Teen won’t let amnesia keep him from soccer dream

Scripps Howard News Service

No one knows what happened March 1.

Johnny Harris, 17, was home alone one afternoon when he headed up to the roof of his San Angelo, Texas, home to work on the gutters. What occurred there is anybody’s guess.

Upon returning home, Johnny’s mother, Regina, found her son obviously impaired. His speech was slurred, movements slow and eyes unfocused.

Regina asked Johnny to remove his cap so she could get a better look at his face.

“When he took it off, there were these huge knots,” Regina said. But on that Sunday, the high-school senior’s insistence that it was Saturday worried her more.

“What happened yesterday?” she asked.

Johnny proceeded to describe in perfect detail an incident that had happened in 2005.

Regina called her doctor immediately, and he sent them straight to the emergency room.

Johnny insisted he could walk without help, but the young man who usually moved with an athlete’s grace — and who was actively pursuing a college soccer career — couldn’t find his footing.

Tests at the hospital showed Johnny had a concussion.

Other than a headache, Johnny felt fine, and he didn’t believe anything was wrong with his memory until he looked down and didn’t recognize his clothes.

Doctors struggled to explain why Johnny’s memories were gone.

“The best [explanation] they could come up with is, it’s like shaken-baby syndrome,” Regina said. “The neurochemicals in his brain had gotten shaken, and they moved away from those memories. They can’t figure out a pathway back.”

After a few days, he was released from the hospital and came home to a world he didn’t recognize.

Johnny’s memory has slowly started to return, but not the way he expected. Moments simply come back to him during regular conversation.

“It’s like how you daydream,” Johnny said. “You’re talking, but you’re thinking about something else. That’s how I remember stuff. People sit there and say, ‘Do you remember this?’ And I’m like, ‘No, and I’m not going to when you remind me.’ I’ve never remembered like that.”

Friends didn’t know how to interact with him, and the accident erased memories of a two-year relationship, an ex-girlfriend who now knew him better than he knew himself.

“When I talked to her, she knew everything about me,” Johnny said.

Johnny decided he would simply relearn what he had lost.

He studied yearbooks and pored over journals he had kept since seventh grade.

Johnny’s muscle memory was not affected by the concussion.

Soon after he came home, Johnny went out to the backyard and then came inside smiling.

“I went out to kick a soccer ball,” he told his mother. “The things I can do with it are sick.”

Several colleges had been recruiting him, and Johnny called them all a few days after the accident. Most were no longer interested.

One school kept its offer on the table — the University of Texas-Permian Basin.

“I was surprised UTPB was still interested,” Johnny said. “It’s a lot of money to give someone who fell off the roof and can’t remember 21‚Ñ2 years. But they said they would respect their verbal commitment. That was cool.”