HIGH POINT, N.C. (AP) - When you meet Connor McKemey, you can’t help but notice the pink and white blotches covering much of his face, the telltale scars of a burn victim.
They are scars that brought tears to his eyes the first time he saw them as a 14-year-old boy.
Scars so horrific that he used to avoid brushing his teeth in the bathroom, just so he wouldn’t have to see himself in the mirror over the sink.
Scars that draw stares and whispers from curious, sometimes rude, strangers.
Scars that constantly remind him of just how much he lost that day five years ago, when an outdoor fireplace accident at his home in Fort Mill, S.C., turned him into a human fireball. Only the efforts of his mother and a quick-thinking neighbor, who wrapped his body in wet towels to smother the fire and cool his seared flesh, saved his life.
“I had a 1-percent chance of survival for the first 36 hours,” says McKemey, a freshman at High Point University. “My dad was flying back from Iraq, where he’d been serving for about nine months, and they were just trying to keep me alive long enough for him to see me.”
Once a three-sport athlete, McKemey spent two months in an induced coma to help with the healing process, but he was told - rather, his parents were told - that he would do well to walk again, much less play sports. How could he possibly play lacrosse, his favorite sport, when he surely wouldn’t be able to run or grip a stick with his scarred, disfigured hands?
“I would keep asking my mom when I could go out and play lacrosse again,” he recalls. “She tried to sugarcoat it, but all she heard from the doctors was that I would never play sports again.”
It’s a sad, horrific story that McKemey’s scars tell, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Look beneath those scars, as he has learned to do, and you won’t see a teenage burn victim. You’ll see a burn survivor.
Look beneath those scars, as HPU lacrosse coach Jon Torpey has done, and you won’t see a former lacrosse player deserving of pity. You’ll see a guy who overcame those scars and played four years of high-school lacrosse, who still has an unquenchable passion for the game, and who will make a great college lacrosse coach someday.
Look beneath those scars at the young man McKemey has become, and before long, you won’t see the scars at all.
McKemey began playing lacrosse around third or fourth grade. He played football and basketball, too, but lacrosse became the sport he loved, fueled by a competitive desire to be better than his big brother.
“I just fell in love with the game,” he says.
By middle school, McKemey was good enough to play on his school team, and as an eighth-grader he dreamed of going on to play in high school and maybe even college. In December 2008, though, those plans literally blew up in his face, when his family’s outdoor fireplace exploded as he was trying to light the logs. He suffered burns over nearly 90 percent of his body, most of them third-degree burns.
After emerging from the induced coma and learning the extent of his injuries, McKemey says he initially held a pity party, but eventually made a conscious decision to move on.
“It was really rough at first, because I felt like I had the world in my hands before the accident happened,” he says. “After a week or two, though, I just decided this is what it is, and I can’t go back and change it. I could dream about what life would’ve been like if it hadn’t happened, but it did happen, and I just had to make the best of it.”
He had a great medical team and strong support from family and friends, but the force that drove McKemey to overcome his burns was the desire to play lacrosse again.
“I decided this is my life, and the way I want it to be does not involve me sitting around being a potato for the rest of my life,” he says.
“I want to go out and do all the things I did before the accident. I want to play all the sports I played and hang out with my friends like I did before. Regardless of what the doctors said, I believed I was going to be able to play sports again - I just didn’t know how much effort I would have to put in to be able to do that.”
McKemey initially worked hard just to get back on his feet. First came walking, then running. Getting in shape - and then staying in shape - posed challenges because his training was continually interrupted by skin grafts and other operations.
Then came the day he put a lacrosse stick in his hands for the first time.
“It was hard at first,” he recalls. “What they do when you have deep burns to your hands is they pin your fingers and your joints in a way so that when they heal, your hand will be more functional. So I could hold the stick in my hands, but I needed a lot more finger strength to grip it and have more control.”
He wore a specially modified lacrosse glove that conformed to his misshapen fingers, and gradually regained strength in his fingers.
Seven months after the accident that nearly killed him, McKemey returned to competitive lacrosse. As a freshman at Fort Mill High School, he led his junior varsity team in goals and assists, and then he played three years as a defender on the varsity team.
By his senior year, he’d begun looking at collegiate lacrosse teams and weighing his options. Ultimately, he settled on the program where he felt he could be the most successful - High Point University - despite the fact he’ll never play a single game.
Jon Torpey, the coach of HPU’s fledgling men’s lacrosse team, first learned of McKemey’s inspirational story in a 2011 feature article in Lacrosse Magazine. What grabbed him most, though, was the next-to-last paragraph, in which the teen said he hoped to play college lacrosse at High Point University.
Within a week, Torpey had reached out to McKemey and invited him to come visit the campus, to participate in one of the team’s clinics.
“I got a chance to see him as a competitor,” Torpey recalls. “He’s an angry dude - a very angry competitor - and I mean that in the most positive way.”
Even more than his lacrosse skills, though, Torpey was struck by McKemey’s passion for the sport. His competitive spirit. His dedication. His work ethic. His positive, never-say-die attitude.
“I just fell in love with the kind of person that he is,” Torpey recalls. “I said, ’We’ve got to get this guy involved in our program in some way, shape or form, because he brings so much with who he is.’”
As it turns out, that’s what happened. McKemey realized during his senior year of high school that college lacrosse might not be an option for him anymore.
“My senior year, lacrosse kind of caught up to me and took a toll on my body and my joints, especially my feet and ankles,” he says, describing the litany of problems he had with his feet, which had been badly burned in the accident. “Physically, it was just something I didn’t think I could keep doing.”
Instead, McKemey serves as the HPU team’s manager, but his role goes well beyond that.
“He is as big a part of the team as any other guy,” Torpey says. “He helps with drills, showing guys what to do. He’s filming practices and games, and breaking stuff down for us. And he’s such a good guy, everybody has been so accepting of him. He’s as valuable to us as any guy on the team.”
Torpey says McKemey’s understanding of the game exceeds his years, a quality that will serve him well in his desire to become a lacrosse coach when he graduates from HPU.
And who could possibly be better suited to talk to a group of athletes about overcoming adversity than McKemey? In fact, he’s already done that with the lacrosse team, delivering a poignant message that Torpey believes made a lasting impression on the players.
“When he speaks,” the coach says, “the guys listen.”
That, too, will serve McKemey well in one of his other passions - public speaking. Even at 18, he’s already made himself available for sharing his story with others - particularly those who may be facing adversity of their own - and he hopes to do more of that.
That’s a testament to the kind of person he is, Torpey says.
“When you first meet him, you’re kind of looking at him like, ’God, I can’t believe what he’s been through,’ and you’re looking at those scars,” Torpey says. “But there’s so much more to Connor. One of the best compliments I can give him is that I don’t see those scars anymore. I don’t even think about them anymore.”
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Information from: High Point Enterprise, https://www.hpe.com
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