Eleven minutes.
That’s all it took to justify the hundreds of hours of training and four years of service Tony Riley put into the U.S. Coast Guard.
It was a beautiful spring afternoon on April 17, 2004, but Lake Michigan was a chilly 52 degrees. Riley hadn’t even had time to verify the initial call before a biker burst through the back door of the Kenosha station and confirmed the situation:
Two kids had flipped their canoe. And they were drowning in the frigid water, hypothermia mixing with panic as they battled 2-foot waves.
Riley, a boatswain’s mate second class, pulled on his anti-exposure suit, assembled his best crew and boarded his boat. He knew every inch of that water, but no exercise could assure he’d find a sinking 14-year-old while skimming the lake at 50 mph.
“As we were going I saw the kid,” Riley recalled last week. “I saw his hand go up, and I saw his head go down.
“I was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to get there.’ ”
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Ten minutes.
That’s all the playing time Riley has seen in this, his second season with the UW-Eau Claire men’s basketball team.
He was an honorable mention all-conference player back in 1999-2000, when he was a senior at Cadott High School. But that was a distant memory by the time Riley received his honorable discharge four years later. About the only basketball he’d played was in Coast Guard tournaments, one station against another.
He remembered the promise, though. He’d told his younger brother, Matt, they’d play together after his commitment was up. So when Northland College lost its coach and Matt decided to transfer, Tony called with a simple question:
Where are we going to school?
“Once we decided we were really going to do it, it was exciting,” Matt Riley said.
They settled on UW-Eau Claire, which had major programs for both of them — criminal justice for Tony, physical education for Matt.
The younger Riley went out for the team his first year, but Tony didn’t want to rush in. He got in playing shape, worked on his game and then approached coach Terry Gibbons about trying out in 2005.
At first Gibbons thought Tony, 5-11 and 175 pounds, was muscular, 6-foot-2 Matt’s younger brother.
“Then he said he was in the Coast Guard for four years,” Gibbons said. “I know Coast Guard training is some of the toughest training that you have in boot camp and stuff like that, so I thought, ‘Aah, we need a couple of tough kids around here.’ ”
While Matt worked his way into the starting lineup by his second season, Tony’s game-day role largely has been limited to chest bumps during introductions. He’s scored 10 points in 14 appearances, mostly after games have been out of reach.
That hasn’t discouraged him from making all but one practice despite juggling basketball, school and monthly trips to Bayfield, where his Coast Guard reserve unit is stationed.
His mind is worn down at times, but his body has held strong.
“Practice isn’t tough,” he said. “I’ve been through tough.”
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Three weeks.
That’s how long Riley couldn’t sleep after his first recovery mission.
A man had jumped off the back of his boat and disappeared. His wife called the station again and again, sometimes in the middle of the night, when Riley was answering the phone. He had no answers.
When the body drifted ashore weeks later, Riley got the assignment. Bugs swarmed all around the remains, but one caught Riley’s eye — an insect he hasn’t seen before or since. When he went to sleep that night, the little black-and-yellow bugs were everywhere.
He had the same dream the next night. And the next. And the next. Three weeks of nightmares and cold sweats.
“I had to ask for help,” Riley said. “Life wasn’t the same.”
It took time, but he shook it. Doesn’t know how, but he shook it.
And he was ready two years later when the man hopped off of his motorcycle and burst through the back door, yelling about kids in the water.
Firefighters had rescued a 16-year-old from shore, but the younger boy still was in the water, some 500 feet from shore. Riley saw the boy’s head dip below water twice as he pushed the boat to its limit.
“As I’m maneuvering next to him, waves are coming in, and he goes down for the third time,” Riley said. “I got the bow right where that kid went down, and my buddy (Phillip Chenoweth) reached over down into the water, grabbed him. He passed him back to me. I was hanging out the window driving. I passed him to the back of the boat to my other guys.
“The kid was kind of like a board. He was so stiff already.”
Riley sped back to shore as his crew wrapped the boy in blankets. An ambulance was waiting back on shore to take the boy to the hospital. The time from the initial call to the mission’s completion was 11 minutes.
“I think that if we were a minute later, the waves would have brought that kid to shore,” Riley said, “and he wouldn’t have been living.”
The Coast Guard honored Riley, Chenoweth, Michael Martin and George Amon two weeks later with the Hank Aaron Slugger Award, a Louisville Slugger baseball bat engraved with the Coast Guard insignia. Riley also received an achievement medal for leading the rescue.
The Kenosha Coast Guard station handles roughly 150 search-and-rescue cases a year, according to Petty Officer Jared Shear, but few so closely separate life and death.
“That was definitely more of an extreme distress case,” Shear said. “Graver, more immediate danger.”
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Forty minutes.
That may be all Riley, now 25, has left in his college basketball career, barring a stunning upset of top-ranked UW-Stevens Point on Tuesday night. His brother’s eligibility is up, and he wants to pursue engineering, a program UW-Eau Claire does not offer.
But he hasn’t stopped being the tough guy in practice.
He grabs a rebound and unleashes a guttural yell when he misses the putback, gets a steal and looks for a shot as the clock ticks down during a late-game drill.
“He just constantly hustles all over the place,” Gibbons said. “He’s scrapping.”
And he won’t stop until there’s no scrapping left to do.
Even in the final months before his discharge, after the glow of his crew’s rescue had faded, Riley faced challenges.
A car went into the water, killing two. A man had a heart attack and drowned.
Most chilling, a man and two children floated up on shore tied together. Their skin had deteriorated so badly it was difficult to tell their race. The story made national news. Riley was the station’s spokesman.
“I thought God was testing me. I did,” Riley said.
Less than three years later he’s on a Blugolds team that has passed few tests during what many would call its toughest season in four decades.
But losing basketball games isn’t what ‘tough’ means to Tony Riley.
