Ryan Hilinski’s best audible: Keeping name of brother WSU QB Tyler Hilinski alive
By MARK WHICKER
Los Angeles Daily News
June 23, 2018
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases
to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third
is the moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last
time.” — David Eagleman
Quarterbacks are bred to be big.
Big personalities, big shoulders to carry dozens of
teammates, big, thick layers of skin to absorb the blame of a city.
Big voices that can pierce the angry noise of a three-deck
stadium.
Three quarterbacks named Hilinski grew up together as
brothers.
A kindergarten teacher once called Mark and Kym Hilinski and
asked if they could test their boys’ hearing. They were just so loud, she said.
Kelly, Tyler and Ryan took the tests and passed them. The
ears around quarterbacks can’t be tender.
Ryan Hilinski sat in a conference room at Orange Lutheran
the other day. He was loud, his smile was wide, his sentences bubbled forth. He
was ready for kickoff.
His senior year awaits. He is part of the honors choir at
Orange Lutheran and has sung the national anthem before games. Ryan was the MVP
of the Rivals camp and the Super 11 camp.
On Aug. 17, his season begins against San Juan Hills.
“I’ve thought about it so many times,” he said. “I’ve
thought about seven touchdowns, 500 yards. I think about having a crazy season.
I’ll throw that first touchdown and look up at the sky and wish Tyler was
there. But for my parents, I know it’ll be tough.”
The boys all wore No. 4: Kelly at Columbia and Weber State,
Tyler at Washington State, and at all their high schools. Their grandmother had
died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, and that was Gehrig’s number.
Tyler changed to 3 at WSU because Luke Falk wore 4. This
fall, Ryan wears 3.
Aug. 17 looms in front of Kym, a retired attorney, and Mark,
who has been in sales and has owned a private equity firm.
The first football they watched, after January and the worst
day of their lives, was one of Ryan’s 7-on-7 tournaments. Kym pulled a hood
over her head to keep from crying.
“So many friends have told me they’ll go with me that
night,” Kym said. But this year Mark will be alongside, every game.
Suddenly there is only one left.
‘HE WAS SUPERMAN’
Tyler Hilinski took his own life Jan. 16.
He used a .223 caliber rifle borrowed from a teammate, in
his apartment in Pullman, Wash.
The night before, he was playing Fortnite with some
teammates until 1 a.m. Both brothers were online with him. The next day, he had
a 7-on-7 drill at 2 p.m. and he was sending texts at 12:30. When he was late,
friends went to the apartment that he was in the process of vacating. Tyler had
known how empty it would be.
Ryan left the house in Irvine at 6:30 p.m. for a 7 p.m.
workout at school. On his way, he got a text from Kelly.
“Go home, be with Mom,” it said.
Kym was breathing frantically, “pretty much having a panic
attack,” Ryan said. She spent the night in a hospital. Mark slept there, too.
Parents of Tyler’s Upland High teammates gathered, as did WSU assistant Ken
Wilson, Tyler’s recruiter.
“It haunts me to this day,” Ryan said. “What could I have done?
What were my last words to him? I’ve talked with therapists, psychologists.
Sometimes when I’m alone it gets difficult.
“Tyler was the first guy I called whenever anything
happened. He was Superman. He was always trying to make one more play. He made
people smile. He kept telling me I was going to be great.”
“You talk about people who light up a room,” Mark Hilinski
said, sitting with Kym at a coffee shop in Costa Mesa. “Tyler could light up
the table. The other two are more Type A. But when Tyler did say something, it
got attention.
“There was an economics professor who told me Tyler would
wait until after class and ask him how he was doing. He did in a real way.
Like, ‘How are you doing?’ So many stories like that. He connected.”
“He’s still connecting,” Kym said.
The Hilinskis have come to know the futility of asking why.
Mark will tell Kym to stop researching, get off the computer. There are times
when she can’t, and neither can he.
Tyler would have started this season. In September,
Washington State trailed Boise State 31-10 in the fourth quarter. “We got
this,” Tyler told assistant coach Roy Manning.
Then Falk got hurt and Hilinski went in and the Cougars won
45-44 in double overtime.
“Think about that,” Mark said. “This was his first real game,
and he did it and he rode off the field on their shoulders. Could it ever get
better than that?”
A few weeks later, Hilinski threw for 501 yards but also
threw four interceptions in a 58-37 loss to Arizona, and Mark remembered seeing
the “shallowness” in his eyes during postgame interviews. “We didn’t win,”
Tyler said.
Hilinski quarterbacked Washington State in a 42-17 Holiday
Bowl loss to Michigan State, a mass Cougar no-show. Looking back, Mark sees how
those losses resonated. Again, speculation is self-defeating.
“He thought he let the team down,” Mark said. “He was a gym
rat. He was the guy that would hit all the golf balls at the driving range and
sneak over the line and get some more. He said he didn’t know what he’d do
without football. He was down after that game, but it’s football. You’re going
to lose games.”
Tyler attended the Rose Bowl game with a girlfriend. The
Hilinskis had a peaceful vacation at Cabo San Lucas. Tyler returned to Pullman.
They always go to Kauai in February and visit a particular
lighthouse and look upon the Pacific. In 2018, they went back and took Tyler’s
ashes with them. Ryan and Kelly both have lighthouse tattoos inside their
forearms.
CHANGE OF DIRECTION
“We don’t have a playbook for this,” Kym said. They also
didn’t anticipate the pure goodness they encountered.
Their house is packed with mementos from throughout college
football, particularly from Michigan State. Minnesota sent an oar with its “Row
Your Boat” motto. Army, Notre Dame, Florida, you name it.
Mark and Kym told Ryan he could leave football if he wanted.
He didn’t.
“Football helps them, too,” Ryan said. “It allows them to
see how happy it makes me.”
For years, they lived by spreadsheets. Kym or Mark would
watch Kelly, then catch up with Ryan and Tyler. To watch Tyler, one of them
would take the 11:45 p.m. Friday nonstop to Seattle, sleep on a bench in the
airport, catch the 6 a.m. shuttle to Spokane, then drive 90 desolated minutes
to Pullman.
“A blast,” Kym said. “So much fun.” They lived on that rare
buzz you get from sleeplessness spent on a good cause.
This spring, they went in another direction. Ryan took an
SEC recruiting tour. At Ole Miss, Mark walked into the first team room he’d
seen since the family cleaned out Tyler’s locker.
“I lost my breath a little bit,” Mark said. “But Ryan just
powered through it. He never took his foot off the gas. I don’t know how he
does it.”
Eventually, Ryan chose South Carolina for 2019. Kelly will
attend med school there. Mark and Kym will move to Charleston.
The obsessive and doggedly optimistic South Carolina fan
base has embraced the family. When Ryan introduced himself to Jerri Spurrier,
wife of the former coach, she tweaked his cheeks and said, “I know who you are,
sweetie!”
The football is advanced and prioritized. But Hilinski chose
the SEC because of where it is, and where it’s not.
“We couldn’t go back to those Pac-12 stadiums again,” Kym
said
GETTING OUT FRONT
Suicides in the U.S. rose by 20 percent from 2000 to 2015 and
by 27 percent among those from 20 years old to 35.
“So many people would say, ‘We’re sorry for your loss,’” Kym
said. “But then they would also say, ‘We know what you’re going through.’ We
had no idea it was so widespread.”
“If you play football and you have a swollen ankle, there’s
eight people coming to see what’s wrong,” Mark said. “If you say you’re having
some weird thoughts, nobody wants to hear it.”
They sit there, admittedly stunned. Kym calls it a blur.
“There’s a lifetime of work ahead of us,” Mark said.
They could have spent these months in the paralysis of
grief. But when a mother of a suicide victim came to Kym and couldn’t get
through one sentence without breaking down, or when Mark read yet another story
about this subterranean worldwide crisis, they knew it was time to surface.
“We don’t have a choice,” Mark said, “if we want to honor
Tyler.”
Hilinski’s Hope is a foundation that provides funds for
schools and athletic departments to deal with mental health. Kelly provides the
Instagram expertise. Kym and Mike travel. Wearily and gallantly, they tell
their story. Sometimes they hear themselves and they laugh.
“They all called each other Big,” Kym said. “Mark is Big,
then there’s Big Kell and Big T. Ryan is Big Bo.”
Their final quarterback knows. Sometimes you need to be
bigger than death.
