Friday, April 13, 2001
Broken jaw, You might know the feeling. You're lucky if you don't. Shane Komine was so sick, he wanted to just get it over with and die.
unbroken spirit
Even a line drive to his face
By Kalani Simpson
couldn't slow down Kalani
alumnus Shane Komine,
Nebraska's ace
Star-BulletinThe heat was what got him. The heat almost knocked him over. It engulfed him. It tried to suffocate him.
The air conditioning had gone out, and his apartment was an oven, and now he was being roasted alive. Sweat poured down his face. He hurt and ached and throbbed. He felt like a dead dog.
Komine tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. Every time he turned on the TV, there he was, getting hit in the head with a line drive. There he was, getting his jaw broken by a screaming projectile. "They kept showing it," he said. Over and over again.
He was nauseous and dizzy. It hurt. It really did. His face was a mess. The walls were closing in. All of it was closing in.
"When I looked in the mirror," the Nebraska All-American pitcher said, "it was one of the worst things I'd ever seen."
And suddenly, baseball was just a game.
He was in an apartment in Lincoln, Neb., with a broken face and the temperature was approaching 100 degrees and he couldn't sleep and he couldn't eat. He could only lie there and endure. He just wanted to have his mom around. He just wanted to have his dad around. There was a titanium plate in his head, for goodness sake. He called Honolulu. "I just want to go home already," he said.
But of course you know that Shane Komine didn't go home.
He'd heard the bat. He'd heard that distinctive aluminum "ping!'' that a bat makes when it makes contact with the object of its desire. He'd seen the ball, too, coming right back at him like a rocket. It kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and he'd tried to get his glove up in front of it, to catch it, to stop it, to knock it down, something. Anything. But he couldn't, not in time. It was too late. It was on top of him. There was nothing he could do.
It hit him. It hit him full on. A baseball to the face. A broken jaw. When he moved his head, everything was loose, moving around. "My teeth were shaking," is how he remembers it.
Komine scrambled for the ball, the one that had bounced off his head. He grabbed it and threw the batter out at first base. He knew the jaw was broken. He knew it immediately. His mind was racing. Should he stay in? Could he stay in? The coaches decided for him, and when he saw the blood he knew that they were right. He would end up at University Hospital in Minneapolis for surgery.
"He looked like he had half a baseball coming out the side of his jaw," Butler coach Steve Harley told the Associated Press.
And that's when the questions started.
"Can he pitch?"
Well, yes, "Is Shane OK?" was asked too. Of course. But mostly, "Can he pitch? When can he pitch? Will he pitch? Couldn't he just wear some kind of helmet or something?" He was out for the season, that was easy to see. But ... But what if he went anyway?
Komine meant that much to the Nebraska baseball program and its fans. And the Huskers were on the brink of a possible College World Series berth. And the College World Series is held in Omaha, Neb., and they had never gone, and what a wonderful party that would be. But this, this was devastating. They were close, so close, and their Big 12 Player of the Year from Honolulu was the difference, and everybody in the state knew it.
Including him.
And yet lying there in that hot box of an apartment, at that moment, Komine didn't care.
Komine is a tough guy. Through his recovery, his mom said she never heard a complaint. Not one, not even when he was putting Subway sandwiches into a blender and slurping down his lunch. Not when he lost 20 pounds. Not when he had to put off eating his beloved garlic ahi.
When a baseball slammed into his face dead on, shattering his jaw into pieces, he picked up the ball, he got the out. When back problems limited his effectiveness and pained him to no end, Komine pitched through them. And won anyway. When a marginal baseball school on the frozen plains 4,000 miles away wanted him, Komine went, leaving his island home far behind.
And he helped turn the Huskers into champions.
Komine, a Kalani High grad, had been a locomotive for the Huskers, with a 94-mph fastball and a killer curve, and two or three other things in between. He had baffled the Big12 all year long. He pitched on Fridays in front of more and more fans every time out. He won games. He set records. The Huskers won the conference tournament for the second season in a row, won 50 games. They were in the NCAAs. They were on a roll. Komine was the ace, a national player of the year finalist.
He was working on a two-hitter, when it happened. More mastery. Twelve strikeouts through 713 innings, and then - bam! - every pitcher's nightmare.
The Huskers would hang on to a 2-1 win over Butler in their NCAA Regional opener. They would win their 2001 NCAA regional, held in Minneapolis. They would advance to face Stanford for the chance to go to the CWS.
The doctors said that maybe, just maybe, if he felt ready, Komine might be able to pitch against Stanford.
And an entire state waited.
The bus ride home was long and bumpy. It took more than six hours in all. In its final stretches, winding through the interstate highway through Omaha, fierce winds rocked the iron behemoth back and forth. "We thought the bus was almost going to tip over," Komine said. He sat there, through all this, on the bus, drugged and dazed and out of it. He was in pain. He was being jostled around, and he was in no shape for being jostled around. He was miserable.
Back in Nebraska, people kept asking questions. "Could Shane go? Might he be ready? Is there any chance?"
Then he hit the heat of his apartment, and the suffering of a sleepless night. "Sweat just started running down my face," he said. He wasn't ready. He wasn't anywhere close to ready. Playing baseball? Have any of these people been hit in the face?
The coach said there was no pressure. He wouldn't tell Shane what to do, he said. It would be all Shane's decision, he said. He said it in the newspapers. He said it on TV. Shane was probably out for the season, he said, but it's up to him. Soon, everyone in Nebraska knew that if Komine sat out, it was Komine who had made the call.
Sweltering in his apartment, he reluctantly made the call. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go home right now.
He had told his roommates he was fine, the way he does, so they had fled the apartment in search of air conditioning, leaving him to tough it out alone. "I made them promise to get a blender," his mom, Donna Komine, said. "But you know guys, yeah?"
They returned to find him in worse shape than they had thought, and looking to leave the team for Honolulu, and so soon hitting coach Mike Anderson was at Komine's bedside. "Just stick it out," Anderson was telling him. "Just stick it out."
Komine felt like hell, but maybe that was the worst of it. He made the trip to California.
And then the Huskers won their first game. They beat All-American Jason Young. They were one win away from the CWS, and they were going up against Punahou grad Justin Wayne, and the next morning Komine woke up and he felt "100 percent better." He told the coach, "I'm feeling good, I want to pitch." He was ready. He was ready to go back out there.
Eight days after suffering a devastating blow, Komine was on Stanford's fabled Sunken Diamond in the California sunshine, taking on Wayne, making it Hawaii's most meaningful college baseball game in a while. It was a miracle. "Just two island boys going at it," Komine said.
"That guy was unbelievable," Wayne would say later. Unbelievable. Perhaps the two best college pitchers in the country, both from Hawaii, one with an incredible comeback story. Komine had come back from the dead to play in the biggest game of his life.
"I mean the pressure that he had," Wayne said, "being their ace, to come back. And the fortitude to just push and drive and say, 'Coach, I want to be in there.' "
He needed to be in there, if there was any chance he could go. He couldn't wait. He couldn't afford to. He couldn't let fear set in. He couldn't allow it to fester, and grow. "I wanted to prove to myself," Komine said. "Then the whole summer I knew I was all right."
And so he pitched. He took the field, he faced the fear. It was one final conquest, an exclamation point at the end of the season. If it were a movie, the soundtrack as he took the field at Stanford would have been triumphant.
But it wasn't a movie.
He was still the ace, for a while. But then he tired, of course, and that's when Wayne had him. Stanford won game 3, too, and the Cardinal was on to Omaha. Looking back, the smart move may have been to save Komine for a day, to duck Wayne. But that's not what fairy tales are made of, the two decided when they met in Honolulu later that summer. It was special because they had faced each other. "The regional might not have meant as much," Wayne said, if there had been no Aloha State showdown.
Komine had no regrets. For the two of them, for baseball in Hawaii, nothing could have matched that moment. Months later, Komine glows at the memory, and now his smile is perfect.
Komine is a hero now. He's winning games, again, and took a 7-1 record and 3.96 ERA into today's game against Baylor.
The stadium, once they plowed the six inches of snow off of the outfield, is half full with season ticket holders alone. The Huskers (27-8, 10-3 Big 12) are putting in bids to host a regional, and the brand new jewel of a ballpark, the house that Komine helped build, is set to open in June.
His fastball is up to 96 now, he said. He's a leader this year, he calls player meetings. He became the Huskers' all-time strikeout leader earlier this year, to a standing ovation. Nebraska has been ranked anywhere up and down the top 10. The Cornhuskers and their faithful are openly talking about taking over Omaha, making it to the College World Series, making Rosenblatt Stadium a sea of red. "Coach says to do it, you have to talk about it," Komine said.
Komine is calm. Expectations are on him, he knows. He's a marked man this season. He acknowledges the pressure, but he doesn't seem concerned.
He knows baseball is the easy part.