Bouncing Back

What makes Reilley a great motivational and inspirational speaker? To be sure, it’s not only her first hand experience of a life-threatening accident. Nor is it solely her determination to keep her life, get her sport back and actually win that war. Make no mistake, all these lend her credibility. But really, it is because Reilley is gifted with a mind and heart that accept with courage life’s dealings, and because she is perceptive enough to learn its lessons.

Read on for a taste of Reilley’s inspiration. Click here to invite her to your event.

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“Chimney Rock is the best thing that ever happened to me. If I hadn’t broken my back and bruised my heart and cracked my sternum, I’d have never known how family, friends and love can bring you through anything. With this and the surgeries the year before, people say, ‘Oh, you’re the most unlucky person.’ They’re wrong. I’m the luckiest person alive.”

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Surviving a leap of faith – golfer Reilley Rankin

by Dave Kindred

She crashed into the water and thought: ‘I wonder if they’ll be able to find me at the bottom of the lake’

Someone said, “Out in the lake, there’s this rock called Chimney Rock and you can jump off it.” A cautious person would ask: Is the rock close to the shore? How high? Dangerous? Reilley Rankin asked nothing. When you’re 20, you jump. Later come the questions. Hearing about Chimney Rock, she said, “Come on. Now. Let’s go.”

But Rankin and her friends had no boat, no way to get to the rock. So they passed time talking, fishing, riding waves on a Jet Ski. Then, that afternoon, five guys from school showed up and one said, “Isn’t there a place here, Chimney Rock?”

The guys, being guys, commandeered a boat. Everyone piled in, and 10 minutes later they saw the big ol’ rock rising from the lake. Chimney Rock dominates a little island otherwise undistinguished: a few scrub trees, scraggly grass, no landing beach. But the lure of the rock’s high ledge is so strong that on holidays and weekends dozens of boats bring jumpers to the island in Lake Martin, just north of Montgomery, Ala.

Reilley Rankin remembers looking at the rock as her friends’ boat came near it. “Not that big,” she thought. Eagerly, she swam to the rock and clambered past a cautious-jumper’s ledge 20 feet above the water. She went all the way to the top, 70 feet up. From there, Rankin looked down at the boat and the friends she’d left. They looked far, far away and really little. She shouted, “Whoa, guys, this is high.”

Still, she hadn’t come all that way to lay up.

All-America as a University of Georgia freshman golfer, Reilley Rankin won four straight tournaments in that 1997-’98 season. In her sophomore year, she was set back by an appendectomy, hernia repair and treatment for endo-metriosis. Georgia coach Beans Kelly calls her “quiet and humble, a fearless competitor, with the most talent I’ve seen in years.”

Hero shots define Rankin’s game. She says: “Give me a 3-iron out of a bunker to an island green, I’ll go for it. I’ve always been adventurous.”

Well, now. There’s adventure, and there’s adventure. Knock a ball into water, it’s a stroke. Throw yourself into a lake from a high rock, it may be your life.

Not that Rankin had any such proportional thoughts on that dark, stormy afternoon in June 1999. Once on the boulder’s high ledge, barefoot, she realized she had nowhere to go but into the water; it seemed riskier to climb down than to jump. But she couldn’t bring herself to do either.

Two young boys, maybe 15, climbed up when they saw Rankin peer over the edge, peer again and then back away. “We’ve come to comfort you,” one said. She thought they were cute, so she flirted and watched them jump. She wanted to do this hero thing–only not right now. The boys showed her the running start needed to clear the cliff’s edge. In the air, one said, “Be like a pencil.” Then another said, “Ladies first.”

So, after a half-hour’s trepidation, Rankin threw herself off the rock. Right away she knew she’d done it badly. She wasn’t being a pencil. She was running in the air. She wouldn’t slide through the water. She would crash onto it.

Rankin landed on her hind end, “like she was sitting in a chair,” says Anne Hutto, an Auburn University golfer. Then Rankin flipped forward, smacking her upper body against water, which at her falling speed was the next thing to concrete.

She knows what she felt, saw and thought. She felt compacted/crushed. She saw bubbles rising past her eyes. She thought, “I wonder if they’ll be able to find me at the bottom of the lake.”

Rankin had one more thought: “Swim hard.”

Another friend, Auburn golfer Courtney Swaim, jumped from her boat and swam to Rankin. She says, “Reills came up so fast, like she didn’t even go under the water, I knew she was hurt and swimming up fast.”

She might have died. She’d have been paralyzed had either of two broken pieces of her lower spine moved another half-centimeter. The damage: two broken vertebrae, broken sternum and bruises to the heart, lungs and aorta.

Through a storm crackling lightning around their boat, her friends got Rankin to shore and to a hospital. Every breath seemed a dagger to the heart. She wanted to know two things: “Am I going to die?” “Am I going to be able to play golf again?”

For the next five weeks, this young woman forever in motion lay in a body brace at home in Hilton Head, S.C. Her nurses: parents Bill and Mary, sister Caroline and cousin Chris Culton.

“People had to pick me up, because I couldn’t do anything on my own,” she says. “I was a 20-year-old baby who could talk.” (Not that you’d want to hear her. “Reilley is sweet and wonderful,” her mother says, “but this summer she was a nasty witch.”)

Eight weeks after the jump, a Birmingham doctor sat with Rankin and her coach, Kelly. Good news: no surgery necessary; she’d play again. Bad news: add six to eight shots. Rankin says, “Then he goes, ‘Don’t seem so devastated.’ ”

Why wouldn’t she be? If the doctor’s opinion became fact, her dreams were over. No one wins giving away eight shots. No one shoots 80 and makes a dollar on the LPGA Tour.

“I’m thinking, ‘Who’s this guy to tell me that?’ He couldn’t have known the level I was at and where I wanted to go. So maybe I won’t be able to hit it as far. Who knows? And who’s to say, if that’s so, that I won’t be better with my short game?”

A second opinion better fit Rankin’s personality. “This doctor said we just wouldn’t know until I started playing again. We left there with a game plan.”

The plan: “Little steps. Give myself the best chance to come back fully.” She would return to school, rebuild/retrain her traumatized/atrophied golfer’s body, sit out this season and in the fall of 2000 show ‘em that Reilley Rankin can still play. So, in her body brace, she went to class, sometimes lying on the floor. Two hours a day, she worked out with Georgia’s head trainer, Ron Courson.

In half her brace, Rankin chipped and putted with her teammates last fall. She swung 7-irons standing neck-deep in a pool. On Nov. 5, five months after the jump, Courson told Rankin five thrilling words: “Go hit some whiffle balls.”

“No way!” Rankin shouted.

For her first full swing, using a wedge, this young woman who would take a 3-iron out of a bunker over water perched a whiffle ball daintily on a tee. Kelly said no: “Get rid of that fear now.”

Two dozen swings later–”Perfect swings,” the coach says–Beans Kelly wept.

Next came real balls. Rankin set a basket at 60 yards and flew sand wedges 25 yards past it. She looked at Kelly and couldn’t speak. Her body in motion again, the feel of a ball on the clubface, the arc of the ball’s flight–those sensations so long gone and feared lost had returned.

We’re in Reilley Rankin’s car. A plane leaves in 20 minutes. We’re 20 miles from the airport. She’s driving at less than the speed of sound (perhaps). She’s talking.

Her dreams are alive. It’s hard for her to say these things out loud, but she has been asked about her dreams and she says she doesn’t want to be the “next” anybody.

“I want to be me. I don’t want to be the Tiger Woods of the LPGA. I want to start something new. Juli Inkster, Nancy Lopez, they’re the guidelines. Now let’s see what I can do.”

We bump against the airport terminal curb. Rankin is first out and leaving even as her passenger says, “Where are you going?”

“To tell ‘em to hold your plane.”

“Don’t, I can get the next one.”

A stop at the ticket counter. A walk to Gate 3. There is Rankin in conversation with the gate agent. She has persuaded the airline to wait one dad-gummed minute.

“Reilley, how’d you get down here so fast?”

“I ran.”

Then she smiles, laughs and says, “Y’know, that’s the first time I’ve run since I jumped.”