Completed Event: Baseball versus No. 11 seed Kansas State on May 19, 2026 , Loss , 5, to, 9
Final Score
Baseball
5
vs No. 11 seed Kansas State
9
The University of Utah Athletics
Long Venture Back To Health For Westfall
4/10/2001 12:00 AM | Baseball
March 27, 2001
By Gordon Monson
The Salt Lake Tribune
SALT LAKE CITY - Young Mike Westfall was living an idyllic sporting life, playing college baseball at the University of Utah and relishing it, until everything went criminally insane that awful December night 15 months back.
In a park not more than a minute's walking distance from his Phoenix home, a place with verdant, spacious fields where he grew up playing every kind of ball, Westfall says he was blindsided by a raging stranger. He had his head cracked and caved in by a wild man swinging a pistol, driving the butt of a handgun into his skull 10 to 20 times.
The sickening thuds continued when Westfall hit the ground. He says his attacker kicked him, again and again, until his body lay quivering in the grass. While standing on top of Westfall, the assailant pointed the gun straight into the freshman's battered face, and screamed, "Should I do it? Should I do it?"
"Please, no," pleaded a small group of Westfall's friends.
"You're gone, you mother------," the stranger yelled. "You're gone."
The trigger was never pulled, but the man might have been right, should have been right, given Westfall's already pitiably woeful condition. His skull was broken in five different places. His brain was bleeding and bloating. His neck was broken.
When doctors ran their X-rays and CT scans, after they examined the grave extent of the wounds, they told Westfall's parents to go in and "kiss your son because he likely won't make it through the night."
The news was too cruel, too brutal for Lori and Mike Westfall Sr. to bear. It was too early for any such goodbye kiss. Mike Jr., their eldest son, was just 18 years old, on Christmas break after his first semester at Utah. He had every reason to live. Why should he die at the misbegotten hands of a another man?
Mike Westfall Sr., a deputy chief of the Phoenix Fire Department, had raised up his son to love sports. Back in his day, he had played junior college football, and still played in basketball and softball recreational leagues, taking Mike Jr. along to soak up residual passion.
It worked. Westfall played football, basketball, and baseball in youth leagues, until he trimmed down his specific interest in baseball as a senior at Horizon High School, where he hit .467 and showed prowess in the field.
"I wasn't real flashy," Westfall says. "But I worked as hard as I could."
Ute Coach Tim Esmay got a good look at and trusted the scouting report on Westfall because he also had attended Horizon and played for the same coach, Eric Kibler. The kid was as positive a player as Kibler had ever coached.
He would have to be.
Not to play, to survive.
Night of Horror
Westfall came to Utah in August, 1999, and showed a nervous kind of promise during fall ball, playing third base. "I was scared," he says. "I thought I had the ability, but I had to prove it to myself."
He liked school at Utah, thought the baseball would work out, but, at the end of the first semester, was eager to go back home to spend time with friends and family. Three days after he arrived, on the night of
Dec. 23, Westfall was with a friend in his mom's car when his cell phone rang. It was a girl he knew, asking Westfall to come to the park to oversee a fight that was about to break out between two other girls.
He arrived at 10 p.m., just in time to watch the girls rolling around on the ground, pawing at each other. When two other girls joined in, Westfall says he reached out his arm to restore order. That's when he was cold-cocked from behind.
When he turned around to see who hit him, another blow came. Then, another. And another. He was knocked unconscious. He vomited, and went into seizures.
The girls loaded Westfall into a car, taking him to his friend's apartment, where they attempted to clean up his injuries. Another friend then took him to Paradise Valley Hospital, where they met his parents in the parking lot.
Mike Westfall Sr. took a close look at his son, and was horrified at what he saw. "Mike was looking at me kind of weird," he says. "His eyes weren't responding. He didn't know who I was. He wouldn't answer my questions. I knew something was terribly wrong."
When they went into the emergency room, Westfall Sr. was told his son couldn't be seen for four or five hours. He threw his son back into a car, drove him to another hospital and pleaded with attendants to admit his increasingly incoherent son.
An hour later, a neurosurgeon walked into the waiting room to inform Mike and Lori of the severity of the wounds.
Doctors operated on Westfall for nearly five hours, attempting to stop the internal bleeding, to relieve cranial pressure building up from so much swelling, and to remove some damaged tissue from the left side of his brain.
"They basically took his skull off to get inside," says Mike Sr. "They removed part of his brain that controls coordination and speech. A nurse told us that his brain looked like hamburger."
After the second of two five-hour operations, a surgeon approached Westfall's parents, appearing in a doorway with blood still on his gown, and said: "I need to talk to you."
"When he said that, I thought my son was gone," Mike Sr. says. "I couldn't even walk at that point. I couldn't move. But the doctor said, 'I don't know how or why, but this kid is hanging in there.' We were so thankful. So very thankful."
Tedious Recovery
Perspective and hope came via such small increments.
It was Christmas Eve, Westfall was in a coma, but, through the help of a respirator, still breathing. His stitched head looked like a baseball, seams running around its circumference.
Over time, Westfall regained consciousness, and slowly began recognizing people and regaining memory.
"If I recognized somebody, I would squeeze their arm or smile at them," he says. "Mostly, though, I was out of it."
Support came from hundreds of family members and friends. Esmay visited regularly. Josh France, a Ute team member who lived in the area and was home for Christmas, sat by Westfall's bed and read to him from the latest edition of Baseball Weekly.
The going was excruciatingly tedious.
Westfall hoped he would one day return to playing baseball at Utah, but doctors whispered to Mike and Lori that, if things went well, their son would make it back to a fifth- or sixth-grade level. They were told to expect no more.
As the days went by, Westfall started to walk. He had difficulty computing anything more complicated than two plus two. After returning home, for five hours a day, he attended rehab sessions in which therapists held up pictures of dogs and birds and trees, and asked Westfall to identify them, if he could.
"I was stumped for a long time," he says.
Then, he started to remember.
Handling concepts and deciphering images came back to him.
Then he started working out.
By July, he enrolled in a college summer baseball league, and managed to hold his own.
Westfall returned to Utah last August, and continued on the fast track to recovery. He participated in fall ball, playing, he says, "better than I had the year before."
He also improved his grade-point average from a 3.2 to a 3.4.
When baseball season started, he was inserted into the starting lineup at third base, because of a knee injury to Mike Goff. The freshman has responded by hitting .381, leading the team in batting.
"If you didn't know about what happened to him, you could never tell," says Esmay. "He's a miracle child."
Somehow, Mike Westfall's world has returned to him -- wholly. The only remnants of the beating are surprisingly subtle scars around his head, and his constant donning of an old-style batting helmet when he is on the field to protect against any further head trauma.
Doctors cannot fully explain his recovery. Neither can he. The only real form of expression powerful and comprehensive enough to handle the measure of his feelings now, he says, is gratitude.
"I'm thankful for everything," he says. "Everything."
While his assailant is serving five years in prison, Westfall is grasping every meaningful moment he can from the breadths and depths of his experience, never stopping to ask, "Why?" Only to remember all of the reasons he had for living in the first place.
"I appreciate everything now," he says. "I appreciate being able to be in school here. I appreciate being able to play baseball. I appreciate being with my teammates. I appreciate my family and friends. I appreciate the dirt on the ground. Every time I wake up in the morning, I think about how lucky I am. I feel like I'm the luckiest kid in the world. Just to be alive, to know who I am. I can't tell you how great that feels."
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