Seeing What’s Important

‘You are blind, but you have eyes!”

The high-pitched cry rose from a small blur somewhere beyond the tap-tap-tap of John Page’s white metal stick.

How funny, Page thought. What was this child saying? What was he seeing?

Walking carefully past the tiny voice at the Coliseum tunnel this month, Page paused to consider the possibilities.

His eyes indeed appeared normal. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses. It’s not every day you see a blind man at a football game, so a sound of surprise was common enough.

But those words ... they chilled him with something he couldn’t quite understand.

“You are blind, but you have eyes!”

Certain that the many difficult turns in his life had often been paved by the messages of angels, John Page wondered, was this another one?

*

It was the defining moment of a season, a career, a prayer.

With UCLA’s football team trailing California by a dozen points early in the fourth quarter this fall, the Bruins called a fake punt.

The ball was snapped to safety Jarrad Page, in as a blocking back, who ran 38 yards for a first down.

The bench erupted. Thousands cheered. John Page turned to his wife, Carolyn.

“What happened? What happened?”

“They faked the punt!”

“What else, what else?”

“And Jarrad is running with the ball!”

“Go, boy, go!”

The run led to another Bruin comeback victory, after which, the father hugged his son outside the Bruin locker room.

“I saw that fake-punt run, I believe you are a champion!” he said.

The first part was not true, but the second part was.

John Page believes what he cannot see, an attitude embraced by the Bruins during an improbable 9-2 season that will end against Northwestern in the Sun Bowl on Friday in El Paso.

“All those comebacks this year, they remind me of my dad,” said Jarrad, the team’s vocal defensive leader. “During those games, I was actually thinking, ‘This is what he did.’ ”

On a July day in 2003, John Page suffered a stroke that robbed him of his sight and left him in a coma for 5 1/2 weeks.

But he missed only one game.

He returned to the Rose Bowl two months after the stroke to be with his son, as he had always been with him, as coach, counselor and head cheerleader.

John Page never knew his own father. He vowed his two sons would know him.

So he was wheeled into the stadium for the second game of the 2003 season, a victory over Illinois, and he’s missed only two games since.

He has shown up tapping his metal stick or holding his wife’s arm, after spending the week in a school for the blind.

He sits in the handicapped section and wears headphones to listen to the radio broadcast. He quizzes his wife on nuances. Sometimes they argue about details.

“It’s like a comedy routine,” said their older son, John Jr. “She’ll talk about a run and he’ll say, ‘What kind of run?’ and she’ll say, ‘Just, a run!’ ”

He asks so many questions of people around him, he later discusses the game as if he had watched it through binoculars.

“You hear him talk about what happened, he knows so many details, you could never imagine that he didn’t see it,” said Jarrad.

He can’t see well enough to read or write, but has learned how to type his son’s accomplishments on a website. Jarrad ranks second on the team in tackles with 66; he had a team-high 10 against Arizona State, and in that game recovered a fumble that led to the go-ahead touchdown.

Great stuff, but blurry stuff. Although John’s sight has improved enough for him to see his son’s No. 4, most of the tackles have been lost in a blue haze.

“I can’t tell you how much it hurts, everybody looking at my boy making the big play, and I can’t see it,” John said. “I get very angry. I’ve been waiting all of my life for this and, in his greatest moment, I can’t see him?”

Yet folks in the Bruin family say the son’s greatest moments are mirrored by the father’s.

For every inspiration found in a hard tackle by Jarrad Page, equal chills are felt by those who hear John Page bellow pep talks during tailgate parties before games, then see him hug his son in the tunnel afterward.

Even if, sometimes, he has to be pointed to the right player.

“Mr. Page is the real story of this season,” said David Olson, father of quarterback Drew. “The way he carries himself, the way he inspires people. He may not always see us, but we all see him.”

*

Whooooosh! What can he say? He got a good deal on the place. Whooooosh!

Spend five minutes in John Page’s thee-bedroom, one-bath house in San Leandro, south of Oakland, and it becomes obvious, the defining feature of the house is not part of it.

They live under a BART track. Trains whooooosh past every 20 minutes, noisy and rumbling.

“We don’t even notice it anymore,” said John, 55. “We never needed much. This is home.”

To their senses, much more vivid is the shine from their two boys’ sports trophies, which fill the floor in front of an unused fireplace. Jarrad has been awarded several game balls and they’ve all landed here. With every shiny statue comes a memory, because John was there when they won nearly all of them.

“People tell me, ‘You should have seen your son do this or that!’ ” John said. “It helps knowing that I’ve seen him do it all before.”

Growing up in Oakland and Berkeley, John never knew his father. It’s a sadly common story, but one that John tells with clarity.

“My mom worked, so I’d be playing Little League baseball and seeing all these dads behind the cage and realizing, I was all alone,” he recalled. “There was never anybody there to cheer for me during the bad times. There was never anybody there to hug me and say, ‘Good game, John.’ ”

He said a lack of a father hurt him both in sports and school. He couldn’t graduate with his high school class because he’d never studied with the diligence he’d put into sports.

“There was never a father to watch my back, to stay on me, to check with my teachers and coaches,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that. And I promised myself, if I ever had kids, that would not happen to them.”

By the time he and Carolyn had their first child, he was already setting an example. He’d joined the Air Force, returned to college and eventually received a degree from Cal before becoming a health inspector.

By the time Jarrad, 21, was born, John was in full youth-league parent mode.

“But it wasn’t bad,” Jarrad said, “because my dad was the kind of guy who cheered for everyone.”

He cheered the effort of a batter striking out, a receiver dropping a ball. He roamed the stands or sidelines reminding his son that he was a champion.

“My job was to take lemon plays and turn them into lemonade,” he said.

He coached his son’s youth baseball teams, gave the pep talks to Pop Warner teams. Willing to do anything to be there for his boys, he sometimes umpired their baseball games and carried the first-down markers during high school football games.

He yelled at his son to act like a champion because he was a champion. His favorite three words were, “You’re the best!”

It was a phrase repeated game after game, year after year. It became part of Jarrad’s psyche as he became that rare college football four-year starter.

“I remember hearing my dad’s voice everywhere,” Jarrad said. “I will never forget that sound.”

Then, in the summer of 2003, the voice went silent.

Three times during the coma, doctors urged the Page family to end life support. Three times they refused.

“They said he had no chance,” recalled Carolyn. “I said, ‘This is a spiritual thing, not a medical thing.’ ”

Jarrad was sent back to summer school and workouts but he called home nearly every day, hoping to hear that voice.

“People talked about the worst, but I kept thinking what my father always told me,” Jarrad recalled. “He was always shouting, ‘Never give up!’ So I knew he wouldn’t give up.”

Then one day, John’s eyes opened. Soon, he was moving his head. Then he was actually talking, phoning Jarrad at UCLA, again telling his awe-struck boy he was the greatest.

Said Jarrad, “My dad says that to me, when that’s what I’m thinking about him.”

Said John, “Through the whole thing, I don’t remember anything except a presence of somebody never leaving me. That’s what brought me back.”

And back he came, stunning everyone by entering the Rose Bowl only weeks after having been in the coma.

“I had to be there,” he said. “I had to have that moment, that crowd, the ambience. It was embarrassing to be in a wheelchair and blind. But I wanted him to see me.”

Everyone saw him, and will see him again in El Paso. John and Carolyn will travel by train, stay in Jarrad’s hotel, probably share a double room with him one night, as they do for bowl games, talking all night across the beds.

“We did that in Las Vegas last year, laughing and joking all night, my boy and me, bonded like that,” John said. “All of it in the dark.”

Sometimes, maybe, you don’t need to see to understand. Sometimes, perhaps, you can make your own light.

“You are blind, but you have eyes.”

John Page grinned.

“Come to think of it,” he said, “maybe that child was right.”

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.