When the call came from his old friend Terry Reed, Jim Robarts heard the only explanation that made sense for the sudden and stunning death last week of his former player, at 36.

“His heart finally gave out,” Reed said of his son, Neil, who was treated for arrhythmia as a high school player in the early 1990s, or about the time that potential time bomb of a condition cost Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis his life.

Neil Reed played two years of high school basketball in Bloomington, Ind., becoming a devotee of the Indiana coaching legend, Bob Knight, before moving to Metairie, La., a New Orleans suburb, and suiting up for Robarts at East Jefferson High.

Terry Reed, also a coach, had joined the staff of the University of New Orleans, and wanted his son to play for Robarts, whom he had met while coaching scholastically in Alexandria, La., before the family’s temporary move to Indiana. The two hoops junkies had connected at the 1992 Final Four in Minneapolis, sharing a room, and watching Knight’s Hoosiers fall to Duke in the semifinals.

Neil Reed joined Robarts’ highly regarded and predominately African-American team the next fall, Robarts having the notion of that being an unspoken reason Terry Reed wanted his son, a white and slender guard, to play for him, preparing for Division I challenges ahead.

“Neil came with a lot of fanfare, and I was actually concerned about how he was going to fit in,” Robarts said in a telephone interview. “To his credit, and the other kids, too, he fit beautifully. He was relaxed, easygoing, except for when he played basketball. He was the kind of kid who worked and worked, who always asked for the key to the gym on the weekend.”

That is what Knight discovered when Neil Reed chose him over Rick Pitino and Kentucky, believing that Knight would never leave Indiana — or be asked to leave — no matter how much his critics complained about his trademark behavioral eruptions.

Weeks before his high school graduation, Neil Reed was in New York City to play in the McDonald’s All-American Game and explained to a reporter why anyone with a multitude of options would get within arm’s length of Knight.

“I’ve seen what it’s like with my own eyes,” he said. “I lived in Bloomington. I’ve been to Coach Knight’s practices. That stuff is always being blown out of proportion.”

Knight, he said, surely hadn’t meant to kick his son, Pat, having missed his real target, a chair. Nor had he intentionally head-butted another player, Sherron Wilkerson, the contact accidental.

Reed quickly became a Knight favorite, running hard, playing hurt. “We’re not tough enough at any position on our team, except for Neil Reed,” Knight said in what sounded like the beginning of a beautiful player-coach relationship, which lasted from 1994 to 1997. Except Knight’s reputation was finally costing him blue-chippers, and while the Hoosiers continued to pile up regular-season victories, they began to get picked off early in the NCAA tournament.

Knight would not stand for failure, nor was it ever his fault. By the end of Reed’s junior year, he was in Knight’s office, with two teammates, being told he had no future at IU and might as well transfer. It apparently was not enough for Knight that Reed did move on. Knight wanted people to know that Reed had been told to go, and trotted out a couple of his younger players to question Reed’s character, kicking him on the way out.

The Reed family responded by saying that Knight had abused Neil mentally and physically. It took three years, in 2000, for the world to view the infamous video of Knight approaching Reed at a Hoosiers practice and snapping his head back with a firm grip of the neck.

And we wonder how in the world big-time college sports reached the level of moral decay at Paterno State? Even presented with the ugly, damning evidence, Indiana did not fire Knight, merely put him on zero tolerance alert, which he predictably violated soon after.

Meanwhile, Neil Reed finished his career at Southern Mississippi, but under the watchful eye of his father, who was an assistant to coach James Green.

“He was going through some emotional things, and I was not that involved, to be honest, because his dad was on the staff and Terry could play that dual role, coach and dad,” said Green, now at Jacksonville State in Alabama. “Under the circumstances, Neil did a terrific job for us, but you could tell that what had happened to him had been difficult.”

Through the years, Jim Robarts remained close to the Reed family, enough to know that Terry Reed, in addition to mourning, is grappling with cancer. Robarts’ daughter is also godmother to the children of Neil’s sister, Michelle. So it is with certainty that he said that the joy long ago went out of basketball for Neil Reed, who briefly played professionally abroad before moving on with his life — marrying, fathering two daughters, working the past five years teaching physical education and coaching various sports at a high school in Santa Maria, Calif.

“I think it really stayed with him,” Robarts said, in sad acknowledgment of how all of Indiana seemed to turn on Reed, how even last week’s reports — a player with all the figurative heart in the world dying much too young of a faulty one — identified Reed almost singularly as the player choked by a coach who had become or always was emotionally unfit.

And Knight? He is still widely celebrated, still preaching his version of the gospel on ESPN, unmoved to make some public statement of sorrow or remorse about that sad chapter of his life.

Robarts made a point of saying that he had heard only the Reed family’s side of the story — as if any student-athlete smart-mouthing or misbehaving would warrant a chokehold — but was inclined to say, “I’m just an old high school coach, but my humble opinion is that Bob Knight was a great coach, not a great person.”

In his small pond, Robarts still sees many former players at East Jefferson games or at a local movie theater. A handful — some of the players who ran with Neil Reed — called when they heard last week’s news, practically in tears.

“These were guys who hadn’t seen Neil in years but they all said they wished they could fly out to California for the service but, frankly, couldn’t afford it,” Robarts said. “That’s the kind of kid Neil was. That’s the kind of impact he had.”

He paused a moment and added, “It’s just so sad that people won’t remember him for that.”