Brooklyn Nets assistant coach and scout Jim Sann lurched forward and collapsed to the practice court on Sunday morning. His heart stopped, his pulse faded and they were losing him.

"I was on my way out," Sann said by phone Tuesday afternoon from his bed in a Northern New Jersey hospital. "I was gone."

Nets scout Jim Sann More

Sann is a fit, trim 46 years old, the father of a 9-year-old boy and 7-year-old girl who lost their mother to cancer three years ago. And of all places that Sann could've gone into cardiac arrest on Sunday, he had been blessed with good timing, good fortune and the presence of one of the best trainers in the NBA: the Nets' Tim Walsh.

Between CPR and a defibrillator, Walsh and his training staff brought Sann back to life. Sann awoke on his back unsure what had happened, only to see the trainers and coaches standing over him, and, yes, perhaps the surest sign he had returned to the living: "Kevin Garnett was yelling," Sann said.

For maybe a month, Sann had dismissed the chest pains brought on by a valve blockage as heartburn, popping Zantac and fooling himself with one of the oldest cons of middle-aged men in the morgue: "Other people have heart attacks," Sann told himself, "not me."

Sann is a workout fool. Every time he checks into the Marriott on the road, he goes directly to the exercise room and drives himself through a hard workout.

Sann hadn't been to a Nets practice in weeks, but he was eager to get on the floor with the players on Sunday morning. He had flown back from a scouting trip on the West Coast on Friday, watched the Nets-Raptors game in Brooklyn, spent Saturday with his kids and come through the Lincoln Tunnel on Sunday morning for practice in East Rutherford.

For Sann, practices still mean so much to him. He loves getting into the gym, getting on the floor with the players. As a scout, he doesn't get the chance often.

So Sunday morning, Sann felt his chest tightening again, popped another pill and thought it would just go away again. Only, it didn't this time. Only, his heart started to pound through his chest, and Sann wobbled over to the basketball stanchion in the Nets' practice facility. Now, the heart attack belonged to him. All those salads, all those workouts to that crazy Insanity DVD they sell on TV, and still Jim Sann had gone down, and gone down hard.

"I had warning signs for weeks that this was going to happen, and I was stupid about it," Sann told Yahoo Sports. "And my two kids were almost orphans because of that."

As much as anything, Sann wanted to talk on Tuesday because he wanted to get a message out there: Be smarter than him, and maybe save your own life.

Nets trainer Tim Walsh (above) helped revive Jim Sann with a defibrillator. (Getty Images) More

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