Swanson: Angel City’s Savy King imagines ‘a nation of life-savers’ ...Middle East

Yeah, that’s Savy King over there, on her way back to work, eager eventually to clock in and play soccer in front of thousands of people again.

Go ahead, talk to her. You can tell her. She won’t mind.

Explain what it was like for you to watch while she lay on the pitch last May as paramedics and Angel City FC’s medical staffers swarmed around her. Tell her how much it messed with you to see an incredibly fit 20-year-old down for the count, unresponsive. How shocked you were, how scared: Savy King. Heart attack. On nobody’s BINGO card that night or any other, and yet …

Oh, you’ve already shared this with her?

Well, that tracks.

A talented, tenacious defender with the cheeriest trademark smile, Savy said she hasn’t stopped hearing testimonials about what it was like to witness her cardiac emergency 74 minutes into a match last season against the Utah Royals.

And it’s all good. Now it is.

Doctors at Cedars-Sinai diagnosed an anomalous left coronary artery and she had surgery to repair the rare, previously undetected congenital condition. She’s been on the mend since, healing and organizing, not about to let this personal crisis go to waste.

I think it says a lot about King that she receives these accounts so openly and with such grace, that she welcomes opportunities to let people know she’s good, “really good; in a good place physically, mentally.”

King thinks it helps that it doesn’t feel like it’s her trauma, but everyone else’s. Anyone who was watching, who could only watch, helpless and afraid.

Yes, she’s the one with the scar running down the center of her chest, but it’s almost as if she wasn’t there, because she remembers nothing after she took a seat on the pitch that night.

She’s also glad to hear people tell her that because she gave them such a fright, they took CPR classes. That useful bit of information has helped fuel the launch of her nonprofit, “Savy King of Hearts,” a noble initiative starting with CPR education.

“I want as many lives saved as possible,” she said, serious as a you-know-what.

PRESSING THE ISSUE

Rewind to Jan. 21. The ribbon-cutting at Angel City’s new training center in Thousand Oaks.

L.A.’s National Women’s Soccer League team had just moved into the facility that formerly housed the NFL’s Rams. Angel City now has room for everything a professional soccer club should have, including state-of-the-art rehab and recovery spaces that were but a dream for Christen Press and her generation of women’s players when they were beginning their pro careers in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

A two-time World Cup champion, Press was feeling reflective that morning, the Angel City star talking to reporters about how, despite plenty of pushback, it had been “our duty, our responsibility and great joy to make the game better for the future.”

Now fast-forward to May 9, 65th minute. Press checks into a scoreless match. Don’t blink, because the next minute she ditches her defender and left-foots a shot into the upper corner of the net.

It’s a beauty, Press’ first goal since June 11, 2022, the day she suffered a torn ACL that required four surgeries to fix. It would’ve been the story of the match, Press’ electric shot that sends her bolting down the field, outrunning her fellow forwards and not stopping until she’s sprinted into the heart of Angel City’s defense, right into King’s embrace.

Neither player knows it, but all of Press’ efforts to improve working conditions for the next generation will matter profoundly in eight minutes.

A CONCERNING PICTURE

We can watch the replay now and know King is feeling poorly. That she is not experiencing any chest pain, but that she starts to feel like she’s going to pass out, that she doesn’t like passing out and really doesn’t like the idea of passing out during a match in front of 16,533 fans.

News reports will say she collapsed, but really she casually takes a seat on her home turf, this L.A. girl.

Santa Monica-born, West Hills-raised, 4.0 scholar-athlete at Agoura High — where she remains a faculty favorite. Where she broke records on the track in the 200 meters, 400, and anchored the 400 relay. She once took over a powder puff football game with four touchdowns and six interceptions.

No, she doesn’t crash to the earth, she actually stands back up, awkwardly, to return a pass. And then sits again. Starts to reach toward her right calf, not because she’s actually cramping but because she has a fleeting notion that she wants to make it look that way, or at least to distract herself.

Then she lies back. Raises her hands over her head like she’s doing the “A” from “Y-M-C-A.” For the first few ticks, it all looks innocuous enough, which is why, I’m guessing, the camera lingers intrusively.

It’s good, actually, that there’s footage King can watch later. Evidence to support the avalanche of text messages she’ll wake up to in the hospital, confused and disbelieving.

She will watch the replay of teammates checking on her, watch how she stops responding, how she only stares vacantly up into the night.

Her ticker is malfunctioning, and the tick-tock countdown is on, that four-to-six-minute window before brain damage occurs if she doesn’t get oxygenated blood pumping. The medical staff onsite know this, the three physicians and paramedics on standby know this, and now you know this, too.

SAVING SAVY

So there’s taking a penalty kick with the game on the line – and then there’s performing under pressure on a pitch. There’s Angel City’s head of medical, Hollie Walusz, giving CPR to Savy King.

Those telltale compressions. That if-you-know-you-know oh no, and everybody in the stadium now knows. Something is terribly wrong.

There’s a race on not only to save Savy’s life, but her way of life. To protect the potentially glorious career stretching out in front of her. Everything she dreams of – World Cup glory, Olympic gold, professional titles, a chance to make a difference, in some way, with the platform she’s been blessed with as an athlete.

Savy has a twin brother, Parker. Her moms, Kim and Karrie, are at BMO Stadium that night; it’s Angels City’s “Mother’s Day Celebration” game.

The previous season, Savy was the No. 2 overall draft pick for Bay FC. She’d come on with such gusto in her one college season at North Carolina that famed coach Anson Dorrance called her debut “the best first-game performance by a freshman” in his program’s illustrious history.

A quiet leader and beloved teammate, a cutthroat competitor and empathetic soul. She was 5 years old and grieving for Haitian earthquake victims she saw on TV, this girl. “Savy’s heart,” Kim Parker-King said, “is bigger than her ability on any soccer field.”

She captained her high school track and field team and the U.S. Under-20 team. Just one of those kids of whom much is expected: “Savy, as a person, soccer or no soccer, she’s going to make her mark on the world,” Agoura track coach Amanda Starling said. “She’s going to do something big.”

She’s not on TikTok, so she didn’t broadcast this on social media, but in the months following heart surgery, she got to be good friends with her fellow cardiac rehab patients, folks paddling in the same boat but who all had “multiple decades” on her. She laughed, remembering how she was definitely the only one stomping on the treadmill in that room (after she was cleared to exceed the 2-mph and 3-mph speed limits doctors imposed to start).

None of her new pals minded the racket once she got up to speed, though. On the contrary, she said, “A lady in one of my classes said she was very afraid about what her life was going to look like. But she said seeing me running really helped her see what could be possible after surgery.”

Lately, Savy said she’s been able to train “pretty much fully.” She said her cardiologists have been pleased with how she performed on stress tests and, thankfully, “everyone is really happy, from a medical standpoint.”

Still, Sarah Smith, Angel City’s director of medical and performance, said there’s no timetable for Savy’s return, and no need to rush.

“She hears this from me a lot, but we will be patient,” Smith said. “It may take six months. It may take eight months. It’s just going to take whatever time it takes. She’s 20 and we have a long career ahead of her and we’re really, really trying to focus on the long term. Because she is an amazing athlete and an amazing footballer, so we’re going to make sure we do things right for her.”

So the rest of the NWSL might not have to deal with Savy on the pitch for a bit (she’s going to come back stronger — “jacked,” she half-joked during an appearance on Press’ podcast).

But the league will feel her presence before then. Savy King of Hearts, in conjunction with the NWSL and the American Heart Assn., will provide free CPR training to all 16 teams, making it the only American professional sports league to have players, coaches and staff from every team trained.

That’s really cool, but also … why is it the only league? Why isn’t this happening everywhere, all the time, with every company in the country?

Also, if you’re wondering, Savy’s situation will change the game in another way too: The NWSL announced later in May that matches will be abandoned after life-threatening incidents like Savy’s, unlike what happened on May 9, when, controversially, the show went on in Angel City’s 2-0 victory.

‘A NATION OF LIFE-SAVERS’

Savy’s story made me think of the Lakers’ Bronny James and Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin, who both recently survived crises of the heart.

It made me think back to my conversation with Ryan Hall, the decorated distance runner from Big Bear, who was mourning his friend Ryan Shay after complications from an enlarged heart led to his death during the 2007 men’s U.S. Olympic marathon trials that Hall won.

Made me think of Rubidoux High girls’ soccer player Lucero Garcia, whose kind-hearted teammates I spent time with after she died in 2010, a 16-year-old sophomore who was the fittest on the team when she was felled by a malfunctioning heart valve.

Made me Google, “heart attack young athletes,” and read a report from the Mayo Clinic that said sudden cardiac arrest is both rare and the leading cause of death in young athletes. Estimates vary, but some reports count that as many as one in 50,000 young athletes die of sudden cardiac death each year. How many more would there be, I wonder, if not for someone nearby who was trained to perform CPR?

As for the rest of us, cardiac arrest kills about 1 in 1,000 people yearly, a fact that’s driven home when Angel City’s Smith tells me she encountered a man in a parking lot who also needed CPR just two weeks after Savy’s scare.

And that makes me think of this great line Savy is using, about wanting to turn “a nation of bystanders into a nation of life-savers.”

‘STAYIN’ ALIVE’

So, Savy, let me also tell you: On Saturday, I found myself on the 20th floor of an office building in downtown Glendale, pushing hard on a plastic dummy’s chest to “Stayin’ Alive,” the Bee Gees’ song with a beat to match the recommended rate (100-120 chest compressions per minute) for administering CPR.

Nine women — nannies, nursing techs, a sportswriter — spent a couple hours getting coached up by a no-nonsense, dry-witted instructor named Zianya.

She taught us to look first for a pulse and breathing, to call for help — and an AED. To make compressions at least 2 inches deep, to be aware it won’t be easy work saving a life, pumping someone’s heart for her. We should expect to be sore afterward, maybe a little bruised – almost as if we were soccer players, I thought.

I just couldn’t write this column, couldn’t rewatch those excruciating few minutes of your life and have that footage seared into my memory, couldn’t talk with you about the change you want to be in this world and not go to the American Heart Assn.’s website and sign up for a training session.

Because you’re right: “It’s something that’s not super difficult to learn and not super time-consuming.”

And, yes, “it really does make a difference.”

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