IRVINE — You’ve got your who, what, when, where of a story, sure. But mostly it’s about solving for why.
And it can seem, when you try to wrap your mind around what happened to UC Irvine baseball player Will Bermudez in May 2019, like there’s no good answer. Doesn’t mean there isn’t.
The Anteater they call Willy B. plays like Pete Rose. All hustle, all the time. Teammates will tell you, no one’s jersey gets dirtier. No one puts his body on the line in quite the same fashion.
He’s 23 now, but Bermudez’s life changed profoundly when he was 17 and he suffered a brain injury in a collision with a teammate during a travel ball game. He’d been playing shortstop and chased a shallow pop fly into center field – and dove for it, because of course he did. A teammate who was also tracking the ball tried to leap over Bermudez to avoid him, but he accidentally kneed him in the back of the head.
In that moment and the moments that followed, Bermudez went from miffed that he missed the catch to calm when he realized he couldn’t feel his legs, or his coach pinching them, trying to provoke a response. “If this is how my life is supposed to go,” Bermudez remembers thinking, “it’s how it’s supposed to go.”
In the next few, elastic minutes, his calf and toes started “flickering” and he regained all of his movement. But then, a couple days later, he lost five years.
He woke up dumbfounded as to why the walls of his bedroom were painted closer to Dodger blue than the baby blue they’d been when he was a middle schooler. Why his dad, William, had aged overnight. And those shelves displaying the baseball gloves he’d started collecting? “I liked them, but I was like, ‘Whoa, what the heck is this?’”
Who was that young man staring back at him in the bathroom mirror?
His mom, Sandra, asked him to come to Starbucks with her and was weirded out when he asked her what he should order, and when he didn’t recognize their neighbor. She asked Will to stay in the car and went inside, because neither she nor William nor Will’s big brother, Jaymez, ever panicked in front of him. “You guys. He doesn’t remember!”
‘Why me?’
Will’s friends – who seemed like strangers – made picture books so they could teach him about himself, introduce him to the stellar student with the 4.6 GPA at Santa Fe Springs’ St. Paul High School and the baseball scholarship awaiting him at the Air Force Academy.
But it was hard to keep up, and Will started wondering: “Why?”
“Why is this happening to me?” he asked himself. ‘“What did I do wrong?’ In my mind, I’d always been helpful, always been good to people, like why is it happening to me? This is my new reality, but why? Like, really, why me?”
When the swelling in his brain subsided, his memory returned. But his easy proficiency in the classroom didn’t.
“I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, making planes, making jets,” he said. “And then when I got hurt, math was more challenging for me. Numbers didn’t flow as they used to … it was really, really weird. Growing up, math was just my thing. We would go to 7-Eleven and I would try to get the number of our change before the cash register.
“But after my injury, it didn’t flow as well.”
Just being in class was tough. He wore his Ray-Ban shades inside because the lights gave him headaches, and his classmates were suddenly so loud. He had trouble focusing, splitting up his class time into 10-minute increments buffered by five-minute walks alone outside. Eventually he asked his teachers – all of whom were happy to accommodate – if they’d share lesson plans before classes because he needed more time to absorb the material.
And then, just after returning from a religious retreat in the San Bernardino mountains, he had his first seizure.
That led to the diagnosis that changed his life: “Will,” his neurologist, Dr. Jasmine Dao, told him. “You have Myoclonic Juvenile Epilepsy.”
“I was just like, ‘OK, so what does this mean?’” he said. “And she’s like, ‘Well, you can’t do these things, blah, blah, blah.’ A bunch of things. A long list of things I couldn’t do. And then she said, ‘Last one, I have to say it legally, you can’t jump out of airplanes.’
“And I said, ‘That’s going to be a problem. I’m committed to the Air Force Academy, I have to do that for my training.’
“And she’s like, ‘Well, you can’t.’”
That meant, no, the first member of the Bermudez family to go to college wouldn’t be studying at the Air Force Academy. And baseball? That was suddenly in question too.
“It was like, ‘We highly, highly advise you not to,’” Will said. “If you get hit again, we don’t know if it’s going to be worse, and if it’s worse, we don’t know how much worse it’s going to be.”
‘Best day ever’
But Will’s not a guy who gives up on a play, so he did the math: “This was a freak accident. I’ve been playing since I was 5 years old, at that point, 12 years. This has only happened once.”
Wasn’t there something he could do to strengthen his brain and his body to allow him to keep playing the game he’s so passionate about?
His parents didn’t want him to have to live with regret, and his doctors also agreed to let him try, so he started playing brain games with a physical therapist. Got competitive with it, because of course he did. “Give me a good one!” he’d say before he’d be given 30 seconds to make change using only certain coins in a pot and then quizzed not only about the answer but “the conceptual, why did I do that?”
Once he got the green light from his neurologist, Will started ramping up, preparing to get back on the field half a year later.
“The best day ever,” he said. “I felt like a wild horse running around. I’d told myself, ‘Wherever this pitch is, I’m swinging.’ I got a base hit; and just running the bases, it just never felt so good. This is why I love the game, you know? Running and feeling the wind by you, and talking to your teammates, strategizing together. There’s nothing better.”
His parents were in the stands that game, as they always are, home or away.
“Oh my God,” dad William said, patting his chest. “My heart just was racing – racing. I was happy, I was excited. I was thanking the Lord for giving him a chance, but I was also worried, concerned, like, oh, man, I know mentally he’s got it, but what if he’s running, and he bumps into a guy? Or a guy bumps it into him?”
I asked William and Sandra if they still worry. Because, knowing what I know, I found myself worrying before Will, the Eaters’ sturdy-looking, 5-foot-10 leadoff hitter, stepped to the plate for the first time against a red-hot USC team last week – as always, shaking the home-plate umpire’s hand before seeing his first pitch.
In unison and without hesitation, they said: “Yeah.”
“We don’t miss no games,” William said. “And every time we go to a new stadium, I walk the whole stadium, because I’ve got to find the quickest way to get to the field. In case something happens.”
That something happened during Will’s season at Mount San Antonio College – an important pit stop between UC Davis, where he redshirted his freshman year, and UC Irvine, where he’s thriving now.
The way Mounties head coach John Knott remembers it, before he could even react to the sounds of bats falling behind him, dad William was there. On the spot, reassuring to his son, propping him on his side, timing the seizure to gauge whether they’d have to call 9-1-1, which Will said they’ve never had to.
Will was a Division I talent at a community college program figuring out how to play through epilepsy. Learning how heat and hunger can trigger his condition and continuing his search for the medication that would allow him to feel – as he does today, Sandra said – “like himself.”
In 41 games at Mt. SAC, he hit .373 and scored 55 runs, but what really got UC Irvine coach Ben Orloff’s attention was the 27 times he was hit by a pitch – eight more than he struck out.
“We liked his toughness,” Orloff said. “In recruiting, you ask kids, ‘What’s something hard that you’ve overcome?’ And most of the kids are like me and they haven’t had to overcome anything hard when they were 16 or 17 or 18.
“But he’s had to overcome real hardship, and the spirit and positivity that he brings every day, and there are even days, once in a while, where you can kind of feel and see he’s not having a good day in terms of the meds or his levels – he’s always happy.”
‘Light of the team’
That’s the case now at UC Irvine, where Will is studying to become a sports psychologist, where he said he’s been seizure-free, and where, last season, he hit .301 for a ball club that finished 45-14.
Where, in an 8-4 win Wednesday over Utah Tech, he broke the program’s hit-by-pitch record, pushing it to 53. (His mom doesn’t love this.)
He’s the Anteaters’ “most physical guy,” and “the light of the team,” as infielder James Castagnola and catcher Blake Penso called him.
But that guy will tell you, he spent a lot of time after his injury in a dark space, mourning the version of himself he calls “Healthy Will” while trying to reconcile his new reality.
“I remember talking to the people, especially my dad, like, ‘Dude, Dad, why?” Will said. “‘It just doesn’t make sense. Like, why? I don’t party, I don’t drink, I don’t do nothing. I try to be the best student. I try to be the best teammate, the best baseball player. I come home, try to be the best son. Why?’ ”
It took time, but his faith and his family helped get him through, and Will came to realize this unexpected new pathway is his pathway.
“This is what I needed to go through,” he said. “Now it’s my turn to inspire someone else or to help someone else, because we all go through our battles. Mine is epilepsy, others is depression or anxiety or whatever it may be.”
He’s been able to share advice with other epileptic patients through social media, and with another young epileptic ballplayer who connected through their neurologist. Orloff got an email recently from a fan who was inspired when he heard Will’s story on a broadcast. And last month, Will was honored with the CalHOPE Courage Award, recognition that goes to student-athletes who’ve overcome personal trauma and comes with a $1,000 donation to support mental health services on campus.
“Looking back, it’s like dang, I needed it to happen,” Will said. “Sucks to say, but I needed that to happen to really appreciate everything that I’ve been blessed with.”
Including this perspective, hard-won: “You can be in the brightest, brightest, brightest, brightest room, but one little dark spot, you will notice it. Or you can be in the darkest, darkest, darkest room and then one little light spot, you will notice it as well.
“Which one do you want to pick? I pick the dark room with a little light.”
Why?
“It got me to where I am.”