Long Road Back for Wilson

The letters John Wilson and his father write each other are not, in themselves, remarkable.

John Wilson writes about playing baseball at the University of Kentucky, about trying to become the first person in his family to earn a college degree.

His father, Jack Wilson, usually discusses life as a born-again Christian.

What is remarkable is that there are any letters at all between father and son, since Jack Wilson is serving 10 years in prison in California for nearly killing his son with two shotgun blasts to the chest.

One day after his 18th birthday, on the morning of Sept. 30, 1996, John Wilson woke to a commotion outside his family’s home in the Los Angeles suburb of Reseda.

Wilson had just begun his freshman year on a baseball scholarship at nearby Cal State Northridge. He and his then-girlfriend were the only ones in the home that morning. His father was not living there and his mother Cindy, who was being stalked by her estranged husband, had moved out, taking Wilson’s sister with her.

“It was a pretty hostile situation,” Wilson said of his parents’ troubled marriage. “Every day, I couldn’t keep track of what was going on with them.”

Wilson had hoped to live at home, saving money for Northridge’s cash-strapped baseball program. But when he told Northridge coach Mike Batesole that his home life was deteriorating, Batesole found him an on-campus apartment. Wilson and his girlfriend planned to move his things there on Sept. 30.

Instead, a bleary-eyed Wilson, awakened by what he later learned was a blast from the shotgun his father was carrying, found himself trying to reason with Jack Wilson through the locked front door of the home. It was a familiar role.

“I always kind of had a history of getting in my dad’s way when he would get violent,” he said. “I’d always rather provoke him to come after me than after my mom.”

That was when Jack Wilson fired two blasts through the front door, putting 22 shotgun pellets in his son’s chest and right arm and puncturing one of his lungs.

Prosecutors later charged Jack Wilson with attempted murder, though his son calls the shooting an accident. “I guess he was trying to blow off the locks and break in,” he said.

Los Angeles Police Detective Dave Szabo was one of the first people on the scene.

“We thought he wasn’t going to make it,” he said. “There was blood everywhere in that house.”

“It should have been enough to probably put me away,” John Wilson said. He believes his baseball conditioning saved him.

Even once it was clear he would survive, Wilson’s prognosis was not promising.

“They had like seven tubes running out of me,” he said. “I had a collapsed lung, they were pumping blood out of my lung, stuff in my liver, my kidney.”

“Half his bicep was blown off,” Szabo recalled. “We figured his baseball career was over.”

More than two years later and 2,300 miles from home, Wilson has, improbably enough, become a college star.

A sophomore catcher for the Wildcats, he is hitting .353, with 18 home runs, and 41 runs batted in. His eight homers in conference play lead the Southeastern Conference, and Wilson recently learned he is among 40 college freshmen and sophomores invited to national team tryouts later this spring.

“I was pretty focused before the accident happened, and I just wasn’t about to let an unfortunate thing like that happen and derail me in my dreams,” he said.

Wilson left the hospital within weeks of the shooting and was back on the baseball field later that fall. He redshirted his freshman year.

In June 1997, Northridge announced it would drop baseball, leaving Wilson scrambling for a scholarship. After receiving a call from a Northridge assistant coach, Kentucky baseball coach Keith Madison brought Wilson to Lexington for a visit.

The player made a point of telling Madison about the shooting during their first meeting.

“It was an incredible thing to hear from a guy his age,” Madison said. “But the most impressive thing that he said to me was, ‘Coach, I have forgiven my father.’ When he said that, I said, ‘This is a special young man that has learned something that some people never learn in a lifetime: That you gain freedom from forgiveness, and if you don’t forgive, it only hurts yourself.’

“I could tell from that conversation, without ever having seen him play, that he was a guy I wanted in my baseball program,” Madison said.

Wilson accepted Kentucky’s scholarship offer, sticking with his decision even after Northridge reinstated baseball that fall. He hit .327 in limited time at first and third base in 1998, then volunteered to move to catcher this year, tackling the challenge with characteristic eagerness.

“I know that I’m an intense player and that I’m really aggressive,” he said. “It’s good to be in the middle of things.”

In California, Wilson’s mother has moved from Reseda, divorced his father and will soon remarry. His sister is in college near San Diego. And Jack Wilson is serving 10 years for second-degree attempted murder and stalking at the state prison in San Luis Obispo.

In Kentucky, Wilson has a new life. He says his current teammates, particularly roommate Aaron McGlone, are the closest friends he’s ever had.

“He’s a city boy and I’m a country boy,” said McGlone, a third baseman from northeastern Kentucky. “His stories are about going to this club or that club. Mine are about hunting and fishing.”

McGlone said he doesn’t pry into Wilson’s past, but is there to listen and offer his thoughts.

“I just give my advice and try to help out,” he said. “It’s very personal. If he needs to get it off his chest, he’ll say something to me.”

Though Wilson had made up his mind to forgive his father by the summer after the shooting, he waited until December 1997 to re-establish contact, by letter.

The father and son write back and forth, with John Wilson grabbing time during baseball road trips to update his father with a letter written on hotel stationery.

“We keep it pretty basic,” he said. “Anything beyond that is too painful for pen and paper.”

He has chosen to not to see his father in person.

“Maybe sometime down the road,” he said. “It’s nothing that I’m looking for right now.”

Wilson links his decision to maintain a relationship with his father and his drive to prove himself as a baseball player. The shooting, like the fact that he was not drafted professionally or recruited by top colleges out of high school, is another hurdle to overcome, he said.

“Who understands a lot of reasons why things happen to them in life?” he said. “I have a really strong belief that everything I do is part of a plan that God has for me. Certain things happen for certain reasons.”

Forgiving his father, he said, was part of putting his life back together.

“I didn’t see any other choice if I was going to get on with things,” he said. “ ... He’s still my dad, and that’s never going to change.”