Vandy Win CWS, What You Didn’t Know

[LSUDad]

A Story Of Courage:

Vanderbilt's Tyler Brown dealt with mom's death, daughter's Down syndrome to become one of college baseball's best pitchers

---

 

ADAM SPARKS | NASHVILLE TENNESSEAN

Updated 7:11 a.m. CDT June 27, 2019

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

0:00

0:00

 

 

Vanderbilt pitcher stepped up for fatherhood, daughter with Down syndrome

Tyler Brown and his girlfriend were prepared to be young parents. What they didn't know is their daughter, Isabella, had Down syndrome.

AUTUMN ALLISON, NASHVILLE TENNESSEAN

Thirteen-year-old Tyler Brown lifted his mom’s cancer-riddled body from out of the driver’s seat and took the wheel as she mumbled through a stroke in the summer of 2012.

He punched the gas and drove home as fast as he could. No need to worry about a ticket for speeding or underage driving. Brown had seen trouble before and would see far worse ahead.

Brown, now a Vanderbilt baseball standout, was just a few weeks from holding his dying mom’s limp body in their kitchen. It would take another week before his estranged father would learn about her death.

Two years later, he was adopted. Three years later, he blew out his pitching arm in high school. And, in his freshman year at Vanderbilt, his daughter was born with Down syndrome and a life-threatening heart condition. 

Now, Brown is a 20-year-old doting father, a man of renewed faith and one of the best relief pitchers in college baseball with an extraordinary story to tell.

“But I can sit here today and tell you that I don’t deserve all the ways that God has blessed me,” said Brown, who will play for Vanderbilt in the NCAA Tournament this weekend.

Blue-collar kid from Ohio

Brown, a right-handed sophomore, was an All-SEC relief pitcher this season. His 14 saves lead the conference and rank sixth nationally. When Vanderbilt needed to close out a tight game, coach Tim Corbin usually handed the baseball to Brown.

“Because to Tyler, that’s not pressure. That’s just competing,” Corbin said. “Life has thickened his skin. He’s had experiences you and I have not had.”

Brown grew up in a blue-collar family near Savannah, Ohio. His dad was a truck driver and his mom worked in a factory. Brown only knew hard work, hard-nosed sports and hard times.

He was chopping wood as a 9-year-old to fill the family’s wood stove in the winter when his mother stopped short while swinging a maul splitter over her head. A pulled muscle in her chest seemed like a minor injury, but months of persistent pain revealed a tumor.

“Getting off the (school) bus that day and walking inside, everyone was sitting there quiet, like a morgue,” Brown said. “Mom was under a blanket. She didn’t want to look at me because she felt like a disappointment.”

Cindy Brown had multiple myeloma, a cancer that attacks white blood cells and eats through bone marrow. She struggled through tumors, chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant before finally going into remission. But the Brown family never recovered, and an already-strained marriage broke apart.

“My mom had her falling out with my dad," Brown said. "Then me and my dad had our falling out. They divorced in the summer after my fifth-grade year. I felt like I was on my own.”

‘Mom, you’re freaking me out!’

The cancer had returned by the time Cindy Brown slurred her speech and swerved her car down a country road while having a stroke that day. Her son was walking home from a nearby farm, where he had baled hay in the sun to earn money for the family.

“Mom, you’re freaking me out! What’s wrong?” Brown yelled after he flagged down her car.

He drove her home and then sprinted to a nearby paramedic’s house for help. She went to the hospital and recovered. A few weeks later, Brown ran frantically to the neighbor’s house again, but it was too late.

 

[LSUDad]

Almost seven years later, while sitting in the Vanderbilt dugout, Brown can describe every detail of his mom’s death on Aug. 3, 2012. He pauses with each breath and illustrates the scene — as if he’s seen it a thousand times in his mind..

“(My half-sister) Jessica is unpacking the groceries. Me and mom are sitting at the table, and mom just falls over,” Brown said. “We start carrying her. She collapses, just dead weight. I panic. 

“She’s looking at us. I tell her I love her. She says, 'I love you, too.' Then, I feel her go.”

A relationship too strained for description

Stiffening his back against the dugout wall, Brown struggles to describe the strained relationship with his father. He wants to put it in a mature light. After all, he’s a father now. But pain is pulsating through his face.

“I have reached out to him a couple times in my life to try to mend things, but there’s no healing, I guess,” Brown said. “I found God and I learned to forgive.”

Brown won't offer details about what separated he and his father, but he acknowledges there was trauma he’d rather not replay. He declines to provide his father’s name, and he doesn’t list him on his biography page on the Vanderbilt baseball website.

Brown’s anger boiled over after his mom’s death. He said it took a week before his father heard about her death.

“I was there. I was the man of the house. Where were you? I don’t need you,” said Brown, raising his voice in the dugout, as though still a 13-year-old talking to his estranged father.

Brown lived with his father for a short time until the court granted emergency guardianship to Dan Pritt, the father of Tyler’s half-sisters. Then he lived with his former Little League coach, Greg Ramsey, and son Walker, who was Tyler’s close friend and football teammate. Then he lived with Jimmy and Amie Walker, his mother's friends.

Within two years, Jimmy Walker died in a car crash and Walker Ramsey, a 17-year-old quarterback, died of a seizure.

[LSUDad]

‘God was present when we met’

Tragedy seemed to pause when Brown was adopted by Brandon and Koren Oswalt.

“Brandon just came into my life,” Brown said. “God was present when we met.”

Brandon Oswalt was a talented former pitcher from the same Ohio area. He came from a broken home, suffered career-ending arm injuries and hit hard financial times as an adult. He found solace in faith, forgiveness and coaching baseball.

“Parts of Tyler’s life is my life on repeat,” Oswalt said.

Oswalt coached Brown on a summer baseball team. After games, they would go fishing, pray together beside the lake and talk about life’s hard lessons. Oswalt taught the 16-year-old to let go of anger from his mom’s death and hate from his dad’s absence.

The Oswalts adopted Brown on Dec. 9, 2014, and moved to nearby Columbus. They quickly discovered the extent of his neglect.

Brown hadn’t been to a dentist in years. He read at a third-grade level and struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia.

Brown caught up academically, thrived athletically and grew into an imposing pitcher with a 95-mph fastball.

‘Worth taking a chance on’

Brown’s dream of playing Major League Baseball started as a 6-year-old sitting on the couch with his mom and watching C.C. Sabathia pitch for the Cleveland Indians.

[LSUDad]

Brown hadn’t been to a dentist in years. He read at a third-grade level and struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia.

Brown caught up academically, thrived athletically and grew into an imposing pitcher with a 95-mph fastball.

‘Worth taking a chance on’

Brown’s dream of playing Major League Baseball started as a 6-year-old sitting on the couch with his mom and watching C.C. Sabathia pitch for the Cleveland Indians.

When Vanderbilt's Corbin, fresh off winning the 2014 national championship, came to recruit Brown, it was his chance to shine. Corbin had already sent several Vanderbilt pitchers to the major leagues, and he was interested in Brown.

 

[LSUDad]

The rest of the story. 

https://www.tennessean.com/story/sports/college/vanderbilt/2019/05/30/vanderbilt-baseball-tyler-brown-ncaa-tournament/3665549002/