Fred Hoiberg delivers good news of comeback victory to athletic director on the mend

Pardon Iowa State coach Fred Hoiberg for looking a tad spent after Thursday night’s 69-67 Big 12 quarterfinal victory against Texas at the Sprint Center. It’s been a long week.

On Monday, Cyclones athletic director Jamie Pollard suffered a heart attack while watching his daughter’s track meet in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Open-heart surgery on Tuesday and hours spent waiting and praying followed.

Of all people, Hoiberg could relate to what Pollard, 50, was going through. The Cyclones’ coach suffers from heart disease and has a pacemaker that just last summer required replacement.

Once this season ends, he’ll have a second open-heart procedure of his own.

Only after calling Pollard to check in after the game could Hoiberg exhale and share what his boss had said from his hospital bed in Des Moines.

“First of all, I told him, ‘I can’t believe you watched,’” Hoiberg said. “That’s one thing I forgot to tell him last night, when he was in ICU: I was going to tell him not to watch the game. Just too much stress.”

Stress, yes, but no chance Pollard wouldn’t be watching. What the athletic director saw was yet another double-digit comeback by a team that’s had its share of them this season.

“He obviously is proud of the guys,” Hoiberg said, looking relieved but drained. “He (wanted to) let them know it probably helped his recovery a little bit.”

So had Hoiberg been stressed during the game?

Not that he’d let on.

“I thought we were going to go down, but we’d go down swinging,” he said. “And then finally with about two minutes left we got the tempo going our way.”

This story was originally published March 12, 2015 at 10:39 PM with the headline "Fred Hoiberg delivers good news of comeback victory to athletic director on the mend."