Cedric Ceballos, an 11-year NBA veteran and former All-Star for the Los Angeles Lakers, has been in a hospital ICU battling COVID for over a week. The 53-year-old tweeted out a photo of himself Tuesday resting in a hospital bed while attached to a respirator. “I am asking all family and friends for your prayers and well wishes for my recovery,” wrote Ceballos, who famously donned a blindfold for his winning dunk at the 1992 Slam Dunk Contest in Orlando. “If I have done anything to you in the past, allow me to publicly apologize. My fight is not done.”
Many in the NBA community reached out to share words of encouragement including Ceballos’ former Suns teammate Steve Nash.
Ceballos, who led the league in field-goal percentage in 1993 (57.6 percent), has encountered health issues before, undergoing an angioplasty after suffering multiple heart attacks in 2011. Since retiring from the NBA, Ceballos has worked as a morning radio host in Phoenix, an in-arena MC for Suns home games and a studio analyst for Mavericks pre and post-game coverage on Fox Sports Southwest. He also competed with former teammate Shawn Marion in Season 30 of The Amazing Race, ultimately finishing ninth.
Over 40 million confirmed cases and 600,000 deaths have been reported nationwide since the COVID pandemic first reached the United States in 2020. The virus appeared to be under control in most areas of the country earlier this summer, but that’s changed with many recent COVID cases attributed to the “Delta” variant. Our thoughts and prayers are with Ceballos and his family as well as anyone else who has been affected by the tragic events of COVID in the past 18 months.
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