Ricks overcomes three ACL operations, signs to play baseball wth N.C. Wesleyan

By News-Argus Staff
Published in Sports on April 25, 2016 1:48 PM

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By JUSTIN HAYES

jhayes@newsargus.com

PRINCETON -- January 19, 2014.

It's a postcard-type evening in the pacific northwest, when afternoon airish yields to a rainy, bone-chilling darkness.

Perfect football weather.

At CenturyLink Field in Seattle, the NFC Championship game nears its zenith. The Seahawks, leading 20-17 with 8:54 remaining, face a critical third down in the red zone. Another score will likely salt the affair and rubber-stamp an Emerald City ticket to Super Bowl XLVIII in New York.

The 12's, Seattle's decibel-crushing fan base, yell with abandon from the hymnal of synchronized anarchy.

The snap is clean and Seattle's Russell Wilson wastes no time. He fires a guided missile complete to wideout Jermaine Kearse, who makes a turn toward the goal line.

San Francisco's Navarro Bowman awaits.  

Their collision is football's rendering of terminal velocity. Machine on machine. Grinding gear on grinding gear. And trapped, just a split-second into the jarring mess, is the left knee of Bowman.

Replays show the all-pro's ligament set buckling and popping like popcorn kernels under his knee pads. His terrified howling, audible for a national television audience, crystallizes the life of a seriously injured athlete.

Read.

React.

Reflect.

Some 2,887 miles away, Princeton High sophomore Tyler Ricks is watching. But his sensibilities aren't trained on the visual of Bowman's mangled mess of a leg.

It was the snapping sound.

The distinct, magnified blast of two rope ends brought together, then yanked apart, to register and release merciless tension.  

It's what happens when an athlete's knee dies.

Ricks heard it. What's more, he felt it. After all, he's lived the same nightmare three times.

"I should pray," he thought.

•

The first time it happened --his knee dying -- was in middle school, as he was learning the ways and means of life as a defensive end.  

"Seventh grade... I planted to turn, and my cleat just didn't come up," Ricks said. "Heard a loud popping noise, so we knew we had to get it checked out."

A month later surgery was needed to repair a torn right anterior cruciate ligament.

Then there was rehab.

Straight leg raises. Half squats.

There were endless tension boards, range of motion metrics and swimming. The 13-year-old had a checklist for his checklist, all before getting the chance to record his first blind-side sack or apply shaving cream.

The theories as to why this happened were many, and looking back, not worth considering. He was bigger than other kids, a clean six feet tall. Heavier, too, by nearly 30 pounds in some cases. Maybe the root cause lived there.

Or perhaps his physical dimensions just collided with each other in some strange way that can't be articulated through any explanation but ligament-shredding madness.

But no matter.

Ricks toiled through rehab and came back to play hoops in the eighth grade. And unlike some athletes, there was no ghost in the machine. He prospered, which gave him clearance to pursue the business of a three-sport athlete at Princeton.   

•

He did it while they were out of town, vacationing on a cruise boat in the middle of something larger than life. It would be easier that way.

"I called (my parents) and said, 'I'm telling you now so you'll have time to process it... I think I just tore my ACL again.'"

He was shooting hoops in gym class, joking with his friends the way ninth-graders often do when an inadvertent push sent him to the floor. Ricks landed on someone's foot, and heard it.

Again.

The popping noise. The same obnoxious, how-dare-you-move-that-way chorus that was quickly becoming the soundtrack of his young life.  

Recently promoted to Princeton's varsity football team, the freshman would again part ways with his mates. From the cocoon of bed rest, he watched as the Bulldogs made an unlikely run to the N.C. High School Athletic Association 1-A eastern regional finals against Plymouth.

"Lots of tears," he recalls of the moment. "I was pretty devastated... I remember telling my parents I didn't think I could do it again."

But he would.

Three days after surgery, the long road back took shape. Rehab, his foxhole comrade, was back in close quarters for another spell.  

He started sooner than expected, and the tension exercises weren't quite so daunting this time. Things were going swimmingly, so much so that Ricks and his family were convinced the comeback would be different this time.

Until it wasn't.

•

May, 2015.

Less than 30 minutes into his second spring football practice, the knee died again.

"Same thing that happened in seventh grade," Ricks recalled. "My cleat got stuck... with my brace on, which is supposed to prevent that stuff from happening."

His father, Chris, rushed to the Princeton football facility. His son lay in a mess of pads and tears at the site of the unfathomable happening a third time.

"As soon as he put his hand on me, he looked up at me," Ricks said. "And I just shook my head. It's gone."

Because this time, the snapping sound and the weight of rehab was different. It was heavier. And what, really, was there to come back for?

His high school career, for all intents and purposes, was done. His hopes, once lofty, had become a mummified shell of an athlete and the rogue ligament intent on holding him hostage.

Only three seasons remained for Tyler Ricks --football, basketball and baseball -- and he would be cleared for just one of them. Not long ago a prodigy, he now stood the very likely chance of never knowing the extent of any prodigious feats.  

"The third one was the toughest," Ricks said. "Because my junior year, baseball season went very, very well. I was in the best shape of my life."

What he didn't know -- and what he couldn't possibly expect as he wound through another jail-like rehab term -- was that others thought so, too.

•

A group of ladies surround a table in the mint-spectacle gymnasium of Princeton High School. A spotlight effect angles on them as they shape and reshape everything dressed in blue and gold.

They hem and haw about the official hat.

"Here," one says dictatorially, and places it just so.

Another waxes about the shirt, because try as she may, it simply won't fold and simultaneously stand to reveal its logo.

It's signing day, and Ricks -- looking almost stunned, as if this moment could belong to someone else -- is here to pen a national letter-of-intent to play baseball at North Carolina Wesleyan College in nearby Rocky Mount.

"When they asked me a couple of weeks ago to sign, I was like... what?" he said. "Having a dream and it actually coming true are two totally different things."

But because of a fortuitous moment during his junior season -- the one year his knee didn't turn on him -- they are now one.

While at a game to scout a prospect from North Duplin, the NCWC staff took notice of the player with the thrice-dead knee. That night, Ricks crafted a 3-4 performance at the plate, and unbeknownst to him, established a position for himself on the Battling Bishops' recruiting radar.

"To see how it worked out that way, and me not even knowing, is pretty cool," Ricks said, "I was going to go there regardless (for academics). Baseball was just the cherry on top of everything. God knew he was going to give me this three times."

Tyler Ricks thinks about Navarro Bowman from time to time -- as well as his own litany of setbacks -- but leans on his faith when the grisly replays cloud his mind. He'll start over this fall with eyes for baseball and a career track in sports medicine.

Call it credit for time served.