Article on CSUF pole vault coach.

[bjvando]

this is an article on MY pole vault coach at Cal. State Fullerton. ( kinda long, but worth the time) if the link doest work, i apolgize, they update the page frequently through out the day...

http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/05/0 ... 503156.php

Out of the darkness
A CSF track coach has overcome paralysis, depression and himself.

By JEFF MILLER
The Orange County Register

Can't start at the beginning. That works for most stories. Not this one. There's only one place to begin here. At the bottom.

This is about a journey, see, about the great distance a man can walk even when his legs are useless. To understand how far this man has traveled, the number of miles he has survived - and the first step of the journey was survival - we have to hide with him behind those bushes.

In the dark. The rain. The cold.

Ready to kill.

Ready to die.

His story is about sinking to that bottom, about the night almost 15 years ago. It's not about his sport, which he consumed as if it were oxygen until the day it consumed him. Not about his wheelchair or the question that's always the same: How can a man who can't stand teach others how to jump? Not about his accident, in which he lost half of his body and nearly all of himself.

Because to see Ron Kamaka smiling now, sitting in the breeze and sunshine at Cal State Fullerton, on the track he and his fellow coaches call "The Sanctuary," to hear others describe him as "lovely" and "inspirational" and "beautiful," to understand why this man is so alive, we have to return to those damp shadows, to the exact spot where he decided to die.

His mother was leaving that morning, and she felt the uneasiness only moms can feel. Grab onto the umbilical cord is what Marelee wanted to do, squeeze tight until her boy, paralyzed from the chest down, felt again.

But it was time for her to leave Honolulu and the rehab center and return to California. She leaned over and kissed his cheek, mother and son exchanging I-love-yous, their tears pooling together. Kamaka wheeled over to a plant, bit off part of a flower and give it to her, certain this goodbye was their last goodbye.

By the time Marelee was home, he would have done it, would have rolled his chair onto Kuakini Street, in front of one of the buses he had seen pass so often while sitting up on the hill in the afternoon shade.

ROCK BOTTOM

It would just be finishing the job, really, because, at 27, Kamaka already felt dead. Come on, his entire life was sports, first basketball, then track, running and jumping, especially jumping, and now, because of a body surfing accident, his legs didn't even work. When you're egocentric and you can't feed your ego, it's all of you that starves to death.

People wouldn't understand this reasoning. But people never seemed to understand Kamaka, never grasped the depth of his desire. Otherwise, they wouldn't have kept asking the questions back then, after his college career had ended, the questions about finishing his degree, getting a real job, giving up all the running and jumping already.

They might have seen him compete for Arizona State, been there the day he reached his personal best, 7-foot-31/2, barely short of qualifying for the Olympic Trials. Maybe they saw the sacrifices, the pantry he lived in to save money, the classes he took after leaving ASU so he wouldn't have to start repaying his student loans, the minimum-wage jobs in the middle of the night, always in the middle of the night, leaving the rest of the day for practice.

But understanding Kamaka's suicide? How, when so few near him appreciated why he lived in the first place?

This obsession drove him into libraries to research articles on his sport, desperate for enlightenment. He would scribble illustrations, sure he could construct the perfect jump. When your game measures success by slices of slices of an inch, how can you not be devoured by the details? Particularly when Kamaka, now 42, recalls his career, himself this way: "I was one of those guys who people always thought should have jumped higher."

Imagine, then, how empty his spirit felt as his body went hollow - 50, 60 pounds disappearing from a frame that stretched 6-foot-5. He was savaged in that hospital by infections and fevers. He fought pneumonia. He feared what his life wouldn't be anymore.

Even more frightening was what it would be now. The morning of his accident that broke his neck, Kamaka lifted weights. Five months later, he was celebrating lifting his heaviest weight since - a grape.

Maybe someone would have understood all the darkness in his mind now had they been there that day in 1988, riding home in Kamaka's Volkswagen bug, as he sobbed for every inch of the two-hour drive from Sacramento State. This was just before the Olympic Trials, the final qualifying event.

TRIAL BY LOSS

Warm-ups had been spectacular, Kamaka clearing 7-5 - still wearing his sweats. When the competition began, as usual, he waited for the bar to reach 7-2 before jumping. Three times he tried. Three times he missed. In the last meet of his life, a meet in which there was no option but to finally jump as high as everyone expected, as high as even he expected, Kamaka couldn't have gone lower.

He walked to the middle of the infield, removed his spikes and left the stadium, barefoot and bawling.

"I can still smell that day and taste that day," he says. "The farther I walked away from the pit, the heavier my heart got."

But one man can only hurt so much, right? So Kamaka kept moving, all the way to Hawaii, where his father, Stan, now divorced, was ailing. He told everyone he had to go, for Dad's sake. The story wasn't untrue, only half-told. The son also was sick, his insides going sour every time he saw someone who knew him as a high jumper.

Kamaka needed to make new footprints, and where better to do that than in the sand? He discovered beach volleyball, a sport in which he could be the unknown underdog, solace coming in the new climb suddenly before him. He finished school and began teaching.

It was Aug. 16, 1990. "A Thursday," Kamaka says. He had just accepted a new job at Honolulu's Punahou School. He picked up the keys to his classroom, then met his sister, Mary, for lunch. Just fast-food burgers.

That afternoon, body surfing at Sandy's Beach, Kamaka caught a wave that sent him headfirst into a sand bar. He felt his body catch fire from the inside. He could move only his eyes.

He kept seeing arms and legs all about him. It wasn't until two or three days later that Kamaka realized those had been his arms and legs, just dangling there, swaying with the whims of the surf.

He tried to fight, but nothing happened. Then children. He thought about children. Not a particular child, not a face, just children in general. He found himself wishing his brother was there, but he knew Randy had moved to Sacramento two weeks earlier.

Thrashing and gasping, no longer able to contain the desire to breathe, he sensed his throat and chest filling with flames, the salty water pouring into his lungs. "This is it," Kamaka recalls thinking then, "this is how I die."

Then two men, strangers, men he never has met, had him by the shoulders. Kamaka felt the water running off his face, saw the drops splashing into the surf. His head flopped backward and he was blinded by the sun.

Three fractured vertebrae, a ruptured disc and part of his spinal cord severed. Four months later, they still were finding sand in his hair.

"All I knew myself as, an athlete, was taken away that fast," Kamaka says. "When that happens, what are you left with? That's the question I couldn't figure out."

Frustration - not a strong enough emotion for what he felt, this man whose body was numb. So he decided to forget the damn question and make up his own answer. One day at dusk, having kissed his mother a final time, he wheeled off the rehab center grounds, to a crosswalk, where the curb opened into the street. He hid behind the bushes.

An hour, maybe an hour and a half passed. He was shivering and crying, at least when he wasn't too mad to cry. He never saw a bus, but he did see a sign, one indicating the route had stopped running at 4 p.m.

"I can't walk," Kamaka remembers thinking, "and now I can't even take my own life."

Back at the hospital, there was a terrain park where patients learned to maneuver their wheelchairs. Behind the park was a drop-off, maybe 15 feet, into a ditch. New idea. He would plunge over the edge.

On his way there, because of the rain, the front wheels of his chair stuck in the mud. He never came close to reaching the drop-off. Once more, the bar had been set, and Ron Kamaka had come up short.

He had felt so lonely in a place full of people just like him, but now he really would be alone. In isolation, the result of a staph infection. Here, of all the places, of all the times, was when he found a friend, two friends, actually. Deanna, his new therapist, brought along her Bible.

"Everything changed," Kamaka says, his story incomplete without Him, without mention of Kamaka's conversion to Christianity. "The last 141/2 years of my life have been a lot more rewarding than the 27 years I spent walking."

He doesn't recall Deanna's last name, which changed when she married anyway, but that's not important. Neither is the fact she left to take a new job a short time later. What matters about her is the one thing that hasn't changed, her impact.

After 51/2 months of rehab, just a couple months from his darkest point, Kamaka re-emerged as a light, returning to teaching and starting to coach. He is in his 11th season at Cal State Fullerton, where head coach John Elders talks about his "awesome attitude" and "awesome perspective," about how Kamaka loves - and lives - to be an example. Elders said even more a year ago by promoting Kamaka to associate head coach.

SEEING THE LIGHT

He is in his ninth year of marriage to Lynda, the mother of one of his former jumpers. They drive together to most of the meets, Kamaka passing time by singing his Hawaiian songs. She looks at him today and doesn't even see a wheelchair. "It's become invisible," Lynda says.

His athletes look at him and see only a coach, their coach.

"Everyone wants to know about this guy," says Brad Seberhagen, a senior pole vaulter.

"I'm fortunate in that I get to wear the same colors as Coach Kamaka. His life ... he's traveled so far. It's a fun story to share with people."

Opponents ask all the time. What's up with the handicapped guy? Why's he smiling all the time? Seberhagen laughs at the reaction. "I guess people," he says, "aren't used to seeing someone in a wheelchair who's so happy."

Communication is how Kamaka does it, how he coaches something he hasn't done since his last lifetime. Senior Jennifer Clarke calls it his "ability to be social," saying he hooked her as a recruit after roughly three minutes of conversation.

Handicapped? That wheelchair has taken Kamaka to places an able-bodied man wouldn't go, probably couldn't go. He and Lynda showed up at the hospital so late that March night five years ago they had to go around to the side to find a door that was still open.

When they saw Rodney Anderson's mother, she turned away from them, couldn't stand looking at a man in a wheelchair. Not this soon. Not when her baby, a CSF basketball player and victim of a mistaken identity shooting, had just been pronounced paralyzed from the neck down.

So Kamaka left and came back a few days later. Then he did it again. And again. And one time he showed up with a stack of McDonald's gift certificates that fed Martha Anderson for weeks.

"He was my biggest inspiration," she says. "He didn't give up on me. He told me Rodney's life wasn't over because of this. He let me know Rodney was still a whole person."

A whole person, with a chance to be more. No matter how much Kamaka lost that day in the surf, he has regained everything, plus some.

Or, as he says, "That grape I lifted has become so much more."

Odd thing about being paralyzed; it seems you can move others even if you can't move yourself.

"I can remember the day and the events, but my heart can't remember the pain and the sorrow," Kamaka says of the night he didn't kill himself. "Seeing how far away I am from that now is something that makes me smile, almost laugh."

And why not? That was a long time ago for the once thoroughly beaten Olympic hopeful, the man who had to be permanently grounded to finally jump to the heights expected.

[ladyvolspvcoach]

Awesome!! You are very fortunate to have someone like him in your life!! And he is fortunate to have someone who can tell his story so beautifully...Great job!!!

[vaultmd]

Ron's a great guy. It's good to see him get some recognition.

[izzystikchik]

I sense a very admirable and inspiring man

[altius]

I was fortunate to have dinner with Ron in reno last year - it is something i will treasure for the rest of my life because he is clearly an inspiration to eveyone who meets him.

[FCCVaulter]

i totally thought it was on California State University FRESNO..about THE coach fraley..but still a great article..so good thing i read it huh?..