Originally published: VISIONS Magazine, Spring 2009

 

It’s an unseasonably warm autumn day at Bos Landen Golf Club, and inside the clubhouse Tyler Swanson is manning his post at the cash register, his 6-foot-4-inch frame folded over a canary yellow legal pad. The left side of his brain concentrates on learning calligraphy, and the words flow down to his right hand and land on the page in elegant strokes of green ink.

 

Like 90 percent of the population, Swanson has always been right-handed.

 

Like a smaller percent of the population, he’s a fighter.

 

As a star basketball player at Clinton (Iowa) High School, Swanson was a double threat. He remembers dribbling on the wing near an opponent’s bench and hearing the head coach shout, “Left handed, left handed!” at his team’s defense. True, Swanson says: He liked to drive to his left on the basketball court, but he drained the jumpers with his right.

 

Today, there aren’t many people who would mistake Tyler Swanson for a lefty. His left hand isn’t driving to the hoop or filling a page with elegant handwriting. The waves coming from his brain’s right hemisphere, he says, now have to take a detour – causing his left arm, hand, and leg to have to play catch-up. It’s a frustrating situation for a gifted 25-year-old athlete who just six years ago qualified for a PGA Tour exemption. But it’s a challenge Swanson today says he’s blessed to get the chance to try and overcome.

 

Driven off course
In the early morning hours of May 2, 2004, Tyler Swanson was lying unconscious next to mile marker 185 on Interstate 80.

 

He and his ISU golf teammate, Curtis Foster (’07 marketing), were thrown from the car Swanson was driving after he apparently fell asleep at the wheel and bounced off a median. Swanson and Foster had decided to head back to Ames late at night after playing 27 holes of golf and visiting friends in Iowa City.

 

“Tyler asked me if I wanted to go, and I didn’t care either way,” Foster said. “We could have slept on the floor at my buddy’s place, but we said, ‘Let’s just go.’”

 

It was a choice that nearly cost Swanson his life.

 

Eyewitness accounts say he was thrown at least 75 feet from the vehicle and Foster was thrown about 25 feet. Neither was wearing a seatbelt. Foster estimates he was unconscious for 10 to 15 minutes before he woke up on the wet grass and started to process what had happened. He began crawling toward the mangled Chevy Lumina, where he hoped he’d find his friend, or at least his cell phone to call for help. As he reached the car he was startled by a voice.

 

“Stay put and don’t move,” came the command from a trucker who had stopped to help. His bright flashlight blinded Foster at first.

 

“I told him there was another kid out there,” Foster said. “He didn’t think I knew what I was talking about. He looked briefly and couldn’t find anyone else.”

 

An off-duty paramedic saw the trucker’s flashlight and thought there was a cop in the median. But as he drew nearer, he realized something wasn’t right. He pulled over and ran to the scene. CDs, golf clubs, shoes, balls, and gloves were strewn everywhere.

 

Mike Wilwol, who was accompanied by two other EMTs on their way home to Cedar Rapids from Des Moines, ordered the trucker to keep looking for Swanson and called 911 to request that an air ambulance remain on standby in case, as Foster was insisting, another person was out there.

 

About two minutes later, through the thick blackness of the night, the trucker found Swanson’s unconscious body. Without his friend being cognizant enough to demand that Swanson be found, and without the good fortune of off-duty EMTs coming upon the scene, Swanson’s family shudders to think how this story may have ended.

 

‘Swanson therapy’
Today Swanson remembers lots of things that happened before the accident, but the first thing he remembers after the accident was being face-to-face with a Great Dane.

 

“It was a Monday and I was in a wheelchair staring him straight in the chops,” Swanson says. “I remember thinking, ‘My God, where are you taking me?’” Swanson was in a hallway at the On With Life rehabilitation center in Ankeny, Iowa, on canine therapy day. He arrived at On With Life in a coma on May 26; he awakened on June 5 – more than a month after the accident. That’s when he started therapy at On With Life to re-learn, well, everything.

 

“My dad said a successful day of therapy at first was just getting me to roll over and maybe making two, three, four grunts,” Swanson says. “[My parents] said they had to teach me to sit up, with my dad sitting on one side and my mom on the other. Part of the therapy was for them to hold me up so I could get used to the sensation of sitting, I guess. I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t remember.”

 

But as soon as Swanson became aware of his situation, he knew there was one thing he really wanted to do: pick up a golf club.

 

“As soon as he woke up, we started talking about it,” says Jay Horton, ISU’s head golf coach. “From that point on, there was never any doubt in my mind that he would come back to Iowa State, and there’s still no doubt in my mind that he’s gonna play competitive golf again.”

 

The road was long, but the work ethic instilled in Swanson by his family – the same work ethic that attracted Horton to the young golf recruit nearly a decade ago – made him a new kind of superstar: best at recovering from brain injury.

 

“At On With Life there was doctor’s therapy, and then they had what they call ‘Swanson therapy,’” Horton says. “The doctors tell you what you should be doing, and the Swanson therapy is, ‘Okay, we’ll do twice as much as what you’re asking.’”

 

“I’m a good ole Iowa boy,” Swanson says. “My dad played college football and pro football and my little brother plays college football. The way my dad thinks is, if you do an exercise for a half hour, an hour’s got to be better. When I was growing up, my dad’s big thing was, ‘If you only want to be as good as everyone else, then only stay on the golf course as long as everyone else,’ So he just beat that into my head.”

 

It quickly became clear that Swanson’s philosophy made him the exception to every rule. Even though his doctors at Genesis West Medical Center said they had never seen one of their brain injury patients return to college, it was beginning to look like a real possibility for Swanson. But what about his emotional well-being? Patients at On With Life have had their lives turned upside down; they all leave with prescriptions for antidepressants.

 

“There was a psychiatrist who came to see me in my room and asked me if I wanted to be here,” Swanson remembers. “I told him, ‘Of course I don’t want to be here – I hate being on house arrest.’ He said, ‘No, I mean here as in living,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I?’ I didn’t work this hard not to stay living.”

 

The day Tyler Swanson walked out of On With Life, he became the first to do so without antidepressants.

 

‘They thought I was a Hawkeye’
After spending seven months in rehabilitation, Swanson received a gift from his father that still encircles his wrist today: a yellow “Livestrong” bracelet. Living strong became his way of life.

 

“I hate being out of the norm,” Swanson says. “I hate it – every bit of it. If people think of me differently from the norm, I hate it. In my mind, I went to college to graduate from college. You can’t stop halfway through; that’s pointless. And I didn’t want to be looked down upon because I got in a car accident and couldn’t finish college.”

 

So he finished.

 

Swanson didn’t lose any of his intelligence as a result of his accident, but when he returned as an ISU student he struggled with how to utilize it.

 

“I used to fly by the seat of my pants,” Swanson says. “All my focus was on golf and my classes were just, whatever. I could finish my schoolwork like that. But when I came back I had to change focus points; I really couldn’t multi-task that well.”

 

Swanson changed his major from marketing to speech communications (“I wasn’t exactly the valedictorian of marketing,” he jokes) and focused on earning his degree in that discipline.

 

That’s when he met Fred Vallier, a retired ISU professor who was back on campus to teach a course on business and professional speaking. Vallier’s background was in speech and language pathology, with a specialty in brain trauma. Vallier took an instant shining to Swanson and offered to do everything he could to help him achieve his goal of graduating.

 

“He had some memory problems when it came to following highly abstract instructions,” Vallier says. “It was somewhat hard for him to sit in a lecture situation and pull out all the details, but that’s pretty characteristic of anyone who has had a head injury.”

 

But with Vallier’s help, Swanson learned the material. “He had a determination about him that the accident didn’t destroy,” Vallier says. “He stuck with things and did them and got them out of the way. It would have been easy for him to say, ‘To heck with it,’ but he never did. In some ways I think he was lucky that he was left with enough to be able to pull himself back up. Plus, he’s likeable. He’s got such a good sense of humor. That helps.”

 

Vallier says he knows Swanson’s likeable personality and determination to succeed made an impression on his classmates, especially after a speech Swanson gave in Vallier’s class about how society views people with disabilities – told from the perspective of a disabled person who recently wasn’t.

 

“He got up and he talked with the students about being very careful in the way that you approach or handle or think about people who have disabilities. He gets up there and can talk with a great deal of authority, and he’s not bashful about doing it at all. It turned out to be a very moving presentation,” Vallier says.

 

“When [Vallier] told that story about how Tyler got up in front of the speech class and gave [that] speech,” Horton says, “I thought, wow, that’s a pretty deep thing. That’s how I knew he was taking things more seriously.”

 

On Aug. 16, 2008, Tyler Swanson walked across the stage at his college graduation. (“We were so proud we couldn’t even stand it,” Cindy Swanson said.) A few months earlier, he was invited to the ISU athletics department’s Scholar-Athlete Banquet and was surprised with a special recognition: “The Eye of the Storm Award.”

 

“I didn’t know what was going on. They were announcing all these people who had like, 4.8 GPAs in chemical engineering and stuff, and in my head I am thinking I missed a memo – like maybe you’re supposed to be smart to be at this thing,” Swanson says. When the video began playing that told Swanson’s story, his first reaction was fear: He was getting an award, and they were going to make him get up in front of the audience and talk.

“My dad gives a speech and gets everyone crying,” says Swanson, who rolls his eyes and admits that to this day he still doesn’t fully understand what everyone finds so remarkable about his story. “I knew I couldn’t do that, so I thought I’d throw in a little comment about how they gave me such little odds of living independently. I told them that when I was in the ICU in Iowa City, they only gave me those odds because they thought I was a Hawkeye. But since I’m a Cyclone, those odds go way up.”

 

The crowd laughed and cheered, and Tyler Swanson was in his element.

 

‘He doesn’t know any other way’
“You see, it starts with my grandpa and them goes to my dad, and then down to me,” Swanson says, cracking a wide smile as he talks about his love of sarcasm. “My grandpa’s got one-liners to no end. My mom’s got her fair share of smartass-ness as well. My dad once told me, ‘If you’re thin-skinned, you’re in the totally wrong family.’”

 

Swanson’s thick-skinned immediate family includes his parents and his 20-year-old brother, Taylor, a student at Central College in Pella who is also a member of the Dutch football team. Swanson says he could never have accomplished what he did without them.

 

“They’ve been over the top on everything,” he says. “We’re very close; we’ve always been close. I think, honestly, this whole thing was harder for them than it was for me because I didn’t know what I ‘should have’ been thinking. They had to deal with the idea that their oldest son might be dead. I commend them for being ungodly strong.”

 

The patented Swanson family sarcasm and stubbornness have always defined Tyler’s personality, and those who know him best say he hasn’t changed.

 

“I was a hothead growing up. I would always get mad if I lost. My brother actually says I’ve gotten nicer [since the accident].” Swanson says. “I guess, in a way, I’m more happy-go-lucky.”

 

But in the end, it’s probably just Swanson’s perspective – not his personality – that has changed.

 

“Before, I thought I was on top of the world. But now I just have to take it day by day and be thankful for the days I get, because I damn near didn’t have any more days,” he says.

 

“Tyler’s personality is the same,” says Horton. “His work ethic, his stubbornness – those are the things that got him through the accident and are continuing to let him recover today. He’s the same old Tyler that he was before. He just doesn’t know any other way.”

 

For the love of golf
When Tyler Swanson is holding a golf club, there is joy.

 

He’s been playing since he was three years old. At 12, he beat his father for the first time. At 18, he won the Iowa High School Class 4A state championship by a whopping 11 strokes. At 19, he won the Quad Cities Tour and earned a sponsor exemption into the 2003 John Deere Classic, where he made the cut with back-to-back 71s. He was the first Cyclone to make the cut at a PGA Tour event while a student-athlete. At 20, he set two tournament records en route to a victory at the Stevinson Ranch Invitational.

 

And at 21, he broke 100.

 

Today, at 25, Swanson rates his golf game as a “6 or 7” on a scale of 1-10. “Above average, but not really where I want to be,” he says. “Since I graduated, it’s gotten a lot better.”

 

“He’s had limitations on his left side, but you put a club in his right hand and he knows what to do,” Horton says. “His mind hasn’t changed; his mind knows exactly what he wants to do and how to do it. He just can’t quite get his arms and hands to do exactly what he wants them to do yet. But it just keeps getting better.”

 

“It’s a cliché in sports, but he always had that ‘it’ factor,” Horton explains. “He didn’t have the prettiest swing; he didn’t have the prettiest putting stroke. He kind of rocked back on his heels and locked his knees, but he had the desire of wanting to win. And he was bull-headed; it took me about a year to figure out that the easiest way to get something out of him was really to make him mad. Tell him he can’t do something, and he’s the type of guy who will try to prove you wrong.”

 

Swanson admits it was frustrating when he first returned to the ISU golf team in 2006: “When I came back, Coach had variations of every drill for me, just to make it so I was competitive with everybody else. He always made it so I could still be part of the team, which was fun. But I knew that I used to mop the floor with these people [on the course], and it wasn’t happening.”

 

So Swanson had to learn to compete against himself.

 

“Before, golf was just pure competition to him,” Horton says. “He wanted to beat people. But the great thing about golf is that all ages and all handicaps can play. Golf is about breaking down barriers and pushing your own limits.”

 

Swanson says he has worked on and learned to appreciate the value of mental endurance.

 

“If you look back on my high school records, I would never really win the 9-hole meets,” he says. “But if we played the same course, 18 holes, I would win. I played better when I was pissed off, basically. I’d use it as motivation. But now I have to work on not getting over-saturated with thoughts about the shots I should hit and not getting run down. As my mental endurance has gotten better, it has made golf a little easier.”

Through Swanson’s recovery process, Horton says, “I think he found just how much he loved golf.”

 

“It’s all individualistic,” Swanson says. “You get all the accolades if you play well, and there’s no one else to blame when you play badly. I guess, in a way, I might be a control freak because I like the fact that you can’t throw the blame anywhere else.”

 

The lessons of sports have played a valuable role in Swanson’s life, but perhaps more now than ever.

 

“Hard work is going to get you somewhere in life,” he says. “You can get behind against all odds, and each individual’s outcome is going to be different. My outcome may be different from what I want it to be, but I’ll be damned if it’s not going to work out for me because I didn’t work hard enough.”

 

Just a bump in the road
Both Vallier and Horton say they think Swanson has tremendous potential for a career working to assist and motivate other victims of brain injury. But career-wise, Swanson says he has put “all his eggs” in the golf basket for now. After a stint working for his father at Bos Landen in Pella, Swanson is beginning a new position at Pinnacle Golf Course in Milan, Ill., this spring. He plans to remain in the golf industry, at least until he fully explores his options for playing professionally in the future.

 

“I should ride that until it fizzles out,” he says. “I wanna play.”

 

Swanson says neurologists told him his progress has been “amazing” and that he should expect to eventually recover 100 percent. “When exactly do you plan on this going down?” Swanson remembers asking the doctor.

 

“My muscle memory just went in my accident,” says Swanson. “Time is my best friend, apparently. But I can’t say I’ve ever done this before, so I’m not sure.”

 

Swanson’s path to recovery and his matter-of-fact attitude about facing his obstacles is stunning to many, but friends like Horton aren’t surprised.

 

“I can see somebody on the outside looking in going, ‘Yeah, that’s amazing.’ But I guess I’ve known him for so long that, to me, it’s him. It’s normal. It’s life. It’s how he is. It’s who he is. So maybe it will sink in more to me 20 years from now, but I’m gonna be just as happy seeing him get that full recovery as anything else. He will probably just pick up where he would have been when he was a junior in college.

 

“He just hit a little side bump.”