Sports

Tony Gonzales is well known for saving his team the Kansas City Chiefs and giving them the win they so desperately need. The Pro Bowl tight end is now known for not only being a sports hero - but also someone who saves lives when needed.

A Californian man says that Gonzales saved his life when he was choking. “Tony saved my life. There’s no doubt,” Ken Hunter, a shipping company manager from Hunntington Beach, California. “Tony came up behind me and gave me the Heimlich maneuver. Thank God he was there.”

At the time Gonzales was having dinner with his wife, brother, and his 5 week old daughter at Capone’s restaurant on Thursday night. Hunter - who was dining with his girlfriend - was sitting at the next table when he began to choke on his dinner.

“I tried to take a drink of water, but I couldn’t swallow,” Hunter said. “Then I couldn’t breathe. That’s a terrible feeling. I couldn’t breathe. Then I guess I started to panic.”

Gonzalez, sitting with his back to Hunter’s table, looked around when he heard Hunter’s companion yelling. “She was screaming, `He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe,”’ Gonzalez said by phone from California, where he lives in the offseason. “The whole restaurant was quiet. Nobody was doing anything.”

Then I saw he was turning blue. Everybody in the restaurant was just kind of sitting there wide-eyed.”

That’s when he began to do the Heimlich maneuver. “After just a few seconds, the piece of meat popped out,” Hunter said. “I could breathe again. It’s a good thing Tony is so tall because I had stood up— I think.”
Diana Martin, a restaurant employee, said no one else seemed to know what to do.

“He was so lucky Tony was there,” Martin said. “In a situation like that, every second counts. It helped a lot that Tony’s a big, strong guy because you have to be able to apply some pretty good pressure. I don’t think I would have been strong enough to help him.”

Hunter went into the restroom to clean up and didn’t realize he’d been saved by a famous athlete until he came out. “I’m a big NFL fan and I recognized him right away. I was still kind of dazed when I went over and thanked him and said, `What can I do for you?’ I guess I said it about 1,000 times.”

Gonzalez, who has been active in charity and community activities during a brilliant career with the Chiefs, said he had no intention of having the incident become public.

“The next night I had a dinner for my grandmother’s 90th birthday, and people were saying, `Why didn’t you tell me about that?’ I honestly don’t want to make a big deal out of it. But of course it does give me a lot of satisfaction to know that I was able to help somebody.”