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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
A story of an umpire
never to forgetNO doubt, in your kid's Little League career, you have, at some point, at least once, come across an umpire who was inexplicably, undeniably, certifiably out of his mind.
Roy Koenig thanks you for your patience.
He needed to be out there far more than your kid needed that call at third base.
Far more.
"I don't know what I'd be doing today," he says. "I really don't."
It seems strange that umpiring could save a person. It seems strange that a man admittedly more than a little off would actually be out there, when perfectly sharp officials are accused of having brain damage all the time.
"It's like," says Western Athletic Conference umpire Don Greman, who mentored Koenig in those earliest days, " 'Hey, are you there?' And then after the game you'd realize, no, he wasn't there."
But it was a miracle, being on those basepaths. He needed it.
Being out there helped him find his way back.
A BUMP ON the head is what got him here. A car accident, a minor one. It should have been nothing. But it turned out some neurons were sheared on the frontal part of his head.
And that led to problems. "The primary problem," he says, "being that I couldn't remember 10 minutes at a time."
Or even 10 seconds at a time. Or, at first, for even one. Therapists would come to his house, hold up pictures, take them away and ask what he'd seen.
"Nice try," he'd say. Poof. It was already gone.
He'd mow half the lawn. Not quite take out the rubbish. Find himself in Aina Haina having to call his wife to ask her how he got there and where he was going.
His brain was damaged. "Memories of events that occurred prior to the injury usually are retained," the Brain Injury Association of America Web site says, "but new information and recent events may not be accessed easily.
"For individuals with brain injury, it can be overwhelming to try to maintain attention, make sense of information, integrate it and use it appropriately."
And so this was his new life.
"So, almost five years," Koenig says, "of oblivion."
It was something out of a Hollywood script.
As tragedy, "The Twilight Zone." As comedy, "50 First Dates."
You'd think it would be scary, living forever in the present, no memories from even a second ago. But not really, no. You see, it would only be scary if you could string together those series of unnerving incidents. If you could remember feeling that fear.
It was only as he got better that Koenig could even realize that everyone around him knew something was wrong -- very, very wrong.
"To me, everything seemed normal," he says. "To them, they knew that, man, this guy is whacked!"
He laughs at this. He can laugh at all of it now. Now that everything makes sense again. Now that he's found himself again.
"That was my fourth head injury," he says. "I had three prior head injuries in the Army. Motorcycle accident. Football injury. What was the other one?"
He laughs again. There are a million funny stories, now that he's safe.
THE FIRST TWO years were the toughest. Koenig once spent four hours thinking it was "10-to" because that was what it said on his digital watch. Four hours. Every time he looked at it, he had 10 minutes.
Most of us have done something like that. Most of us would have eventually noticed several hours passing. But every time Koenig looked at his watch, in his mind, in that moment, it was 10-to.
His wife, who stuck with him through it all, finally told him, "You're not driving anymore."
He couldn't work, of course. He was disabled. Unable.
He'd been a professor, a claims adjuster, a legal assistant, a registered nurse. He'd served in Vietnam. He'd played and coached baseball. Now, after the injury, he couldn't even catch one.
"I was afraid to read," he says. "Because I couldn't remember anything."
But finally, after five years -- psychologist, psychiatrist, specialist; brain wave work -- he could hold onto things from 10, sometimes 20 minutes before. There was hope.
"And finally one of the doctors said, 'You've got to do something that forces you to stay focused.' "
And then there was that brilliant, genius, wonderful idea, about umpiring.
Who would have thought that umpiring could save a life.
AN OLD FRIEND introduced him to the Pearl City Umpires Association. And these would be the men who would bring him back from the brink.
They took him in, even when he was terrible. He was lost at first, as anyone would be, even those of us with all our neurons. Only a couple of them, and Greman was one, knew he was there for therapy.
"We'd teach him something," Greman says, "and then he'd forget and we'd have to redo it and redo it and redo it." But Koenig never quit working at it. And so they never did, either.
"I did this for Little League," Koenig says, "because they're volunteers and they can't fire umpires. So I figure, OK, I'm going to go out there and make a fool of myself."
And he did.
In fact you can still hear the frustration -- all umpires are perfectionists, aren't they? -- in Greman's voice all these years later.
Koenig would suddenly "awaken" wondering, Wasn't there just somebody at second base a little while ago? His mentors would frantically signal him to move to the proper position.
Did coaches argue? Did people boo?
"I have no idea," Koenig says.
"They probably did. They probably did. And they probably called me all kinds of names in the book. But it didn't faze me, because I couldn't remember half the stuff that was going on out there."
He would study the rule book, study, study, study it, then put it down.
Gone.
But he kept studying. Working. Focusing. And there was the camaraderie, too. He was on a team again. He was doing something that mattered again. He was in baseball again. It was the best way to work.
Doctors, he says, "didn't see the change for about maybe 18 months. But I could gradually start seeing that things were -- man! I could start remembering things."
He was gradually coming home.
THAT CAR CRASH was in 1992. Twelve long years ago.
"Today," Greman says, "he's a good umpire."
Today it's a miracle.
Today he's the state chief of umpires for PONY baseball. He does high school and adult leagues and softball on the collegiate level.
Today he's himself again. He's back at work.
"Nobody would hire me," he says. "I had been out like seven years. 'What have you been doing for the last seven years?' 'Trying to remember my name.' "
So he's started his own business now, drawing on his experience in nursing and law and insurance and, now, of even having been a patient himself. He started his own business, "like an idiot," he says, but at last it is finally starting to take off.
The way his life, his health, his brain finally started to take off.
"I'm almost back to normal," he says. "Now anything that I forget now, that's age."
And he laughs at this. He can laugh at all of it now.
He's still out there, these days. Every weekend, all the time. He's an umpire now. He'll probably never stop.
And when he was a boy playing ball or a coach complaining about calls, could he have ever pictured that?
"Never. Never. Never. Never. I would never," he says.
But he's president now of the Pearl City Umpires Association, leader of those men who gave him his life back, head of this group that means so much. Elected president of the association he loves.
"They elect anybody," he says.
And he laughs again, at this, a laugh that is full of life. It is the laugh of a man who loves to laugh, and does so often.
It's the laugh of a man who's lived through a miracle, and come out the other side.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com