NICOLE MILLER/Daily Bruin Staff
Ryan Rasmussen takes a minute with his wife
Nicole, who is expecting their baby.
By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
[email protected]
The ringing in Ryan Rasmussen’s left ear is persistent,
never pausing for a beat of silence.
Once it came, it never left. And it never will.
Rasmussen hears it during all hours of the day.
He hears it when he goes to class. When he kisses his wife. When
he goes to the bathroom.
The sound will overlap with the cries of a baby, when his first
child is born six months from now.
The ringing, a byproduct of a ruptured eardrum, serves as a
remembrance of things past ““ actually, of a thing past, of a
specific at-bat in the fall of 2000 that nearly ended his baseball
career.
Perhaps it’s the call of sanity, telling the UCLA second
baseman to stop playing baseball, to completely eliminate the
possibility of getting hit in the head again and having to endure
what he did last year.
But Rasmussen, now a 25-year-old senior, has learned to ignore
the sound and forget about the fury that left a river of blood
flowing out of his helmet during one of the Bruins’ fall
practices last season.
He’s overcome any feeling of trepidation he had of facing
a hard thrower and he’s now hitting better than he has his
entire life.
He’s batting .343 this season, third highest among
UCLA’s regular players.
“There’s still ringing right this second,”
Rasmussen said. “It’s like a concert. It’s really
loud.”
But he can deal with it.
He dealt with losing almost all of the 2001 campaign, his first
year at UCLA since transferring from Riverside Community College.
After Rasmussen recovered from ear surgery last season, he returned
to the field, only to find himself too scared to hit with any
efficiency. The ringing in his ear continually reminded him of the
potential danger he faced each time he walked to the plate.
“I told him to forget about it,” head coach Gary
Adams said. “However, there was a big problem. He hears it
all the time. How could he forget about it when you hear a bell
ringing in your ear all the time?”
Hitting .135 in 12 games, Rasmussen called it quits for the
year.
He was dejected.
He asked himself, “Why me?”
He asked himself the question over and over again for the next
week.
Then, one day…
“I realized nothing is really that bad in my life,”
Rasmussen said.
Suffering, he realized, was not what he was experiencing. He had
seen real suffering. It was what he had seen in the impoverished
villages of Chile during his two-year Mormon mission that ended in
1999.
How bad was his life, anyway?
God was watching over him. He didn’t question that.
Rasmussen’s father, who had multiple sclerosis, still had
enough energy to travel from Chino Hills to Westwood with his
mother to watch him play.
He had reunited with high school sweetheart, Nicole, whom he now
considers much more than a pretty face.
There was no reason for Rasmussen to feel sorry for himself. He
had it all, it seemed, with the exception of baseball ““ and
that was only a game.
“(The injury) got me back to my foundation,”
Rasmussen said. “I couldn’t rely on baseball anymore. I
had to rely on my family, my faith. Looking back, I never had a
reason to complain.”
Rasmussen married Nicole last June and planned his return to
collegiate baseball.
At the suggestion of his coaches, he started out by playing in a
Sunday beer league in San Bernardino the following summer. There,
he rarely saw a pitch over 70 miles per hour. He still heard the
ringing, but there was no longer a need to back away from the
plate.
When Rasmussen returned to UCLA this past fall, however, the
ringing bothered him at times.
“A few times in practice when it got dark, I would think
about it,” he said. “When all of the elements that were
there that day I got hit came back together, the thoughts of it
would creep in.”
But getting hit by a pitch was the least of Rasmussen’s
concerns.
Aside from being ribbed by his teammates about his advanced age,
Rasmussen was preoccupied with reconstructing his swing.
Hitting coach Vince Beringhele noticed that Rasmussen had a
habit of straightening out his front leg as he moved his bat across
the plate. This caused him to uppercut and swing for the stars,
much the way Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox does. Rasmussen,
however, was not blessed with Ramirez’s bat speed or power.
The result: plenty of flyballs.
To fix the problem, Beringhele forced Rasmussen to hit with a
tightened knee brace on his left leg.
“I had questions if he could make his swing work at this
level,” Beringhele said. “But he continued to work
hard. He made it work.”
“He’s one of those guys you have to respect a
lot,” Bruin designated hitter Adam Berry said. “He goes
about things the right way, especially mentally.”
It has all worked out for Rasmussen, which might explain how he
can speak of last year’s incident so nonchalantly. It is no
longer a ghoulish story; it is now a story of triumph, one which he
is almost proud to tell.
Smiling, Rasmussen recalls today that the pitch that nailed him,
for all the damage it did, hardly had anything on it. It was a
curveball that didn’t break, thrown by a pitcher who wound up
getting cut from the team, traveling at less than 70 miles per
hour.
Rasmussen somehow didn’t see the ball and it cracked him
on the helmet right over his left ear. Rasmussen hit the ground and
was suddenly surrounded in a world of darkness. When he regained
his sight (and, presumably, his consciousness), he saw Adams
hovering over him
“Did you see stars? Did you see stars?” Adams asked
jokingly, thinking such a slow pitch could not have done Rasmussen
any harm.
Rasmussen blinked.
“Did you see stars? Did you see stars?”
Adams was still chirping away.
Today, Rasmussen laughs at the memory, thinking of how much
worse it could have been.
He could not have woken up. He could not have lived to marry
Nicole, who is now three months pregnant. He could not have lived
to see his parents, his teammates or Gary Adams.