PETALUMA - It's been four months already and Tim Curran still waits, been ordered to wait, until August when the team docs examine him to see if he's healthy enough to resume lacrosse. If his brain is back in one piece. If those three concussions in 10 months haven't left him less than whole. If he is or isn't just one good bump away from struggling to remember who he is and where he is.
"I just wish I could go out (leave lacrosse) as my choice," said Curran, 18, a 2011 Casa Grande graduate who just completed his freshman year at Notre Dame De Namur in Belmont. "I would like to be the one who decides to stop."
Stop? Look at Curran and there's no evidence why he should. Six-feet-one, 180 pounds, with a strong, firm body, Curran provides the quintessential picture of an athlete. He may like a donut now and then but his frame does not betray the anatomical excesses associated with refined sugar. He's solid, and he has the history to prove it: Curran was a key player on a club lacrosse team that won the state championship two years in a row. He was first team all-league as a senior and went to New Zealand as a member of USA's West all-star team.
With a 3.2 GPA at Notre Dame, Curran speaks with a certainty that can only come with intelligence, which is why this wait is tearing at him. Curran wants to be active, needs to be active, but the docs at Notre Dame - essentially the Stanford team physicians - have told Curran he cannot engage in any contact sports this summer. No weight lifting. Run but don't think you're in the Olympics. Wait until August, when Notre Dame begins lacrosse practice. We'll test you then.
"If they tell me I have to wait a year," Curran said, "then I'll just quit and cut my losses."
Curran didn't make eye contact when he said that Wednesday. He didn't want to see a look of condolence on my face.
On the other hand ...
Curran doesn't want to go through what he went through in April, 2011, when he was a senior at Casa. He was in Napa playing against Napa High School. Curran was carrying the ball when someone pushed him from behind. He never saw the guy coming. He fell face-forward, hitting his forehead on the ground. He was led off the field where he vomited.
His mother, Carol, came rushing over. At that time, Carol knew as much about concussions as her son.
"Nothing," she said. "It was never in our house."
Carol and Mike Curran have three sons, all athletes, all had played concussion-free to that point.
Tim left the game and while a little wobbly, he wasn't ringing any bells and whistles for his folks as the family went to a Carrows in Napa for dinner.
"And then the symptoms got progressively worse," Carol said.
Tim's eyes would dart back and forth, side to side. His face showed no recognition.
"When he spoke," Carol said, "he made no sense."
Enough, his folks said. They took him to a local hospital. A CAT scan confirmed he had been concussed. A few of his responses about that event revealed as much.
"I don't remember the contact," said Curran, a long pole middie. "I don't remember getting sick on the sidelines. I don't remember the score, the game, anything like that."
Curran saw doctors once a week for the next two months. Things returned to an even rhythm. Curran enrolled at Notre Dame on an academic scholarship. Last February in the schools' second game of the season Curran got sandwiched between two Dominican University players. He fell to the ground, made it to the sidelines, where he vomited, tried to stand up, couldn't.
Curran sat out two games and went to Colorado to play Adams State.
"I never saw the guy who hit me," Curran said. He was hit on his left side, hit the ground and when he got up, "I was really dizzy." He sat out the team's last seven games of the season. He met with team doctors twice a week for the rest of the school year, which ended May 4.
By this time the Currans, once unaware of traumatic brain injury, had gotten up to speed on the subject. They learned that one concussion makes one susceptible to experience another one, even if the contact is comparatively mild. Tim had gone online and watched videos of athletes getting hit, doctors explaining the physiological change and the increasing body of knowledge being presented on long-term damage.
You might say that put the fear of God into Tim but, just as significantly, it also put him into this place of limbo. Not knowing if he can continue to play the sport he has loved for six years, in fact being ordered to stay away from it, Curran is grinding hard. He is not a couch potato.
"Tim always has liked physical activity," Carol said.
It is possibly the ironicdevelopment of In possibly the deepest irony of all this, Curran is a kinesiology major at Notre Dame.
And yet he won't remain one if he is told by team physicians he has to wait another year to play. He will walk away from that scholarship that pays 50 percent of his college tuition. He said he will enroll in a firefighter academy. Or possibly become a paramedic. Either way, Curran's life and career will not be behind a desk. He has to be out there, doing something, being physical. He is not meant to be a bookkeeper.
"This is Tim's decision," Carol said firmly, although with a trace of trepidation.
Those three concussions have brought home to the Currans the national discussion on the topic. This is not something that happens to NFL players, that brings on depression, suicide, loss of respect, loss of bodily functions. This is not something that is happening to well-known athletes after years of systemic battering.
This is Tim Curran, 18 years old, a local kid, not a big name, but nonetheless someone like any of us, who has a life, a future, expectations. It's a life worth keeping intact and Curran doesn't have to be a Junior Seau for that to matter. Curran is important to his folks, his brothers, his friends, his girlfriend, to employers yet unknown, and especially, to himself. It needs not to get any more significant than that.
Curran's story isn't just Sonoma County. It's everyone's story everywhere, being played out in small towns and big cities across America, as parents and their athletic children wrestle with a most intimate dilemma. How much do they allow today before it risks too much of tomorrow? Where is that line? And will they know when they cross it?
For Curran, he won't double-down on that future.
"If they let me play again," he said, "and if I experience anything somewhat close to what already has happened, I'll be done (with lacrosse) forever."
For more North Bay sports go to Bob Padecky's blog at padecky.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Bob Padecky at 521-5223 or bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com.
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