On April 27, 2020, Mark McNamara’s heart gave out as he stood outside a museum in Ely, Nevada. The long-retired NBA center, who began his eight-year career in 1982 as a first-round draft pick of the 76ers, died later that day at age 60.

Before his time, as the phrase goes.

I wrote recently for the website Liberty Ballers that McNamara was the last of six ex-Sixers big men to die of heart afflictions between 2011 and 2020, all of them 64 or younger. Another, Harvey Catchings, underwent a heart transplant in 2019, at the age of 67.

What sets McNamara apart is that he knew better than most that any time could be his time, having faced health problems most of his life. Twice while growing up in Northern California he was diagnosed with encephalitis. Later he suffered frequent bouts of pneumonia, which he would learn were due to a condition known as alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, a genetic disorder that impacts the immune system.

Then there were the heart problems. In a March 2019 phone interview – i.e., 13 months before his death – he told me he had been informed years earlier that his aortic root, the part of the aorta that connects to the heart, was enlarged. He underwent twice-yearly examinations at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and was told that if it grew too large, he would have to undergo surgery. Doing anything less would leave him at increased risk of an aortic dissection, which is often fatal.

Given all that, he had long before adopted a seize-the-day mentality – “not just seize the day,” he said, “but total gratification for every gift you’ve been given in life.”

In the course of his six decades he served as a Chewbacca stand-in in a Star Wars movie and a member of the ski patrol in his native state. He moved to Alaska, where for a time he lived in a yurt and a cabin accessible only by seaplane. He introduced himself to his Sixers teammates in part by imitating Elvis and according to his best friend sneaked out of the team hotel the night before a Finals game his rookie year.

“He wasn’t a lukewarm kind of person,” his sister Lauren McNamara, born two years before Mark, said in a phone interview from her San Francisco Bay Area home. “He was a completely all-in guy.”

She would alternately call him a “free spirit,” a “powerhouse” and a “mountain man” as well, while saying he was “eccentric … even though he was mainstream.” One is left to conclude that while his NBA career was unremarkable – he averaged 3.5 points and three rebounds in barely 10 minutes a night while playing for five teams over those eight seasons – the same could not be said of his life. In fact it serves as testament to something rock musician Warren Zevon told talk-show host David Letterman when Zevon was dying of cancer in October 2002 – that his diagnosis served as a reminder to “enjoy every sandwich.” (Zevon died less than a year later.)

Those who know Mark McNamara best say that’s how he approached things. He savored not only every sandwich but every morsel, every crumb.

“He was just a different soul,” said Keith Larsen, a coaching lifer for whom McNamara did some free-lance big-guy instruction, notably when Larsen was an assistant at Stanford. 

As McNamara said in that 2019 interview, “I was forced to learn that lesson that people have to learn about aging – that I don’t have the same body and tools I had when I was young. I was forced to learn that younger, and so it was tough.”

But not impossible. He said then that he lived “moment to moment,” that he was cognizant of the sand slipping through the hourglass.

“I’d like to consider myself someone who is not going to waste a lot of time,” he said.

A story: McNamara came to Philadelphia the same offseason in which the team acquired Moses Malone from Houston. Moses was, of course, an established star, well on his way to the Hall of Fame, while McNamara was a callow rookie. But they were similar in that they played the same position, and, tragically, would meet similar fates; Moses was one of the other ex-Sixers bigs to die of heart problems, in September 2015.

Malone was also 60 at the time of his death. Also before his time.

The first time the two of them met up in practice, Moses informed McNamara that he would never score against him. Not ever. While that did not prove to be literally true, McNamara dug the older man’s burn-the-boats approach. And certainly he had ample opportunity to watch Malone put that philosophy into practice. In 1982-83 McNamara barely played as Moses won one of the three MVP awards he was bestowed in his 21-year career and earned one of his six rebounding titles. He was also named Finals MVP, as the Sixers swept the Lakers (part of the near-fo’, fo’, fo’ run Malone quite possibly predicted).

“One of the main things I learned from him is, everything matters,” McNamara said. “Whether you’re a Buddhist monk or an NBA center, every moment matters. He didn’t sacrifice or give up any moment. They all mattered. He just went about working, whether he succeeded or failed. That’s the thing – – shoot, miss, get the rebound, shoot, miss — just continuous. Total focus. Total Buddhist focus in accomplishing the goal.”

The day of the Sixers championship parade, Ray Didinger, then a Daily News columnist, was building his piece around a play called That Championship Season, about the 20-year reunion of a title-winning high school team. In doing so, he asked various people associated with the Sixers what they thought the team’s principals would be doing two decades hence.

When he posed the question to McNamara about Malone, the rookie was locked and loaded.

“In 20 years?” he asked Didinger. “He’ll still be leading the NBA in rebounding.”

McNamara grew up in San Jose, the younger of two children born to an engineer and a home-maker-turned-tax preparer. Summers were spent at the family cabin on the Russian River, catching lizards, snakes and polliwogs while dodging wild boars. Winters were spent skiing in Tahoe. Family meals were, by Lauren’s recollection, raucous affairs, as the family was “super verbal” – Mark as much as anyone.

“We always used to joke that he should have been an attorney because he argued every single thing in the world,” she said. “He’d like to argue for the sake of argument.”

No surprise, then, that he also had a ready argument for those who believed his wider interests might detract from his budding basketball career – that in fact those things kept his mind fresh and sharpened his on-court focus.

“It didn’t hinder it,” he said. “It didn’t take away from it.”

He earned a scholarship to Santa Clara, where as a freshman one of his roommates was teammate Ted Whittington, who became a lifelong friend. But after two years McNamara transferred to Cal-Berkeley. He would earn a degree in Political Economics of Natural Resources – surely, no other NBA player has ever ventured down that path – and his senior season he led the Pac-10 in scoring, rebounding and field goal percentage, something only two UCLA legends, Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton, had done to that point.

That success did not translate to the NBA, after the Sixers made him the 22nd pick of the 1982 draft: As the 12th man on a 12-man team, he saw just 182 minutes of action over 36 regular-season games as a rookie, and two minutes in two playoff games.

It was an eventful time nonetheless. The summer before his first season the producers of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi were looking for someone of the stature of 7-3 actor Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca, to do stand-in work. McNamara’s cousin, Chris Bowers (a stand-in herself, for Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia), reportedly suggested Mark, whose listed height was 6-11. He earned the role, though he was unsure if any of his scenes made it into the final product, which was released in 1983. Two years later he also did stunt work for another 7-foot-plus actor, Carel Struycken, in a made-for-TV Star Wars spinoff called Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.

“We used to call ourselves at the end of the bench ‘scrubs,’ where it’s like you’re part of the team and you’re important to the team, but you’re still not the superstar,” McNamara told Foxsports in 2015. “And that’s pretty much exactly what I was. I was a scrub on the Star Wars team, but I was there, and it was a fabulous experience.”

When he joined his other team in training camp in Lancaster, Pa., he received the rough on-court baptismal from Malone, who was at the absolute height of his powers. And off the court, he and the other rookies were subject to the usual torment by the Sixers’ veterans. That included being required to sing at a team dinner.

The way fellow rookie Russ Schoene remembers it, he and McNamara had similar ideas: Just sing a song to which you know all the words. Schoene settled on Grand Funk Railroad’s “Some Kind of Wonderful,” but McNamara went the extra mile, slicking back his hair with whatever water remained in his glass, employing a fork as a mic and belting out an Elvis tune – either “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Hound Dog;” Schoene can’t remember which.

“But,” he added, “it was hilarious.”

And then there were the Finals.

A story: The Sixers won the first two games over the Lakers in Philadelphia, then headed to Los Angeles. Game Three was scheduled for the afternoon of May 29, a Sunday.

“And that’s the same weekend that I’m getting married,” said Whittington, now an attorney in Bakersfield, Calif.

The wedding was scheduled for Saturday in San Jose. His best man? Mark McNamara.

“So he sneaks out of the hotel in LA,” Whittington said, “catches a flight, comes out for my wedding to be my best man, comes to the reception for an hour, and he zips back to the airport.”

Whittington paused. His voice caught as he continued.

“I’ve told this story so many times,” he said. “Anyway, he did that, never got caught and got back to the hotel room.”

Billy Cunningham, the Sixers’ coach at the time, said recently he was not aware of McNamara’s gallivanting, but laughed at the thought of it. He also said he is eager to share the story with the players from the title team, as he stays in touch with many of them.

“Not one of them will be surprised,” he said.

The question is, what would Cunningham have done, had he found out all those years ago?

“I might have let him go, for the simple reason that Mark was not going to be a factor in the game,” he said. “From that standpoint, I might. I’m just not sure.”

Cunningham mulled the question a little more, and recalled how driven he was at the time — how the title run was nothing short of an Ahab-like quest. 

“Then again,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t have let him do anything, if I’m going to be consistent with everyone.”

As it was, McNamara actually played a garbage-time minute in the Sixers’ 111-94 victory the next day, dropping in both his shots and scoring four points, the only ones he scored in the playoffs that year.

The Sixers would win the title two days later. They haven’t won one since.

Before his second season, McNamara was traded to San Antonio, and early in his third the Spurs shipped him to the Kings, then based in Kansas City. That deal came on Dec. 11, 1984. Four days later, Philadelphia sent Marc Iavaroni – who, like McNamara, had been a rookie on the title team – to San Antonio.

There, Iavaroni inherited his former teammate’s apartment. Hanging on the wall, he said, was a painting depicting McNamara and his brown Porsche 911 … as well as the starship Enterprise, for reasons known only to McNamara. Iavaroni also recalled that a sombrero had been left in a closet.

“Mark,” he said, “was a beautiful guy.”

McNamara later spent a year in Italy, then returned to the Sixers in 1986, spending parts of two seasons there. He also played for the Lakers and Magic before closing out his career in Spain, in 1992.

He did some advance scouting for the Toronto Raptors after he was done playing, then drifted back to California and served in the ski patrol in the Sierras for a few years. As mentioned, he also instructed post players at various levels. That includes Robert Swift, a Bakersfield high schooler who was taken by Seattle at No. 12 overall in the 2004 draft (but could not overcome his own demons).

“He spoke the big-guy language,” Larsen said of McNamara.

But his health was always precarious, always top of mind. And it very much informed his decision to move to Alaska, a place he had visited and loved, in 2005.

“It was like, ‘OK, I better get up here before it’s too late,’ ” McNamara said in that 2019 interview. “I don’t know how much time I’ve got, so I want to do this.”

When he first arrived in Alaska, he lived in a campground outside the town of Haines, a town of 1,700 in the southeastern part of the state. Then he split his time between the yurt and the remote cabin. Finally he moved into town, where he worked as an assistant coach for the boys’ basketball team at the local high school – a team that won two state titles while he was on the staff – while editing nature documentaries.

He called Haines “uniquely eclectic,” in that 2019 interview – a little artsy, a little fishy, a little touristy. But it was not overrun, he said. It was not plagued by “the industrial-level tourism that some of the towns have.”

He would spend part of each year there, part at Whittington’s place in Bakersfield. And if he embraced Haines, the town certainly embraced him back. A school official said he had had “a very profound influence on our community” before McNamara delivered the commencement address at Haines High School in 2012.

McNamara, his hair gray, was wearing a black pullover shirt and khakis as he stood before the graduates in the school’s gym. He talked about the rewards of working with young people – how those who do so gain as much as they give. And he talked about challenges.

“Life’s going to throw you a lot of curveballs,” he said, “and it’s how you react to them.”

Ely is a city in the eastern part of Nevada, nearly four hours north of Las Vegas and five hours east of Reno. It is, in the words of the town’s tourism ambassador, Shadrach Robertson, a “hidden gem,” a place surrounded by surpassing natural beauty, and featuring a thriving cultural scene.

“I think we all represent more of what Nevada is truly about,” he said in a recent phone interview, “over the concrete jungles of Reno and Vegas.”

Fewer than 4,000 souls reside in Ely (pronounced “Ee-lee”), which in the distant past was a stagecoach stop and a copper-mining town. But Robertson said somewhere between 14,000 and 15,000 cars pass through town each day via one of the major highways that intersect there – U.S. Route 93, which runs north-south, and U.S. Route 50, which runs east-west and is known as “the loneliest road in America,” since it traverses so much desolate country.

For reasons that are unclear to those closest to him, McNamara wound up there in April 2020, after trying to drive from Whittington’s place in Bakersfield, where as always he had spent several months, back to Haines. The Canadian border was closed because of the pandemic, and according to Whittington, McNamara “didn’t really have a plan.” He somehow found himself in Ely, 15 hours south of the border, when the radiator went on his truck – an enormous, self-contained vehicle known as an Acela.

Lauren said Mark spent several days in Ely, sleeping in his truck as it was parked in a lot behind a repair shop while he awaited the delivery of a new radiator. Every now and then he would venture out, as was the case on April 27.

It was while he was outside the Nevada Northern Railway Museum that he was seen lying on the ground, apparently “having a cardiac event,” according to the sheriff’s report.

“Basically,” Lauren said, “his heart just burst.”

Rushed to the small medical center in town, there was discussion of flying him by helicopter to the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, but it was too late.

“Mark used to joke that he wouldn’t live to be 60,” Whittington said. “And he did, barely.”

Lauren will always remember her brother as the guy who during NBA offseasons loudly emceed a volleyball tournament in Santa Cruz called Earth Karma, which passed out an award to the MVD – Most Valuable Drunk. She will remember him blaring Talking Heads music at the raucous parties he hosted at his place in the Santa Cruz mountains. And she will remember that he was particularly content when he was living in a remote cabin while serving on the ski patrol.

“No one,” she said, “could have fit more into 60 years.”

Whittington recalls that his friend was opinionated, but not easy to box in.

“He used to call himself generally a conservative, with a liberal environmental overlay or something like that,” he said. “So it goes back to, he knew who he was.”

He also seemed to know where he was in life. Whittington said he had “a foreshadowing” about his friend while he was still in Bakersfield, shortly before he set out for Alaska in the spring of 2020. Specifically, Whittington feared that McNamara was not going to get good news when he went for his test at Cedars Sinai.

By Whittington’s recollection, he asked McNamara, “What are you gonna do if it’s a big number? Are you going to have the surgery? He basically said no. And I said, ‘Then why go? Why even have a number in your head floating around when you’re trying to enjoy the great beauty of Alaska?’ … So he didn’t.”

Gone before his time? Who can say? The only thing that can be said with certainty is that he made the most of the time he did have. That he enjoyed every sandwich.