Baseball: UL closer Hicks overcomes lifetime of obstacles to shine on the mound

Tim Buckley, The Advertiser, March 16, 2013

It’s the ninth inning on a Friday night during a non-conference weekend series in early March, and after an infield error, a double and a walk Sacred Heart — down two runs at the time — had the bases loaded with none out.

How does UL’s Matt Hicks handle the bind?

He strikes out one, gets the next two hitters he faced to hit grounders to second and walks off with the save as if it was no big deal.

And for Hicks, in the bigger scheme, it was actually wasn’t.

"He really shouldn’t be here," Ragin’ Cajuns coach Tony Robichaux said of Hicks, a quick-working closer who in eight appearances this season has five saves, two wins, one successful non-save-situation outing and a stingy 1.46 ERA.

"So, realistically," Robichaux added, "that right there is not that tough for him — compared to where he’s been."

It’s not at all tough compared to the two stress fractures in his back. Not tough compared the infection that inflamed his body. And it’s especially not tough compared to the car that made him go splat.

Some details are engrained in his brain, and Hicks reels them off like stats on the back of a trading card.

The bike was, past tense, green.

The car was white, a 1996 Mercury Cougar — which was a good thing, because the two-door’s body frame was low, and a pickup, favored in his parts of Texas, would have done much more damage.

He was 12, peddling down Highway 408 in Bridge City, heading home from a friend’s house, right where the speed limit on the long stretch of two-lane road drops to 45 miles per hour.

The driver, he figured, probably was going around 50, maybe still 55.

"Nobody really slows down," Hicks said, "until they get closer to the light."

Standing about halfway up the line toward third, not far from the mound where two nights earlier he had gotten out of that jam in the ninth, Hicks looks back toward the deep end of centerfield at M.L. "Tigue" Moore Field.

"My house is at the scoreboard," he said. "I’m that far away. I’m pulling into my neighborhood."

At this point, memory starts to fade.

"We don’t really know exactly how it happened," he said.

"The next thing I know, I’m in the hospital. I was awake the whole time, but I don’t remember it."

All Hicks knows for sure is what evidence showed, and others claimed to have seen.

"My head went through the windshield and put a hole in the dashboard," he said. "She (drove) into a ditch, and I went over the top of (the car). My head hit the top of the trunk, and I rolled through the ditch.

"They said I was able to manage to hold onto the side of the car. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what they said."

The landing spot was fortuitously soft, muddied by the prior day’s rain.

"So I had sunken down into the ditch, level, and all you could see were my eyes and my teeth," Hicks said. "The paramedics actually had trouble getting out, because of the suction of the mud."

He was extricated, but damage was done.

The fracture to the tibia was compound, bone from the shin piercing skin, muscle and nerves.

His head?

No blood, hardly a scratch.

That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense.

The doctors and hospitals he’ll never forget, in a good way, and Hicks reels off their names like current-day teammates turning a double play.

Johnston, Brinker and Brock.

Southeast Texas Medical Center in Port Arthur, Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital and Texas Orthopedic Hospital in Houston.

After seven surgeries over two-and-half weeks — muscle was grafted from his stomach, skin from his hip — Hicks was discharged in three weeks.

He spent the next three months using a wheelchair, and the three after that on crutches.

Yet things still weren’t like they had been, and they probably never will be.

"It wasn’t healing back right," Hicks said, "because all the blood vessels and everything were dead.

"I still can’t feel most of the bottom half of my leg."

An eighth surgery followed, this one to graft bone from the back of his hip.

The same routine followed — three months in a wheelchair, three on crutches — and before he knew it Hicks hadn’t walked for more than a year.

Slowly but surely, though, so much got much better — just like doctors had promised at the start.

"Everyone of them said, ‘You’ll be able to walk again,’ " Hicks said.

"Since Day 1, they said if we just work at it, let them do their stuff, me go through the therapy, I’ll be fine.

"But they said it was a miracle nothing happened to my head," he added, "because (it) went through the windshield."

So Hicks could move on both feet again, and somehow his skull didn’t suffer the same fate as his shattered shin.

But there’s a big difference between walking and running from first to second, and for Hicks that meant a lot.

He is now a junior for the 13-3 Cajuns, who open Sun Belt Conference play tonight at home against UL Monroe.

At the time he was hit, Hicks was a Little Leaguer who played shortstop, catcher and in the outfield. And of course he pitched, though that wasn’t a really big deal at the time.

"Back then," Hicks said, "anybody who could throw it over the plate, really, could pitch."

Though the medical experts were confident about his walking again, they weren’t really sure how the whole baseball thing wound pan out.

"They said I might not ever be back to normal, but they said I’d be able to play," Hicks said. "To what I extent, I didn’t know.

"We had to play it out, and see how it all happened."

Beating the odds shouldn’t have seemed like much, however. After all that Hicks dealt with when he was even younger.

Around the age of 8, he contracted bacterial meningitis — by eating raw food from a fast-food joint, he suspects now.

Antibiotics did the trick with no lingering issues.

But fast-forward about two years later, when he was 10, and Hicks started feeling similar flu-like symptoms.

This time, he thinks it was from swimming in dirty lake water.

Back to the antibiotics.

"They worked last time," Hicks said, "so I started taking them again.

"And all of a sudden I just started crashing, and turned for the worse. "» I remember laying on the bathroom floor, body locked out. I was throwing up, couldn’t move."

He could barely open his eyes, which were sensitive to light.

Hicks was taken to an emergency room, and quarantined in a negative pressure room so that his infection did not spread.

Two spinal taps later, he was diagnosed with viral meningitis — potentially life-threatening inflammation in the brain and spinal cord areas.

After an ICU stay, Hicks was released — only to get struck by the Cougar two years or so later.

"I don’t really think I have ‘bad luck,’ " he said. "I mean, it happened.

"I have great friends, great family, school’s paid for. "» I think I have great luck."

Most of the time.

In the summer before his freshman year at Bridge City High, when he was 14, only a year or so after being out of the wheelchair and off crutches for the second time, Hicks took a swing.

He missed, and afterward something felt out of whack.

In time, he could hardly sleep, and certainly couldn’t play, because he could no longer turn the bat.

The diagnosis this time: "Too much baseball," Hicks said.

At first, though, doctors were as perplexed as he was to explain the pain.

A mere muscle injury initially was suspected.

CT Scans and MRI exams offered no explanation — until that is, test results were read by one of the doctors who had helped him rehab the fractured leg.

Hicks said he had stress fractures along the transverse processes of the L5 vertebrae bones, which in English translates to no baseball from October until early February.

But Hicks was released to play on what just happened to be the first day of his freshman baseball season at Bridge City, where he both pitched and played shortstop.

Since then — although limited by lower-back soreness last fall — there have been no major medical issues.

Hicks made 15 appearances as a true freshman with UL in 2011 (3-1, 3.80 ERA), and 26 last year (3-1, four saves, 2.92 ERA).

And after watching his eight appearances so far this season, Robichaux has an even greater appreciation for what Hicks has overcome and done.

"He’s been a model player here," the Cajun coach said, "and, of everybody in here, he’s one of the hardest workers on our team, one of the hardest-working pitchers I’ve ever coached in my 25 years.

"He’s getting some success because that’s what he’s put in," Robichaux said. "He’s put in a lot of time and work."

And he doesn’t waste a second.

"(He’s) just a tremendous guy to have in the back end of games," UL associate head coach Anthony Babineaux said.

"The stuff he has pitch-wise — if you combine that with the tempo that he works with, I mean if you blink you’ll miss a couple pitches."

In the Sunday game of UL’s series against Sacred Heart, Hicks retired the side in order in the ninth and again earned the save.

Before moving on to play others teams in Louisiana, the club from Connecticut stayed in Lafayette to practice.

Babineaux ran into their coach, 25-year veteran Nick Giaquinto, the day after the series.

"He said, ‘You know, there’s pitchers that work really fast "» and then there’s pitchers that work really, really fast,’ " Babineaux said. "And he said, ‘The way that guy just commands the mound, and his presence up there, and the bulldog in him, just makes him a tremendous asset.’

"I definitely agreed with him."

Hicks really can throw off batters he faces with his disconcerting tempo alone.

"The hitters," Babineaux said, "spend more time trying to call for time with the umpires, and worry about trying to slow him down, than they do with worrying about hitting the pitches he is throwing."

There’s a reason behind Hicks’ quick pace.

Over the years, he’s come to understand that there’s no sense in fretting over what’s already done — so you may as well focus on the future, and do it, even in a game with no clock, before time runs out.

That’s how he thinks when there’s an error he can’t see, or a lousy call he can.

"I’m here now," Hicks said. "This is the situation I’m in. I’ve got to do what I can, work through it, push through it."

Besides, he added, teammates "do more than I do."

"I put it over the plate for them to hit it," Hicks said, "and these guys behind me do all the work."

More often than not, he hastens their chores.

So pardon Hicks when he takes an extra moment or two to reel off more philosophy on life, and baseball.

Getting nailed by a car, overcoming viral meningitis and cracking two bones in the lower back can prompt a guy to do that.

"What it all boils down to is this is just a game," Hicks said. "It will affect us; we all care about it enough to affect us. But 20 years from now, what happens in this game, really, in the end, doesn’t change my life.

"Baseball is my life. But what happens on an 0-2 count — that pitch shouldn’t affect how I play tomorrow or anything like that.

"Mistakes happen. Errors happen, bad pitches happen. You can’t think about that, you can’t sit on that. I mean, if I get bases loaded and no outs — that’s baseball. It’s in the rules. It’s allowed to happen. I can’t be mad at somebody else, I can’t be mad at myself for that. I just have to play through it."