Never Think You've Arrived

In coming from nowhere and overcoming injury, Brycen Tremayne takes nothing for granted

09/30/2022

THERE IS APPRECIATION, but not contentment, every time Brycen Tremayne steps on to the football field.

He’s fought harder than most to be there -- to leap for fade passes in the end zone, to race downfield on punt coverage, to merely stand in the huddle and listen to instructions, or face an opponent and determine who’s best.

“You can’t ever think you’ve arrived,” he said. Tremayne knows how hard the journey is to get anywhere meaningful. And once you think you’ve arrived, you’re sure to be swatted back down. It’s the way things work in life. But it doesn’t mean you have to stay down.

Stanford receiver Michael Wilson was on the sidelines that afternoon when he saw his roommate and close friend Tremayne uncovered down the middle, catching a pass from Tanner McKee on the run.

Tremayne already had one touchdown catch in this game, against Oregon at Stanford Stadium on Oct. 2, 2021, and had five for the season already. He’s having a game, Wilson thought, I can feel it.

Two defenders. One hit him high, spinning Tremayne, and the other hit him low as the left leg was still planted. A defender began to scream and gesture, as Tremayne’s lower left leg was positioned unnaturally – his fibula broken and ankle dislocated.

“There were guys getting up from the tackle and I just see his leg,” Wilson said. “His ankle was perpendicular to his knee. Oh my God … I just closed my eyes.”

There are many chapters to the Brycen Tremayne story, and his comeback from a horrific injury may not even be the most fascinating. He was overlooked in high school and came to Stanford without a scholarship. His drive to come back from the injury is simply an extension of the drive that got him there.

Throughout the spring and summer, Tremayne rose before sunrise and headed to the training room. He knew that a jump rope could make the difference between returning from the injury or excelling after it. Tremayne called it, “the last 10 percent.”

“That was the biggest challenge in the recovery process,” he said. “Getting that 10 percent back.”

Tremayne could walk and run, but the little things that are hard to define – mobility, springiness – still were lacking. He couldn’t quite push off the ankle like he used to. That … pop, that … explosion remained elusive.

He grabbed a jump rope and began to jump off his left leg. At first, Tremayne could barely do it for 10 seconds. That’s where he started, with four sets of 10 seconds each.

Every day and every chance he got, Tremayne grabbed the rope. The sound, at first uneven and unsteady, became a rhythmic and mesmerizing cadence to restoration. Little by little, days upon days and weeks upon weeks, the ankle grew stronger.

By two months, Tremayne could do five sets of a minute on a single leg. The bounce, the pop, was not only back, but at levels beyond what he did before.

“The injury was just another challenge,” said David Shaw, Stanford’s Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football. “He’s overcome so many challenges to get here -- to get playing time, to earn a scholarship. The injury was just the latest challenge.”

There is another part of the story, the evolution of that drive, with origins that go back generations. Brycen knows that he is not the first in his family to endure.

TETSUKO MORIMOTO was born in Watsonville, California, in the fertile Pajaro Valley, just inland from the Monterey Bay’s northern coastline. She was the youngest of nine children in a Japanese American family with its own strawberry farm.

The Japanese began coming to Watsonville in 1892, attracted by opportunities in agriculture as aging Chinese laborers, many of whom arrived during the gold rush, left the fields.

Many of the Japanese immigrants sought to become landowners, pooling money through cooperatives to lease and, eventually, buy land. The men came first, but soon women began to arrive through arranged marriages between families who knew each other from the same villages in Japan. Matchmaking was done through letters and photos. Thus, many women were called “picture brides,” and met their husbands for the first time as they arrived in San Francisco.

Watsonville’s Japanese American community began to grow and thrive, the Morimoto family among them.

Everything changed on December 7, 1941.

Tetsuko, known as “Tess,” was five years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Her oldest brother was in high school and preparing to go to college.

Within days, assets of Pajaro Valley’s Japanese Americans were frozen and arrests began of “troublemakers” – Buddhist priests, teachers, ministers, Japanese Association officers, journalists. A curfew was imposed. Newspapers printed unsubstantiated stories of spies and saboteurs.

The paranoia climaxed when, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing mass incarceration of Japanese Americans.

In late spring, members of Tetsuko’s family were among 3,600 Japanese Americans from the Monterey Bay area ordered to the Salinas Assembly at the rodeo grounds. They could bring only what they could carry. The Morimotos never saw their farm again.

They were bussed to the Poston War Relocation Camp in southwest Arizona, in the dusty Mojave Desert with its sweltering summer heat, freezing winters and biting wind. The camp was massive – more than 17,000 were held over a three-year period. It was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by military police.

In 1943, the War Department issued a “loyalty” questionnaire to incarcerated men. It was believed that a series of questions – about renouncing Japanese citizenship, serving in combat whenever ordered, declaring fealty to the United States and renouncing allegiance to the Emperor of Japan -- could determine their true allegiance.

This became known as the dreaded “Yes-Yes-No-No” form, causing great unrest in the camps. Japanese Americans resented being asked to renounce loyalty to the Emperor of Japan when they had never held such a loyalty. They already were barred from becoming U.S. citizens on the basis of race, so renouncing their only citizenship could leave them stateless. Young men worried that declaring their willingness to serve in combat units of the army meant they would be volunteering for service.

Depending on their answers, they were labeled “loyal” or “disloyal.” The “disloyal” were sent to Tule Lake, a camp built on a desolate lakebed near the California-Oregon border.

There are no indications the Morimotos were relocated to Tule Lake, a maximum-security segregation center with 28 guard towers and a battalion of 1,000 military police with armored cars and tanks, for this reason. Perhaps it was because Poston was overcrowded. But many people checked the wrong box on a form and were punished for it. Tule Lake was a prison camp.

It’s no wonder that when the war ended, Mr. and Mrs. Morimoto felt so betrayed and disenchanted they felt they had no choice but to return to Japan and their childhood home -- Hiroshima.

THE BLAST ZONE was two miles in diameter. Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, had a force equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT. The fireball from the explosion was 1,200 feet in diameter with a surface temperature of 10,830 degrees, about the same temperature as the surface of the sun.

An estimated 70,000 were killed in Hiroshima, and 40,000 three days later when another bomb was dropped over Nagasaki. Thousands more died from radiation exposure.

Brycen Tremayne has been to the A-Bomb Dome, the ruins of a community hall that serves as a memorial in the heart of Hiroshima, his ancestral city. In both of his visits to Hiroshima, he’s been joined by his grandmother, Tetsuko Morimoto.

No immediate family members died in the blast. Their home village was just outside the blast zone, where terraced rice fields remained untouched. But life in Japan was not easy for children raised in America -- Tetsuko’s oldest brother, Joe, joined the U.S. Army rather than leave.

Tetsuko was ridiculed by classmates for her English-accented Japanese and had difficulty making friends. One exception was Atsuko Nishii, a classmate at Hiroshima Jogakuin High School, whose parents were killed in the blast. An ocean apart, Tetsuko, now 86, and Atsuko remain close to this day.

Tetsuko’s father died and one by one, her brothers and sisters returned to the United States until she was the last one left. When her mother died, 18-year-old Tetsuko left too.

She met her husband, Chinese immigrant Henry Wong, in San Francisco. Ever resourceful, Henry opened a series of small businesses – a paint shop, body shop – but financial security remained a daily struggle.

“They just persevered,” said their daughter, Lexine Wong, Brycen’s mother. “They did what they could to survive. They carried on. They did what they needed to do.”

The Wongs settled in Covina, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountain foothills east of Los Angeles and his grandparents always have been a big part of Brycen’s life.

Lexine sees similarities to her mother’s determination and her son’s.

“In the Japanese culture, people are very kind, very quiet,” she said. “Brycen’s that way. He’s never complained, nothing was ever someone else’s fault, he’s never said anything bad about anybody.

“But my mother was very independent and very determined, and I see that in Brycen too. He has that grit.”

NEAR THE END of his freshman year at Windward School in Los Angeles, Brycen told his parents, “I really want to play football in college.”

His declaration was met with this response, “You do?”

Growing up in Westchester, an L.A. neighborhood just south of the LAX airport, Tremayne played a variety of sports, including Pop Warner football beginning at age nine, mostly as a running back and defensive lineman. He found receiver in eighth grade.

Windward is a 7-12 private school with a high school enrollment of about 400. It’s known for basketball, with a combined five state championships between its boys’ and girls’ teams, including girls’ Open (2018) and Division I (2017) titles under former Stanford star Vanessa Nygaard.

In football, the expectations were not quite as high. Most of the team’s best players were basketball players the coaches convinced to play football. Small roster numbers put Windward on the cusp between 8-man and 11-man football, the level Windward played during Tremayne’s years. But the next season, it returned to 8-man.

Tremayne was good enough to make the varsity team as a freshman under coach Alvin Cowan, a former Yale quarterback and now a Hollywood actor, writer, and producer. At 5-foot-9, 125 pounds, Tremayne was far from the 6-4, 210-pound man he is today, but always was a gifted athlete.

For three seasons, Tremayne had every intention of playing receiver. But each year, Windward’s starting quarterback got hurt and Tremayne was thrust into the role.

“I was a running quarterback,” Tremayne said. “I was never too good at passing the ball. I feel bad for some of the receivers who went there.”

Tremayne threw for 1,164 yards and completed 55 percent of his passes, with 11 touchdowns and 10 interceptions over three years, including two as the primary starter at quarterback. However, his receiving experience was thin. When most juniors are weighing offers and taking official visits, Tremayne, if he made a receiving highlight tape, could include only one touchdown, as a freshman against Frazier Mountain, a 1-10 team.

Tremayne’s college football aspirations at first were geared toward the NCAA Division III level. But as he improved and grew, his expectations increased as well. He trained zealously in the off-season with personal coaches and teammates such as Breland Brandt, a future UCLA linebacker. They did interval work on the track and sprints up sand dunes.

When Tremayne attended Stanford’s camp before his senior year, he was in prime shape. He caught the attention of coaches with his route running and his large frame. Though he had nothing to show on tape at receiver, his quarterback play showed plenty of athletic ability, and his 1,510 score on the SAT (out of 1,600) was a huge bonus.

But schools didn’t have much to go on. Recruiting services listed Tremayne at two stars (out of five), “if that,” he said. If he earned admission on his own, Stanford was intrigued enough to offer him a spot as a preferred walk-on.

“The big thing for us is, he had the grades and he’s very athletic,” Shaw said. “The third part was, everyone spoke so highly of his work ethic and his character. And he played hard.

“He had the height, he just wasn’t developed. If this guy could put on 15-20 pounds, we thought he could help us. He just had to trust us to develop him and give him an opportunity to earn a scholarship.”

Tremayne transferred to Venice High, with an enrollment of 2,000, to showcase himself as a receiver during his senior year. The Gondaliers had a good quarterback in Luca Diamont, who would earn a scholarship to Duke, and that factored into Tremayne’s decision. But before the season even started, Diamont was injured in an accident and out for the year. Tremayne sweated the possibility he might return to quarterback.

However, Venice coach Angelo Gasca, understanding Tremayne’s situation, never asked. And Tremayne, free to play the position he sought for years, felt like a new man.

“It was awesome,” he said. “It was like a dream come true.”

Venice was the film location of the fictional Rydell High in “Grease” (Tremayne never saw the movie). On the same field where Sandy and Danny belted out “You’re the One that I Want,” Tremayne caught five touchdown passes against Westchester. He finished the year with 44 catches for 827 yards and 14 touchdowns.

Tremayne had much ground to make up in the recruiting world. He distributed mid-year and year-end highlights to schools up and down the coast, as well as several in the Ivy League. Still, his only official visit and only football scholarship offer came from Southern Utah.

While on his visit in Cedar City, Utah, Tremayne received a call from Stanford’s Andrew Luck Director of Offense Tavita Pritchard. Tremayne got in.

The news of his admission caused him to narrow his choices to Stanford and Yale, but Tremayne still wavered. He knew what he would get at Yale – an academic scholarship and a chance to make a splash on the football field. At Stanford, nothing was certain, not a scholarship or playing time.

With minutes to spare before the May 1 acceptance deadline, Tremayne decided.

“In the back of my head, I always knew that if I went to Yale and had a great career there, I would always be thinking, Dang, I could have done that at Stanford,” Tremayne said. “That’s what was really eating at me. I didn’t want to have any regrets. So, I chose Stanford.”

Pritchard and Krishnamurthi Wide Receivers Coach Bobby Kennedy assured Tremayne that walk-ons were treated the same as everyone else and that he would receive a fair shake and an opportunity for a scholarship.

“I knew it was possible,” Tremayne said. “I didn’t know how soon.”

MICHAEL WILSON was a freshman scholarship receiver in 2018. Like everyone else, he made note of Tremayne’s exploits on the scout team.

“What he was doing in the first week of training camp, against some scholarship freshman DB’s … We were all sitting around and saying, ‘This man should be on scholarship,’ “ Wilson said. “You just know right away. It’s very easy to tell within a week if a walk-on is going to be able to get a scholarship. Not only did he have the talent – you could see the potential in him – but he also had the work ethic and the character.”

Tremayne and scout team quarterback Dylan Plautz had a quest to “embarrass” the defense and teamed together to regularly make spectacular head-turning plays against the first team.

“For someone who didn’t have a lot of film, he came in right away and there wasn’t a big difference between him and the other incoming freshmen on scholarship,” Shaw said. “He could hang with them. And just the number of acrobatic catches he made on a weekly basis … It was one of those things where the guys were like, ‘Oh, he just made two more today.’

“We guessed right.”

Tremayne and Wilson followed senior receiver Trenton Irwin around, “like little ducklings,” Wilson said, because they saw how hard Irwin worked and used him as their example.

Tremayne separated himself by exceeding expectations at every level, by maximizing what he could get out of his body through hard work. The other reason for his rise was talent.

“Everyone has a calling card in football -- this is their trade and this is what they do exceptionally well,” Wilson said. “And from the first moment I played with Brycen in the first training camp practice, you immediately knew his calling card: He’s a magnet to the ball. Every ball that he thinks he should catch, he catches.”

Tremayne earned his scholarship before his sophomore year, before even catching a pass in a game. He gained 25 pounds between seasons and was exceptionally stronger. Tremayne first made an impact as a special teams “demon,” as Shaw described, and next as a red-zone threat much like J.J. Arcega-Whiteside before him, a big receiver with the ability to outjump and outfight a defender for the ball, or draw a flag in the process.

“Any ball that gets thrown at me is a good ball,” Tremayne said. “I don’t care where it is, I’m going to try to catch it. If it’s behind me a little bit and I don’t catch it, it’s my fault. It’s never the quarterback’s fault. Because any ball to me is a blessing. I’m going to try to do everything I can to catch it.”

Tremayne caught three passes as a sophomore, all for touchdowns. He caught 14 passes for 265 yards in the six-game COVID-shortened 2020 season and was a difference maker in 2021 before his injury, with 19 catches for 240 yards and five scores.

In the moments after the fateful play against Oregon, Tremayne remembers looking at his leg, seeing players call for the medical staff and teammate Elijah Higgins coming to his side to reassure him he would be OK.

“Probably the most traumatizing thing of the whole experience was Dr. (Seth) Sherman trying to reset the ankle on the field,” Tremayne said. “It took a few tries, but he got it back in. I felt a huge relief from the pain.”

At Stanford Hospital, Tremayne’s uniform and shoes were cut off his body, and he underwent surgery that afternoon. Some time that day, Tremayne watched a video of the injury and told his parents, “Don’t watch the tape.”

On Sunday at 5 p.m., Tremayne left the hospital on crutches. On Monday, he was accompanied by his parents, Cuyler and Lexine, to the practice field. He sat on a concrete bench with his crutches resting in his lap.

When his teammates saw him, they halted what they were doing and cheered, clapped, and yelled Brycen’s name. After practice, they lined up to hug him and offer encouragement.

There was anger and depression in the wake of the injury. He was not immune to doubts. Family, friends, teammates, coaches, and staff checked on him constantly.

“I was more worried about his mental health than his physical health,” Lexine said. “He had never gotten hurt before. You have that sense of invincibility when you’re young. Having it taken away … that was a shock.”

Wilson, in recovery from a serious injury too, understood that Tremayne had a hard road ahead.

“I felt sorry for him because of what he was going to have to go through and how hard it was going to be,” Wilson said. “You have to deal with the emotions and the anxiety that comes with it. Am I ever going to come back the same? If somebody tackles me, am I going to be OK? If I make a cut, are the screws in my foot going to hold? Is it going to hurt?

“I know how it feels to have to battle through injury, the setbacks, and the ascension you have to go through to be your old self. And once you get back to your old self, you still have to keep building. It’s up to yourself to get better than before.”

Once Tremayne cleared his head, he turned his energy toward a comeback. He never considered giving up football.

“The look in his eye from that point … I knew he was going to work nonstop to make it happen,” Shaw said.

Team physical therapist Floyd VitoCruz set up a 16-week rehab plan that Tremayne aced. By the time of Stanford’s spring game, on April 9, Tremayne looked … normal. No boot, no crutches. He wasn’t in uniform, but he could have been. By fall training camp, Tremayne faced no limitations.

Shaw said Tremayne is faster than he’s ever been. His vertical leap is 35 inches and “still improving,” Tremayne said. He can bench press 225 pounds 21 times, more than any receiver at the 2022 NFL Combine.

Tremayne’s approach was simple: Keep showing up. It has served him well since his days as a small-school high school quarterback, as a walk-on, and through a comeback that tested him in ways he could not imagine.

“It’s crazy to think that my biggest goal was to go to a Division III school,” Tremayne said. “Now, it’s to go to the NFL.”

Perhaps it’s not so surprising for those who have seen his relentlessness, who saw his potential, who knew what he could be if given the chance … and, who knew his past and the stories of those who came before him.

After all, perseverance runs in the family.