The Journey of A Thousand Miles

Put this in the Point of Personal Privilege File.

​I’ve written in the past of my cousin Andy Elisburg (his branch of the family spell it different, long story…), who is the Executive Vice-President and General Manager of the Miami Heat of the NBA.
 
A couple of days ago, Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote a terrific article about Andy.  It wasn’t a typical sports article though, and nothing that most readers would have remotely expected.  But it’s one that tells a fascinating story worth repeating here.  Normally, I’d just post a link to it, but I’m embedding the full thing below for two reasons – 1) I suspect that few people would click to go read a long article on my cousin and so posting it here is just easier, even if it’s unfair to the journalist and newspaper, and 2) for those who would click on the link, they wouldn’t be able to read it, because the newspaper is behind a paywall.

The article is very well-written, and builds the story slowly.  Adding unexpected twists and turns along the way.  And the payoff is a yowza.  But since it’s long (and deservedly so, for the full tale), I’m sure that most people who read it in the Sun-Sentinel are Miami Heat fans.  Which is not the case here.  So, I want to give at least a hint of what the article is about, though without giving away too much of the twists and turns.

Two passages seem appropriate.

One comes near the beginning –

“Moments later, after weeks of negotiating hospital hallways, Elisburg maneuvers into the usual spot he has held on draft night in his three-plus decades with the franchise.

“Aides are on hand. His blood pressure is regularly monitored. As the Heat’s No. 20 selection approaches, those numbers rise, not from the aggressive infection that led to these unusual circumstances, but because of the comfortably familiar stress of the situation.”

So, that should give you an idea that this isn’t a normal sports story. Though, in fairness, the headline of the article sort of does, too.  But it's too subtle. Really. Honest.

And then there’s a second passage that stands out, which should make that point even more clear --

“It started late last season, as the Heat were fighting for their postseason life, when something felt off for the Maryland native who has come to be respected as one of the NBA’s ultimate salary-cap savants.

“An infection that initially had sapped strength and mobility, suddenly had become life and death.”

The fact that this comes even before the halfway mark in the story (or before halftime, to put it in basketball terms) should give an additional idea that there are indeed twists and turns to the tale.

Among the many things that stand out to me is how upper management was so supportive of this.  The “Pat” referred to throughout is Pat Riley, the former Los Angeles Laker Hall of Famer, and now president of the Miami Heat.  And “Micky” and Nick” are the father and son owners of the team.

Anyway, here’s the article --

---

A life-altering offseason has Heat general manager learning to walk again as he helps run an NBA team
-- Ira Winderman, Sun-Sentinel, September 28, 2025

(That's Andy in the dark blue shirt and glasses.
​Draft night, June 20, 2025
photo courtesy of Miami Heat)

It is June 25, NBA draft day. The practice court at Kaseya Center in downtown Miami again has been set up as a makeshift war room. All of the Miami Heat brass is there: Micky Arison and Nick Arison from the ownership wing, Pat Riley and Adam Simon from the executive wing, Erik Spoelstra representing the coaching staff.

All the while, one floor below, a rented ambulance is pulling into the P1 parking garage, where players, coaches and executives typically enter in privacy.

Moments later, a gurney is rolled into the Heat locker room, with general manager Andy Elisburg then transferred by a nine-member medical team to a high-tech wheelchair.

With the transfer complete, a sense of normalcy washes over the 58-year-old executive.
“And the line I’ll never forget was from one of the therapy people, who said I looked happier coming to my office than most people do going to their houses,” Elisburg says months later.

Moments later, after weeks of negotiating hospital hallways, Elisburg maneuvers into the usual spot he has held on draft night in his three-plus decades with the franchise.

Aides are on hand. His blood pressure is regularly monitored. As the Heat’s No. 20 selection approaches, those numbers rise, not from the aggressive infection that led to these unusual circumstances, but because of the comfortably familiar stress of the situation.

Moments later, Nick Arison, the team’s CEO, ceremonially hands the phone to Elisburg, as has been tradition at such a moment. Elisburg informs the league that the Heat’s selection is Illinois guard Kasparas Jakucionis.

“When I was done giving the pick,” Elisburg says now, “I was able to reach over and hang up the phone. And the people in the back, all the therapists, and all the doctors were so excited, ‘He’s using his core! He’s using his core!’ Because, for me, I hadn’t had the ability. It was an effort to do that.”

Fulfillment envelops the room, as Riley offers congratulations to all involved.

Then, moments later, reality again for Elisburg, whose dramatic rise in the organization dates to his time as a media-relations assistant at the team’s founding 38 years ago. The curfew for Elisburg’s return to the Christine E. Lynn Rehabilitation Center has been set for 11:30 p.m.

Another transfer from souped-up wheelchair to gurney.

Back to the awaiting ambulance.

Making curfew now the goal.

“I was in my room by 11:15. So I made my curfew with 15 minutes to spare,” Elisburg says with a laugh.

•••

When the Heat open training camp Tuesday in Boca Raton at Florida Atlantic University, Elisburg plans to be in attendance.

How he gets there is not as important as how he got here, to this life-balance stage of the fight of his life.

It has been a monthslong journey that largely has come in typical Heat stealth. The organization is bent on keeping the main thing the main thing, so Elisburg over these past few months has mostly conducted business as usual, even when it has been anything but usual.

At times, Riley sat alongside on a hospital bed, briefcase opened as if at a staff meeting at 601 Biscayne Boulevard, not in Miami’s medical district. At other times, the Arisons have stressed time off, only to be met with spreadsheets, suggestions and, ultimately, the franchise’s biggest personnel move of the offseason, the cap-complex trade for Los Angeles Clippers forward Norman Powell.

“All my time at Lynn I only missed one rehab session, and that was when we agreed to the Norm trade that Monday morning at like 9:30. I had a 10 o’clock rehab session and I just looked at my therapist and said I’m not making it this morning,” Elisburg says with a pride unique to the situation. “But I also had a 2 o’clock session, so I pushed the trade call to 3:30.”

For weeks, months, a support system encouraged him, one that very much put Heat Culture and Heat Nation into capital letters. From the ownership branch to the executive suite to the coaching circle to the locker room to the business side, it was as if the entire organizational chart had visited at bedside. Beyond the Arisons, Riley and Spoelstra, other visitors included team executives Eric Woolworth, Sammy Schulman, Raquel Libman, Michael McCullough, the Heat broadcasters and former initial public-relations boss Mark Pray.

“In a hospital,” Elisburg says now from his office suite, “it’s very easy to feel isolated. And I never took it for granted that so many people were willing to come and wanted to come. At one point in time, we limited it to certain days, because I had to make my work phone calls.”

•••

It started late last season, as the Heat were fighting for their postseason life, when something felt off for the Maryland native who has come to be respected as one of the NBA’s ultimate salary-cap savants.

An infection that initially had sapped strength and mobility, suddenly had become life and death.

“We were playing against Memphis on the second night of a back-to-back, and I was exhausted.” Elisburg says, as he begins to retrace an offseason like no other. “I just felt extra exhausted. I canceled an appointment I had that day, and I said, ‘Let me just sleep in and go to the game.’ I went to the game that night. Before the game, I was feeling fine. I was out there for a while. And then I just felt really lousy.

“I called back to the trainers and said, ‘When the doctors get here, let me know. I need to see ’em.’ I just felt really, really run down. My best friend (former Heat executive and college classmate) Marjie Kates saw me and was like, ‘You look gray.’ ”

The vitals at the moment came back fine, but an infection was detected in his foot.
“I didn’t stay for the game that night, and I started on antibiotics. Anyone who knows me, knows me not staying for a game is a big deal.”

Days passed, with a return to better health, as the treatment with antibiotics continued.
“It seemed like it was under control.”

It was not — even as Elisburg continued with his work through the balance of the regular season, the play-in tournament and the playoffs.

•••
​
“The day after the season ended,” Elisburg says of April 29, “I woke up in the middle of the night, and thought I threw a muscle in my back, one of those ones you get up and suddenly you fall right back down in the bed. It was like someone stabbed me with an axe in the back.

“I’d pulled a muscle before, so I thought I’d pulled a muscle.

“I got some medicine for it, stayed in bed for a few days. It was bad enough that I didn’t come to the exit interviews.”

And got worse.

“Two or three days later, it seemed to be getting better — but it never got really better. And then, over the weekend, it started feeling worse. I was having a problem sleeping, I hadn’t been sleeping at all. I thought I wrenched my knee. And it was getting worse.”
Team physician Harlan Selesnick had scheduled a home visit for a few days later. In the interim, Marjie and the team trainers said it might be time to get to the hospital.

“Me being me, I said, ‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.’ ”

On the scheduled day of Selesnick’s visit, “I started getting out of bed, and my left leg didn’t work. . .  . which is probably as scared as I’ve been in my entire life.”

Upon ambulance arrival at Baptist Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables, “I was a whole lot sicker than I realized I was. That’s where they discovered I had an infection throughout my body — in my knee, in my back. My kidney numbers, my liver numbers, everything was up and elevated.

“There were people who were not quite sure I was going to come out of that.”
Amputation of part of his foot followed, “amid concerns about my vital organs,” since his kidneys were essentially at dialysis level.

Multiple surgeries ensued, “like five or six that wound up having to happen over the next week to 10 days.”

•••

Medically, the worst was over.

Now the work was about to begin, work unlike anything that had come before, even for someone who acknowledges far more time spent in the office than at home.

“Nothing is more important than your health. I’ve heard it a million times. I’ve said it a million times. And I’ve meant it every time I’ve said it and every time I heard it,” Elisburg says. ” But when you can’t walk, it’s amazing what those words mean.
“I want my life back.”

So even amid those grueling rehabilitation sessions, ones that are still ongoing — now he is able to take steps through parallel bars while under close supervision — there has been a work-life balance. The body may have failed, but the mind remained sharp — salary-cap sharp, luxury-tax sharp, player-personnel sharp.

“One of my procedures was happening the day of the lottery and got delayed and kept being delayed. And so it wound up happening during the lottery. So I get out of the operating room, I get to the recovery room that I’m awake, alert enough to bring my friends in to see me, and my first question is, ‘So who won the lottery?’ ”

The Dallas Mavericks won, from the lottery seed the Heat would have held had they not made the playoffs.

The moment was not lost on Elisburg, even in that post-surgical moment.

“I said, ‘Well, that’s going to be an interesting thing.’ ”

After three weeks at Doctor’s Hospital, the move was made to the rehab facility.

“I had basically been in a bed for a month without moving. At that point in time, it was enough of a challenge just to be able to move, to be able to sit. It took like six people to be able to get me up to be able to sit on the edge of my bed, and I’m in agony of every step of the way of it happening.”

It had become clear what the main thing actually was.

“Pat and Micky and Nick, from the first time I got sick, basically were,  ‘You don’t have to do anything. Do not worry about work. You need to worry about taking care of yourself and being healthy. We will cover whatever has to happen here. You worry about you.’ That was the first thing they said to me.”

But the work also helped pass the time.

“It was hard for me to sit in a hospital bed and sleep or watch TV,” Elisburg says. “And after a while, I said, ‘I’ve got to get something going.’ I started making some phone calls, started talking about the draft and trades and things of that nature.

“When I would talk to Pat and Nick, I’d say, ‘Hey, I’ve got some information.’ Initially, it was, ‘You worry about you.’ I was like, ‘I need to do this. I need something to get my mind going.’ And it went to now we started to have regularly scheduled meetings.

“There were times when Pat came over and we sat and just were talking, it was just there for support. And there were other times we had meetings and discussed what the next strategy would be. And we did it from my chair or my hospital bed. Mentally I was in a good place. Keeping things going with my mind was really good for me.”

•••

That normalcy allowed for a degree of business as usual. Many outside the organization were not aware of the situation.

“There are times I got calls from GMs during therapy sessions. Now, the old Andy Elisburg, he would have been in the lobby having a phone call if a GM called during therapy. Now, it was like, I’m doing my therapy, and when I get upstairs, I’ll return the phone call. I had to change my approach to, ‘I need to focus on me and my health now ahead of work.’ Which is, to anyone who’s known me for any number of years, was not me.”

There also was no masking the situation as he dealt with other NBA executives and agents.

“Usually you get to, ‘How you doing?’ I’d say, ‘Well, that’s an interesting question.’ I was pretty open with the people I know. I was fairly forthcoming.”
No, not necessarily business as usual, but work getting done, trades made, players signed, cap ledger squared.

•••

Back at his Miami condo since mid-July, with therapy on an outpatient basis, Elisburg is also again spending time at the office, again a fixture at the practice court during scrimmaging and informal player workouts.

The logistics getting to that practice court have been simplified since that draft-night visit, even as normalcy remains a work in progress, including the inability to get to Micky Arison’s Hall of Fame induction two weeks ago.

“That one hurt a lot, and I wound up with a little bit more infection in the foot. And I decided doing things crazy is one thing, doing stupid things is something else.

“I’m probably (doing) about 80% of what I’d been doing at this point in time in September.”

“I’m doing well. There’s still a lot of roads ahead,” Elisburg says. “I’m still dealing with some infections, I’m still dealing with pieces of it.

“There’s nothing at this point in time that has had anybody saying I can’t walk. So I’m viewing myself as getting back to my life.

“But I also can’t go without saying my incredible appreciation for my family and everybody at both Doctors Hospital and Lynn for what they did to save my life.

“I walked into Doctors Hospital a lot closer to not being around than I realized then, and realized later.

“The nurses and the doctors and the therapists and all the people at Lynn and what they did and what they’ve done on a daily basis to get me where it is, because Erik’s line is so true, it’s about getting 1% better every day.

“Marjie was there every day at the hospital. My parents were there often. In fact, my dad also had to go to Lynn for therapy, so my mom was going back and forth to both rooms.

“The care of all the doctors and all the nurses, all the therapists and all my home health aides are why I’m here today. Look, it’s unfair what happened to me and I can sit there and look at that. But I also look at it as, ‘Look, I’m the luckiest person in the world. I love my life.’
​
“I’m looking forward to the season and lucky that I do something that I have such a passion for and still am able to do it.”