A St. Louis Post-Dispatch beat writer is being credited with saving a man’s life before the Cardinals’ regular-season finale Sunday, performing CPR after the man collapsed in the visitor’s dugout.
Derrick Goold, lead Cardinals beat writer for the Post-Dispatch, was at Busch Stadium prior to Sunday’s game when a videographer collapsed in the Chicago dugout as media was gathering for what turned out to be the announcement that Joe Maddon would not be back as Cubs manager next season. The videographer, identified by reports as 64-year-old Mike Flanary, suffered a heart attack and stroke and was briefly without a pulse.
Somebody yelled out if anyone knew CPR, and Goold reportedly replied “I do” and began working on Flanary.
A former lifeguard and longtime Eagle Scout trained in CPR, Goold worked on Flanary until the Cubs’ training staff and medical personnel arrived. Flanary was transferred to a nearby hospital, where hospital officials said he was “critical but stable.”
Flanary was there working for NBC Sports Chicago, according to a tweet sent out Sunday afternoon by Kelly Crull, a reporter with the news station.
After the incident, Cardinals security director Phil Melcher was asked about the role Goold’s assistance played. “Huge,” Melcher told the Post-Dispatch’s Rick Hummel. “You cannot discount that, at all. I absolutely thanked him.”
“So many people are afraid of doing CPR,” said Washington University’s Dr. David Tan, the stadium doctor on duty at the time. “But, because of (Goold’s) actions, he was the first link in that chain of survival. It’s fabulous. It was the early CPR by Derrick Goold that probably saved his life.”
“In the medical field, when you save somebody like this, they call it a clinical save,” Tan continued. “This is a clinical save that was started by Derrick Goold. Period.”