Alive and Kicking : Burned in an Accident, Rolling Hills’ John Crump Makes Dramatic Return

John Crump knew that skiing right before the biggest part of the high school soccer season was a bit of a risk, so he was relieved on New Year’s Eve day to get off the slopes of South Lake Tahoe with no breaks, bumps or bruises.

Play in the Bay League would begin in a few days for Rolling Hills High School, and Crump, one of the top players on one of the top teams in Southern California, didn’t want to be anything less than 100% for his senior season. The few days in Tahoe with friends and teammates would be the only rest he would allow himself until the end of the playoffs.

“I was thinking the whole time not to get hurt, to take it easy,” he said. “All I could think about was Bay League, Bay League, Bay League.”

Crump is mainly a defensive player, so his importance to the Titans is not measured in goals. But since the start of the season, he had been the team leader. Personable and respected, Crump was also the team spokesman.

Although Crump made it off the snow just fine that day, he didn’t make it back home with the rest of his friends. In fact, he was in for a long and painful journey.

Crump and his friends were in the kitchen of the place they stayed. There was some ski wax to be melted over the stove burners, some rubbing alcohol and, he conceded with a sheepish look at the floor, some fireworks.

One thing led to another, and suddenly there was tremendous heat flashing up Crump’s arms and toward his chin.

Nobody is sure exactly what happened, or at least nobody is saying. The way Crump figures it now, why bother with how it happened when thinking about the accident is painful enough.

In what he recalls as a five-second episode, he suffered second- and third-degree burns over 15% of his body, mostly on the inside of his arms.

He spent a day in the hospital near Lake Tahoe, then had some time at home before spending another four days at Torrance Memorial Hospital, where he had a section of skin removed from his left thigh and grafted over the burned areas on the arms.

Doctors told Crump, also a shortstop on the baseball team, to keep the tender skin out of bright sunshine for at least eight weeks and advised him that it would be six months before he would be able to handle much physical activity.

Not coincidentally, Rolling Hills went 0-3-1 in its first games without Crump. The last one, a loss against Mira Costa, was more than he could take.

“I heard about the game in the hospital and then I read it in the local paper,” he said. “It said that Rolling Hills had lost again and that John Crump would be out for the season. I read that and said, ‘That’s enough of that.’ ”

Crump decided to prove the doctors wrong.

“I think he felt really bad that he did something that dumb, knowing his position on the team,” his coach, Dick Barkhuis, said. “All of the sudden, we lost two games. And after we lost to Palos Verdes, he said he could have kicked himself because he knew that was a game we should have won.”

Then Crump went out to two games, looking like a mummy carrying an umbrella. His arms were covered, he wore a hat, and his high-reaching collar left only his face exposed. Rolling Hills won both games. The best, though, was yet to come.

When specially made arm protectors arrived from Ohio, Crump was ready to play again, at least in his own mind.

“This whole thing has been tough on me, too,” Crump said. “But I’ve always been stubborn. If someone says that I can’t do it, I want to go do it anyway. I guess I never really accepted how bad it was.”

And his teammates?

“All they needed to know was that I was ready to go,” he said. “They just had to do their part if they wanted me out there. But they weren’t nearly as worried as some of the other people, like my parents, the doctors and my girlfriend.”

He dealt with his parents by not telling them ahead of time. They learned that he had played again when they read the paper the next day.

Actually, his return last Tuesday night against Redondo was a spur-of-the-moment thing that surprised even his teammates. During the second half of a close game, Crump decided that was as good a time as any to play again. Ryan Skulsky, a junior reserve, agreed. Skulsky gave Crump his uniform.

Crump made a difference without doing much more than being out on the field.

“He gave us the spark that we needed,” Barkhuis said of the Redondo game. “After being out four weeks and not practicing, his stamina and endurance might have just been good enough to carry him through the final 15 or 20 minutes of the game.”

Rolling Hills scored two goals in the second half and won that game, then followed it up with a 3-1 victory over league-leading Palos Verdes in Crump’s first full game since the accident.

Rolling Hills (15-4-1), which will play at South Torrance tonight at 7, is the defending co-champion with South Torrance in the 4-A Division and is ranked third this season in the coaches’ poll, behind Oxnard and Culver City.

Graduation took five of last season’s starters, but Barkhuis has done well with his new group of veterans, seniors Steve Siegner, Geoff Yantz, Kevin LaCasse, Joe Mazella and Crump, and junior Bruce Weisenberg.