KAHULUI – Jimmy Morimoto has always been a fighter, but he had never faced an opponent like this.
“It was a normal day at the office, it was around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I figured I’d call it a day,” Morimoto recalled over a wedge salad lunch on Saturday. “I went
down to the locker room to take a shower and I felt this warm, funny sensation in the back of my head – which later turned out to be the blood.
“I’m just trying to take a shower, make it go away, be a tough guy, right? You know, shake it off.”
The 42-year-old Morimoto – an All-Star football player and state-champion wrestler while attending Baldwin High School and former head coach of the Bears’ football team – had suffered a stroke in the bowels of the Lied Athletic Complex at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where he is the director of player personnel for the Runnin’ Rebels football team.
Morimoto, recounting his health scare last weekend during his annual trip back home to the Valley Isle, will always remember the date it happened: March 17, St. Patrick’s Day.
With spring drills a day old, Morimoto recalls hearing the players enter the locker room.
“I’m thinking should I start walking out to the locker room and just collapse? Maybe somebody will see me,” Morimoto said. “Then one of our (graduate assistants) walks into the locker room – C.J. Cox is his name – he came on in and looks at me and says, ‘Hey, you all right?’ I told him, ‘No, something’s wrong, go find the trainers.’ He did.”
Trainer Kyle Wilson was at the UNLV baseball game that day and came running. Within an hour of being discovered by Cox, Morimoto was in the hospital.
“I was in the intensive care unit for eight days,” he said. “The total process they told me was 21 (days). I got out in eight just because numerous tests that were coming back were all positive in my favor.”
Morimoto was back at work full-time by the first week of June.
“I started with 4-, 8-, 10-hour days, but now I’m back to my regular 12-hour days,” he said.
Without being discovered by Cox, or had he tried to shake it off as his first instinct told him, Morimoto could have died.
“It was a lower-end stroke,” Morimoto said. “They think, ‘I’m going to sleep it off,’ take two aspirin, and then they never wake up.
“(Doctors) told me 5 percent of the people who have my kind of stroke (make) a full recovery, and 15 percent live to talk about it and here I am talking about it. I’m as close to 100 percent as can be, I feel good. People say, ‘Good to see you,’ I say, ‘It’s good to be seen.’ It’s one of those things, I could easily be dead.”
Morimoto has a message he wants to make sure to get across.
“I’m still young enough to try and be a tough guy, but don’t do that,” he said. “If you have any type of symptoms, go seek medical attention. The doctor told me because I sought that medical attention so quickly, that is what saved my life.”
When Morimoto left Baldwin, he was hired as an assistant video coordinator at UNLV in 2007. Now, he has spanned three coaching staffs and is the recruiting coordinator for new head coach Tony Sanchez.
Sean Tesoro, who played under Morimoto at Baldwin and at UNLV from 2008-11, is now the offensive line coach and head track coach at Waiakea High School.
“Seeing him in the office every day was just a great relief for me,” Tesoro said, adding that he uses a little of what he learned from Morimoto.
“Knowing coach Jimmy, he’s always a fighter, he’s a hard-nosed guy, even since he was coaching us at Baldwin,” Tesoro said. “When I heard about it, I was devastated because I had kind of lost touch since I left. It was heartbreaking, but he’s always been a tough dude. The Maui guys, we could always go to him and that’s something that we always appreciated and really just loved. He understands us.”
Morimoto has recruited five Maui Interscholastic League players to UNLV – Tesoro, Troy Aoki, and John Lotulelei of Baldwin; Keahi Raikes of Kamehameha Maui, and currently Maui High graduate Tau Lotulelei, a third-team preseason All-Mountain West Conference selection at linebacker.
John Lotulelei is on the Jacksonville Jaguars roster – he played for the Seattle Seahawks and Jaguars in 2013 and missed last season with an injury.
“Every day in every way,” Morimoto said when asked how he watches out for the MIL graduates in the desert. “That’s my hometown kids, my island kids. The Lotuleleis are from my hometown, Kihei. I keep a close eye on all of them.”
* Robert Collias is at rcollias@mauinews.com.
