Cedar Rapids Kernels outfielder Willie Joe Garry Jr. saved his father’s life

CEDAR RAPIDS — They texted back and forth after a recent game last week.

That’s the nightly procedure between Cedar Rapids Kernels outfielder Willie Joe Garry Jr. and his father. Either it’s texts or actual phone calls.

Willie Joe Garry Sr. bought an internet package on MiLB.com that allows him to watch each of his son’s games from home in Pascagoula, Miss. Senior critiques Junior’s at-bats, watches his routes and things on defense, then let’s him know what he thinks.

Willie Joe Garry Jr. was taken by the Minnesota Twins in the ninth round of the 2018 MLB Draft out of Pascagoula High School. The 23-year-old is in his sixth season in the organization, splitting time last season between high-Class A Cedar Rapids and Double-A Wichita.

The advice-from-dad thing, that’s been a constant, ever since Willie Joe Garry Jr. and his younger brother, Warren, started playing T-ball. Dad bought a pitching machine and built a batting cage in their backyard for his boys and whoever else in town might want to get some work in.

Willie Joe Sr. gave them all hitting advice, if they wanted it. He’s studied the game, watched videos, learned lots of things from former longtime major league outfielder Matt Lawton, a Mississippi native who coached Willie Joe Jr. on some travel teams growing up.

Senior, himself, had been good enough back in the day to make an area all-star game the one year he played baseball when he was a youth. He was a lefty like Junior.

But he never attended that game in Hattiesburg, Miss., just a couple of hours away from Pascagoula. He loved his father, Willie Joe Sr. said, but support was never one of his father’s strong suits.

“I knew what it felt like not to be supported,” he said. “So I knew when I had my own children, the one thing they weren’t going to be is unsupported.”

Which brings us to early spring 2016. The Garrys were set to leave the following day for a week-long tournament in Panama Beach, Fla.

The packing had been done, the suitcases filled. Willie Joe Sr. and his wife, Betty Wells, were relaxing in their bedroom watching a movie.

Willie Joe Jr. and Warren were in another room in the house doing the same via a Fire Stick device their father literally had just given them.

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“I remember it like it was yesterday. I put on the movie ‘The Shallows,’ because it had just come out,“ Junior said. “I pause it, get on my phone for about five minutes, and all of a sudden I hear my mom scream. I’m thinking she’s screaming my name, but he’s Senior, right?

“So I start walking down the hall, and she’s running to me, she’s screaming. And keep in mind my mom is a nurse, deals with this stuff, just not at home. She’s freaking out, I walk into their room, and I see my father seizuring and unconscious, kind of foaming at the mouth.”

Willie Joe Sr. was on his bed in full cardiac arrest. Despite being completely shocked by the scene unfolding in front of him and just a 15-year-old sophomore in high school, Willie Joe Jr. leaped into action.

“I’m honestly kind of blacking out during this whole thing,” he said. “I somehow get to the kitchen and grab a flat pan out of the drawer and put it under him. I start giving him CPR until the paramedics get there. He comes back to, so I stop. He starts seizuring again, so I start CPR again.”

Junior was the only member of the family who knew Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and only because his parents forced him to take classes on it. He had completed those classes and become CPR certified just a month before.

Now he was performing it ... on his own father.

“That’s God. That’s how God works,” Garry Sr. said. “He took that course right at the end of the (semester) ... God knew that this was going to happen, and he prepared my son.”

“As an arrogant kid, I wanted to take P.E. for fourth block my sophomore year,” Garry Jr. said. “My guidance counselor was telling me ‘Hey, you’re going to need a health class for credits to make sure you graduate.’ I didn’t want to take it ... They ended up sending home a letter to my dad and my mom, so they forced me into taking the class. I finished it, I think February was the end of the semester. I got CPR certified in that class a month before the incident with my dad. A month before. It’s crazy. It’s like my testimony.”

Paramedics eventually arrived on the scene and the family was escorted out of the house as they worked on Garry Sr. Things were very much touch and go and continued that way.

Senior was in a coma in the hospital for over a week, and the family was told to say their last goodbyes to him.

“My mom goes into his room, and he kind of wakes up, says something to her,” Garry Jr. said. “She freaks out, calls the nurses, they rush in, start working on him. The next day he starts getting better. The day after that he keeps getting better. It was like a miracle.

“They were like ‘We don’t know how.’ They end up putting a pacemaker in. But they don’t know how it happened, why it happened. He didn’t have clogged arteries. Nothing. He smoked before that, so they said that could have been it. But they weren’t sure.”

Garry Sr. said he remembers laying on his bed watching a movie, then nothing until seeing the flourescent lights on the ceiling of his hospital room.

“I opened my eyes and I saw all these lights ... and I thought ‘I know we don’t have these types of lights at home,’” he said. “Then the nurse asked me ‘Mr. Garry. Do you know where you’re at?’ She said ‘You died, and your son saved your life.’ Those were the first words I heard.”

Garry Jr. was recognized publicly for his heroism by the next-door city of Moss Point. His 60-year-old father is doing well physically, says he’s “healthy as a horse.”

He always has been reticent to tell this story because he’s still processing it, even eight years later.

“I had two news reporters who wanted to talk to me about it, but I wasn’t ready,” he said. “I was still dealing with the feeling of what happened. I was dealing with the fear of the doctors not knowing what caused it. In some cases, still dealing with the cracked ribs from the CPR.

“I wanted to talk about it one day, but ... Y’all don’t get it, what’s going through my head even right now. I was dead.”

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Senior broke down for a bit during this conversation.

“Right now, I still tear up talking about it,” he said. “When I think about it, when I’m put on the spot about it right there ...”

For years, Garry Jr. always has written “8%” on his hats as a reminder of everything because that’s how many people typically survive his father’s situation. He said he was fairly recently told that number actually has been updated to 6 percent. As you’d expect, he has become a huge CPR advocate.

“Get CPR certified,” he said. “For sure.”

Which brings us back around to the father-son text exchange following that aforementioned game last week. Senior gave his opinions, Junior responded to them.

Then Senior signed off.

“Hand on my heart,” he wrote with a couple of emojis. “Son, I’m alive. Thank you.”

Comments: jeff.johnson@thegazette.com