

When the Oklahoma City Thunder forward was still in high school, he wouldn’t want to sit in on boring CPR training. Back then, Johnson had no worries in the world. He would eventually become a starter for the Florida Gators, so why would he need to think about how to help someone breathe or get a heart screening?

That was before Johnson suffered a cardiac arrest in 2020 in the middle of a regular-season game against Florida State and collapsed. He was placed in a three-day, medically induced coma.

After such a traumatic experience, Johnson had advice for those high schoolers that had nothing to do with a crossover or follow-through.

“I feel like if I was alerted back then, in high school,” Johnson said of lifesaving maneuvers, “that I would’ve took it more serious.”

As part of the National Basketball Players Association’s Top 100 camp for elite-level boys’ high school basketball players that runs through Thursday at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, participants were educated on hands-only CPR training and the use of automated external defibrillators in cardiac emergencies.

A cardiac emergency is any sudden, life-threatening disruption of normal heart function. There are different cardiac emergencies, with the most well known being heart failure, heart attack, and cardiac arrest, when the heart stops working and halts breathing.

When a cardiac arrest happens in a hospital, patients have about a 25% chance of survival. But for athletes, they’re most likely to be outside of a hospital when a cardiac arrest occurs, and survival rates plummet to about 10%. This is mostly attributed to the lack of CPR education and the absence of automated external defibrillators, which are devices used to send an electric shock to restart heart rhythm.

An American Heart Association study found that only 18% of adults are “currently trained” in CPR, and a separate JAMA Internal Medicine Journal study found that bystanders use defibrillators in less than 20% of cases where they could provide lifesaving care in the event of a cardiac arrest. That’s the difference between life and death. The association says that 90% of people who suffer cardiac arrest survive if they’re defibrillated within the first minute of arrest.

After Johnson collapsed back in 2020, Florida’s athletic trainer administered CPR before Johnson was taken to the hospital, where he spent three days in the coma. Johnson was later diagnosed with athlete’s heart syndrome, or athlete’s heart, a condition that increases cardiac mass in the heart.

Johnson missed the next 1½ seasons before transferring to Kansas State for the 2022-23 season, where he was voted the 2023 Big 12 Newcomer of the Year. Before the 2023 NBA draft, Johnson was cleared by the NBA’s Fitness to Play panel and was later selected in the second round by the Thunder.

In an informal discussion with the camp invitees, Johnson explained his experience of cardiac arrest while at Florida, and he emphasized the importance of maneuvers like the ones that saved his life.

“It’s really important,” Johnson said, “because you never know when it’s your time when it happens.”

Any case of an athlete suffering a cardiac arrest causes Johnson to flash back to his cardiac arrest. In July 2023, then-USC guard Bronny James, the son of Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James, suffered cardiac arrest during a Trojans practice. On June 6, Kansas City Chiefs defensive end BJ Thompson suffered a seizure and went into cardiac arrest while in a special teams meeting at the Chiefs’ practice facility. James eventually recovered and played 25 games for the Trojans this past season. Thompson was discharged from the hospital Tuesday after six days.

“When I [saw] that,” Johnson said of the news about James, “it was heartbreaking.” Afterward, Johnson reached out to James to offer support and to recommend his cardiologist.

Johnson, who appeared in nine games for the Thunder this season, still gets checkups every six months to check the health of his heart, which includes bloodwork, an ultrasound and breathing tests. He also launched The Key to My Heart Foundation in 2023 to provide heart screenings and donate automated external defibrillators to communities that lack the lifesaving resources for cardiac emergencies.

“Just trying to alert kids at the early age as much as possible before going to college and finding out in the NBA,” Johnson said.

Thus, the heart association partners with organizations like the NBPA and others to increase education on lifesaving maneuvers. Since more than 70% of NBA players are Black, it’s especially important to get this information to those communities: Black Americans are more likely to both suffer and die from cardiac arrest than white people.

Comilla Sasson, vice president for health science and health care business solutions at the heart association, cited four reasons for the higher rates of cardiac arrest in the Black community: lack of early recognition of cardiac emergencies, lack of CPR education, less access to automated external defibrillators and overall distrust of the health care system.

“If you had a person who had a cardiac arrest in a primarily white, affluent neighborhood, their likelihood of having CPR performed was 55%,” Sasson said. “If you had that same person drop in a lower income, primarily African American neighborhood, your likelihood of having CPR performed was 35%.”

That isn’t to say Black people are unwilling to learn how to save themselves from cardiac emergencies. It’s that they lack the resources in their communities to teach them the lifesaving techniques. Johnson didn’t receive a heart screening until he enrolled at Florida and didn’t receive CPR training until he transferred to Kansas State in 2022.

For the heart association, that means offering more training and resources in these communities, not to mention placing more automated external defibrillators in public areas. The organization also pushes to require CPR training as a graduation requirement for high school students. Forty-three states currently require the training.

“We’re focusing on communities and trying to make sure that we’re getting into neighborhoods where people don’t normally have access to CPR training,” Sasson said.