Going Out On Top

Wes Leonard may have only been a small-town high school idol in Southwestern Michigan, but that didn’t make him any less of a hero that ended up riding off into the sunset.  Wes went out on top and on more than his own terms, he went out on the terms of a greater power.  We should all be so lucky.  Eat your heart out, John Elway.

At age 16, Wes was the quarterback of the varsity football team, as well as the the cog everyone looked to on the basketball court. He had already reached the 1,000 point mark for his career in what was only his junior season. Like many multi-sport athletes, his greatness and potential seemingly transcended an entire athletic program.

The Fennville Blackhawks were matched in a tightly contested overtime slug-fest. This wasn’t just any late-season league match-up. Fennville was undefeated with a record of 19-0, and only their rival – the Bridgman Bees – were standing in the way of a perfect 20-0 regular season.

With seconds remaining and the score tied at 85, Leonard found the ball in his hands as everyone expected. Wes drove to his left, then crossed over to his right for the game-winning layup as time expired. Fennville wins, 87-85. They are perfect, 20-0. The entire team and student body is crowding near center court in boisterous disorder.

It’s the moment of a young lifetime. It’s what a 16-year old talent has dreamed about all his life. It is the pinnacle he surely had played out as a youth several times in his driveway versus the snot-bubbling cold of winter.

After the celebration subsides and the teams begin to align for a congratulation of each other, Wes collapses. As quickly as the suspense of the game’s final moments turned into instant and unbridled elation, excitement screeched into panic.

“He made the shot and then the game was over, we had won, everyone rushed the court. He did the team lineups where they all shake hands, the basketball team held him up, he started walking, then collapsed.”  This was the account by student body president Tobias Hutchins.

The crowd suddenly became silent when Leonard lay unconscious on the floor. A Holland Hospital spokesperson later recounted, “Nobody knew for sure why he had collapsed and was suddenly on the floor.”

Paramedics rushed to the court and performed CPR on Leonard. He was then rushed to Holland Hospital where he died a couple of hours later.

David A. Start, the chief medical examiner for Ottawa County, said on Friday that the cause of death was “cardiac arrest due to dilated cardiomyopathy,” or an enlarged heart.

Everybody in Fennville already knew before there was any calamity or subsequent autopsy that Wes had heart bursting out of his chest.

Chad VanHuis, a 21-year-old Fennville High graduate who once umpired Leonard’s middle school baseball games and was his camp counselor, heard that Leonard had collapsed as he headed into work. During his break around 1:30 a.m., VanHuis, an assembly line worker at an auto glass factory in nearby Holland, logged on to Facebook and learned of his friend’s passing.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said VanHuis, who remembered opposing baseball coaches asking to see his birth certificate, not believing a 12-year-old could be so big and skilled.

“He was very courteous. He was the nicest kid. You’d think with his star potential, because he was so gifted, he could have been cocky, but he never really was that way,” continued VanHuis.

Fennville Superintendent Dirk Weeldreyer remembered Leonard as “the quintessential all-American kid.”

“He had a great grin and was always cheerful. Younger kids throughout the community looked up to him and idolized him,” Weeldreyer said. “As the quarterback of our championship football team, he could throw a dart 40 yards down the field. He had the body of a linebacker, but he also was able to bring the ball up the floor as the leader of our basketball team.”

“It’s tough to take in,” Leonard’s teammate Shane Bale told The Holland Sentinel. “He was like somebody from your family, you know?”

When unthinkable tragedy strikes, it is a bleak reminder that the fragility of life is equally precious in any walk of it. It spans indefinitely from old to young, rich to poor, oblivious to conscious, guilty to innocent. While our directions of existence may greatly waiver, our own mortality is the sole thing that does not.

One can only imagine the exchange between Wes and St. Peter himself at the entrance to the pearly gates. Rejoice in its potential. The gates slowly open.  Only one word is spoken by the gate-keeper. It is the bestowing of permission that graciously allows him to proceed.

“Swish.”