AMERCICA AT LARGE / GEORGE KIMBALL: His team was already trailing by the time Joey Harrington got on the field on Sunday afternoon. That has happened a lot in a season in which the Lions have won but three games, and little seemed out of the ordinary in the first Detroit possession.

Harrington handed off the ball for seven consecutive running plays, followed by an incomplete pass. On the next play, Harrington was dropping back to pass when he stumbled over one of his own blockers, full back Cory Schlesinger, and was sacked for a 10-yard loss before he could regain his footing. The Lions punted and their defence took to the field. A few moments later he approached Al Bellamy, the team's trainer, and reported that he felt dizzy and that his heart seemed to be racing out of control.

"Maybe you can check me on the next series," suggested Harrington, but Bellamy wisely overruled that. Prevailing on coach Marty Mornhinweg to ready back-up quarterback Mike McMahon, he held Harrington out of action and summoned Dr Keith Burch, the team physician.

Harrington's normal at-rest pulse rate is between 50 and 60 beats per minute. In the heat of competition, an athlete's heartbeat can race as high as 150. Harrington's arrhythmic heart rate, 280, was nearly double that figure. The rookie quarterback was transported by ambulance from Ford Field to Henry Ford Hospital, where he was held overnight in the cardiac intensive care unit. By Monday the episode had been diagnosed: Harrington had experienced supra-ventricular tachycardia, a not entirely uncommon condition.

The Lions' communiqué attempted to minimise the damage and risks involved, but did allow that Harrington would be held out of Detroit's final two games this year. Whether the team would have been so forthcoming, and whether the precautionary measure would have been taken, were the Lions 11-3 instead of 3-11 remains open to conjecture, but in any case, his season is over.

Joey Harrington is, of course, Padraig Harrington's only slightly less-famous second cousin, and while he wasn't exactly unknown in this country - one of the top collegiate performers in the US a year ago, his 10-story high portrait overlooked Times Square from a mural the week of the September 11th attacks in New York - he had carved out his own niche as one of the top performers from the draft class of '02.

The Lions selected the University of Oregon quarterback with the third pick in last April's draft, and any hope of easing him into the picture pretty much disappeared when Detroit, with McMahon at the helm, were crushed in their first two games.

If the Lions were going to lose, reckoned Mornhinweg, whose job was in some peril, they might as well lose while grooming their quarterback of the future. Harrington's statistical line (he completed 215 of 429 passes for 2,294 yards, threw for 12 touchdowns and had suffered 16 interceptions) might not have been all-pro stuff, but he was easily the NFL's top rookie quarterback, and was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated two months ago.

Just last April, Joey had followed Padraig Harrington around Augusta National during the third round of the Masters, but abandoned plans to introduce himself to his cousin when Padraig double-bogeyed the 18th hole.

A few months later when Joey signed a long-term contract with the Lions worth $40 million, Padraig had famously observed, "Now I'm not even the top sportsman in my own family!"

One reason Joey was able to recognise his symptoms is that his family has a history of arrhythmia. (His father has lived with a heartbeat irregularity for years, as has an uncle; since Padraig's relationship to Joey comes on the latter's paternal side it is unclear exactly what this might portend for his own susceptibility.)

Supra-ventricular tachycardia is apparently not unlike an electrical short-circuit. There is no blockage curtailing the flow of blood; the heart merely beats erratically at the wrong rate. For a 24-year-old man, the three most common forms of treatment would involve medication or a surgical procedure called a catheter ablation, or, in extreme cases, a pacemaker implantation. The former is apparently not an option if Harrington intends to play football.

"Medication is pretty effective for the average person," explained Dr Brian Williamson, a Detroit cardiac electrophysiologist, to Detroit News sportswriter Mike O'Hara. "It's something an athlete can't use because it slows them down enough that they're not on their 'A' game."

Neither is a pacemaker an option in the case of a professional athlete - the presence of a foreign body would be vulnerable during collisions and also the athlete needs to be able to raise his heartbeat during periods of exertion.

Which leaves the catheter ablation, in which a catheter is threaded from the femoral artery to the heart. (The area with the arrhythmia is cauterised.)

"If (Harrington's) heart was actually beating at 280 per minute, it means he has an 'extra' tract or pathway that can conduct the electrochemical impulse that causes the ventricles to contract," explained another physician, Dr Kim Seeger. "Why the impulse switched to that alternative pathway during the game is unclear, but in people who have the extra tract or tracts it occasionally happens. It's the extra tract that is 'ablated' in a catheter ablation. The procedure is very effective when it works and has a considerable success rate," - supposedly 90 to 95 per cent.

Dr Williamson told O'Hara that were Harrington to undergo the catheter ablation he would experience some bruising and discomfort in the area of his groin, but "he'd probably feel better than if he got sacked by Warren Sapp". The Lions, of course, insist Harrington's malady is not life-threatening, or even career-threatening.

"I have 100 per cent confidence he is going to be 100 per cent healthy here, very quickly," said Mornhinweg. "At least standing here right now, I don't think it will limit him even a few weeks from now, but I'm typically pretty optimistic."

Optimistic? Put it this way: he's not out of the woods yet, but you still have to like the odds of Joey Harrington quarterbacking next year's Lions better than Marty Mornhinweg's chances of coaching them.