P. Allen never issued a press release saying he had heart surgery. There was never an announcement from Vulcan. This seems to be the first we’ve heard of it.

Apparently JC caught wind of the situation and decided to make a column about it. Did PA save this very interesting fact and say, “I’m not going to make this public and save it so I can tell J Canzano at Blazers media day so he can write a column about it.” That’s possible I guess. It’s also possible that JC found out about it and then ran with it all the way to the presses.

The point is that usually personal medical issues are considered private. Sports is a little different because the performance of the athlete depends on their health and reporting on medical conditions is often done and is sometimes mandatory (the NFL injury report—Jets got fined for not disclosing Favre’s condition at end of last season). Sometimes reporting on the health of a player is supposed to be done (Dwight Jaynes saying Pritchard broke the law by telling ppl about Darius’ knee). But here, we’re not talking about a player, we’re talking about owner. Does the owner’s health affect the future of the franchise? Sure it does. But doesn’t the health of the owner of any business affect the future of it? Probably. Should we still respect peoples’ privacy when it comes to medical issues?

If PA went up to JC at practice and said, “Hey, get a load of this. I had surgery last summer . . . blah, blah, blah . . .” then PA obviously wanted JC to write about it or didn’t care. But if JC found out about it some other way and wrote the column, he was leveraging a “secret” about someone’s medical history to sell papers. That’s seems wrong to me. Maybe it isn’t, but I just want to respect peoples’ privacy more.