Tim Pearson attended Army believing it would make him a man.

It did, but he found out just how painful that transformation could be.

On Saturday at 3:30 p.m., Pearson, toughened by four years of basic training and far-from-basic injuries, leads the Black Knights into the Carrier Dome for each team’s lacrosse season opener.

‘Sometimes teams come in and are afraid of the mystique of the Dome,’ said Syracuse defender John Glatzel, who will guard Pearson. ‘They won’t be, they have bigger things to deal with. They won’t back down no matter who the team is. They’ll be in top shape and tough on groundballs.’

Pearson, a senior attackman, has proven tougher than most. He started learning about mental toughness even before setting foot at West Point.

Two weeks before entering the Academy, Pearson sustained a broken rib while playing lacrosse. Army regulations state that to attend the school, each student must be prepared to participate in basic training the first day. Pearson kept the injury to himself and suffered through six months of climbing walls and crawling through mud.

‘I really had two choices,’ Pearson said. ‘They basically told me to suck it up. I could either pay for my education or deal with it. If you’re not ready the first day, too bad.’

By lacrosse season, Pearson felt better. He grabbed the school’s freshman scoring record with 52 points (22 goals, 30 assists) before the injuries came again. He separated his shoulder and tore tendons in his ankle, eventually needing reconstructive surgery.

Pearson’s injury bug, though, was to become a lot more severe than the comparative mosquito bite on his ankle.

After sitting out the final game of his freshman season with the injury, doctors discovered Pearson’s rib never healed correctly. Instead of setting, the bone had become enmeshed in tissue. The result was an angioplasty, a collapsed lung, a blood clot and two subsequent surgeries. Pearson’s mother, Pat, says he nearly died of complications from the collapsed lung.

Despite four surgeries, Pearson insists his woes are small compared to those of a number of Army students. One such Cadet is his brother Charlie. Like his younger brother, Charlie Pearson’s body was worn out after the 1999 season.

Playing lacrosse since childhood, weekly marches and daily training all took a toll. Charlie Pearson, who had played two seasons despite persistent back pain, finally saw a doctor in the offseason following his sophomore year.

Physicians told Charlie the pain stemmed from a degenerative disc in his back, which had begun to disintegrate after all the abuse. After two surgeries to fuse the spine, Charlie quit the team for good last year.

‘They have to work so hard,’ Pat Pearson said. ‘It makes them tough as individuals. I couldn’t be prouder. But in Charlie’s case, it did contribute to his injuries.’

Charlie still attends Army and is attempting to receive permission to have his mandatory five years of service eliminated.

But the surgeries, the pain endured and the character the Pearson brothers built doesn’t stop with them — nearly every teammate has a similar story.

‘You play lacrosse, you go on daily marches, in the summer you’re working with a unit,’ Tim Pearson said. ‘There are a million of us who have had ankle and knee surgery.’

His brother put it more simply: ‘Basically, (the Army) just beats your body up.”

As Tim adjusted to dealing with the absence of his brother on the sidelines, he retooled his game on the field. In his final year, Charlie led the team with 34 goals, parking himself in the crease and taking abuse from opposing defenders. Without Charlie’s big body in front, Tim was no longer content with darting around the outside and threading passes to the middle.

‘It’s been tough on Charlie,” Pat Pearson said. ‘They were always a team, always together. They had a net outside, but since they both played attack we just had a circle.’

Said head coach Jack Emmer, who can tie former Syracuse head coach Roy Simmons Jr. for second on the NCAA all-time wins list if his team pulls off an upset: ‘He came in as a good feeder, now he can drive to the goal. He’s a complete player.’

Last year, Tim Pearson earned honorable mention All-America honors for the second consecutive year, netting a career-high 27 goals and a Patriot League single-season record 39 assists.

But Army will need more than just Pearson if it hopes to beat Syracuse. The Knights were 2-5 against Top 20 teams last season and the Orangemen’s top-three returning scorers scored 44 more goals than Army’s best trio.

‘When you take out our focal point on offense, we still have five other guys,’ Glatzel said. ‘You take their guy out of the game, who everything runs through, and you throw their whole team out of sync.’

Published on February 21, 2002 at 12:00 pm