Gregg Bell Unleashed: Bracht Delaying Navy SEAL Aspirations To Help UW at NCAAs
May 18, 2011
By Gregg Bell
UW Director of Writing
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SEATTLE - The key to the Huskies' advancing to yet another NCAA men's golf championships lies beyond the play of standout Chris Williams or fellow All-Pac-10 star Charlie Hughes, another likely future pro.
It lies within a principled junior who hasn't played competitively in more than half a year. Yet Jens Bracht's mission is to rise up Thursday through Saturday in the five-count-four format at the Omni Tucson National Golf Resort in Arizona, so the Huskies can advance to the national championships for the ninth time in coach Matt Thurmond's 10 years leading the program.
I like his chances.
See, Bracht's drive goes far, far beyond the tee. It's not like he's been loafing while away from competition these last seven months. He's been fulfilling his life's ambition, his calling.
Bracht has been training to eventually join the Navy SEALs.
"It's kind of a cool story," Thurmond said Monday while he was on the practice range readying his team for the trip to the NCAA regional in Tucson.
Kind of cool?
Of course I'm biased toward the military, but it may be the best story I've found among the 300-plus I've written in nine months here at UW.
Find me another collegian, anywhere in any sport, who is competing at a national championship this year after being away from his sport for seven months - especially one who is training to become a Navy SEAL.
And I do mean training. On May 7, Bracht ran a 34-mile ultra-marathon, the Lost Lake 50K, outside Bellingham, Wash. He endured an elevation gain of 8,000 feet for 10 hours on single-track, root-filled trails up and down Mt. Chuckanut.
Before the lactic acid could even settle, he was back on the golf course. That was after Thurmond, needing a spark after UW's so-so Pac-10 championships, asked Bracht basically out of nowhere to join Williams, Hughes plus seniors Kevin Spooner and Tze Huang Choo in the Huskies' push back to the NCAA finals.
"'I better get to work' -- that was my first reaction," Bracht said, chuckling. "Because I really do care about this team. I want to put a few rounds together and help them get to nationals."
In the last nine days, Bracht has fiendishly attacked golf with a renewed passion, as if it was another Lost Lake 50K. Thurmond says the former state runner up at Shorecrest High School in the Seattle suburbs is driving a prodigious 350 yards off the tee, 25 yards farther than he was in the fall.
After all, he's probably the fittest player in college golf right now.
Monday, I talked to Bracht as he was coming off the course from practice at 8:45 p.m. I got the sense he was done only because it was getting dark.
And now Thursday, 11 days after completing an ultra marathon some competitors there liken to mountaineering while running, Bracht is going to tee off at the NCAA regionals.
He had the most starts of any UW freshman in 2008-09, including one in the Pac-10 championships, then golfed in three events as a sophomore and started slowly this season.
"He hadn't been playing well in the fall," Thurmond said. "But you know what? I know military examples are cliché, but at the end of the year when the stakes are the highest I want to go into battle with those I trust the most.
"Jens has a special makeup."
He played in three tournaments into October, then told Thurmond his heart wasn't in it. He wanted to pursue something even more intrinsically rewarding than playing for one of the nation's top golf programs, something more self-sacrificing than most of us can fathom - especially while at around 20 years old.
"I really wanted to challenge myself, to strive, to really be physically and mentally challenged," Bracht said, with perspective and a sense of self that far exceeds his years. "And the only thing I saw with that greater purpose was the military.
"And when I started thinking about the military, I thought, `What would I would be most challenged and most satisfied in?' And that was the SEALs. In my mind, the SEALs are the elite of the world."
No one can argue with that, not after what a Navy SEALs team did this month inside Pakistan to kill the world's most wanted criminal, Osama Bin Laden.
Bracht was at his family home in the north Seattle suburbs finishing a Sunday dinner on May 1. That was the night news broke of the raid that eliminated the terrorist responsible for the deaths of some 4,000 Americans in 9-11 and the subsequent wars from it over the last decade.
Initial reports that night didn't specify which U.S. military branch carried out the mission. But Bracht knew.
"Who do you think got him?'" Bob and Dana Bracht asked their son.
"I bet it was the Navy SEALs," he replied.
"I mean, the best in the world, for the most dangerous mission?" he told me. "Who else would it have been?"
It's popular, even chic, right now to want to be a SEAL or to learn about them. The SEALs top lists of the most popular internet searches. Heck, even publishers of romance novels are rushing out books with SEALs as the clean-cut, heroic objects of women's dreams.
But Bracht is going far beyond merely wanting to be one - so far, he is pushing the limits of his body and his mind.
Knowing his normal workouts won't get him to close to the conditioning he needs before joining the Navy and impressing superiors there enough for an invite to SEALs school, he's joined a cross-fit gym in Seattle's Green Lake neighborhood. And he is devouring all the knowledge he can about what he's aspiring to become. He been getting advice from current and former Navy SEALs, including "a real cool" veteran of the Vietnam War -- who is now an accountant. He told him about the near-death experiences of the brutal training, of the missions with zero margins for error and the incredible demands.
I asked Bracht if he has read Lone Survivor, a first-person non-fiction bestseller written by a SEAL who emerged from ambushes and captivity in the most rugged terrain of Afghanistan while the rest of his team was killed hunting for the Taliban.
I read it in a couple of weeks this spring and was enthralled.
"I read that over three days during spring break," Bracht said. "I couldn't put it down."
Oh, and that 55-kilometer trail run near Bellingham this month? It was the first time he'd run more than 16 miles in his life.
"It was tough. I didn't feel too great after it," he deadpanned. "But I wanted to see if I could really experience something way out of my comfort zone. It was a mental and physical challenge. Those 8½ hours I spent running on my own out there, running through the woods, were amazing."
So is this: Bracht, who is on a small, partial golf scholarship, isn't studying tee-box mowing at UW. He's on track to graduate next year from its prestigious Foster School of Business. He wants his degree, and figures he needs the time to adequately prepare for SEALs school.
Upon graduation, he plans on walking into a local Navy recruiting office and enlisting. No officer candidate school. No ROTC classes in his final UW year. Just coming in off the street with a business degree from a top university and signing up to for the lowest ranks, for a salary of $1,300 a month, in hopes of subjecting himself to the most intense training in the world and then likely heading into the most dangerous missions imaginable to defend our country.
That's selfless.
I mean, this is a different military today than the one for which I signed up. Death is far more of a possibility. Especially in the line of work he's aiming for.
"Yeah, there's that point," Bracht says dryly.
"I was just trying to find out for me what's important in life and to do something that's real," he said. "I see it as being a protector. There are bad people in the world, bullies who need taken care of. This is a chance, a great way, to protect our way of life. That idea of being a protector, I like that.
"And if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it all the way."
I thought about what my reaction would be if my son was doing this when he's Bracht's age a decade or so from now - God forbid if our country is still in a war then. Then I asked him what is parents' reaction is to his plan.
He paused for what seemed like 30 seconds.
"It's a shock for them to think about," he said, without wanting - or needing - to elaborate.
Later, he added while talking about the support he is getting from his friends on his quest to become a SEAL: "My parents made me think the most about it, but that's what they are there for."
There's one other aspect to this story that astounds me: The kind of coach Thurmond is for respecting a player's true desire, to allow Bracht to follow his heart in the middle of a season at the highest level of their sport.
That point isn't lost on Bracht, either.
"He really wants us to succeed in life," he said of Thurmond. "He wants us to find what we want to do in life - and go for it. He sees in that the passion in what I want to do. And he's told me that. I love that about him.
"That's probably why I've gone out and put out so much effort to play well down there this week. It's cool. I'm excited that I have this opportunity to help our team reach its goals."
Here's wishing Jens Bracht nothing but the best in fulfilling his.
About Gregg Bell Gregg Bell is an award-winning sports writer who joined the University of Washington's staff in September 2010 as the Director of Writing. Previously, Bell served as the senior national sports writer in Seattle for The Associated Press. The native of Steubenville, Ohio, is a 1993 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000.
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