Los Angeles Rams

Rams special teams coach details life-saving heroics from vacation

Published Aug. 3, 2015 2:47 p.m. ET

Jase Bandelow

Sometimes as an NFL coach you have to answer tough questions from the media about your job on the football field. Sometimes you're asked no questions at all.

And other times you get to retell the story of saving a man's life.

Well, maybe once in a blue moon -- and such was the case Monday afternoon with St. Louis Rams special teams coordinator John Fassel.

Fassel was on vacation, shredding waves on a boogie board at Manhattan Beach in Southern California, when he noticed a man struggling to stay afloat -- and eventually saved the day. So, as you might imagine, questions upon his return to camp were less about kickoffs or punts, and geared more toward his heroic act.

"I went to Southern California for three, four weeks," Fassel said initially when asked about what he did on vacation this summer. "I have a wife and I have two little babies. We spent a lot of time in the water. Is that what you're getting at?"

And then he really got into what went down that day.

"Are you asking about the deal? OK. So long story short, I was out boogie boarding. It was my last day and I had the little kids out there, but I thought I'd go out there and ride some big waves. I was out on the boogie board and a couple of surfers were maybe 30 yards to my right and there wasn't really anybody else out there until a couple minutes later, a guy came kind of floating out, maybe 30 yards to my left. He just kept getting moved out into the sea and there was some brown water around, so obviously, I'm pretty good in open water swimmer so I recognized that he's in a riptide. He didn't have equipment. He didn't have a boogie board, fins, surfboard, and he didn't look like he could swim. So me and another surfer kind of teamed up and we saw him really struggling and getting pulled out and he was splashing. He was under the water and back up and he was just barely head above water, so we jammed over to him as fast as we could on our boards. When we got to him, he was unresponsive, but he was head above water. He was choking and gasping and obviously panicked.

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"So me and the surfer dude, we picked him up and put him on a surfboard. And we had to hold him on the surfboard because he had no power, so he couldn't even hold on to it on his own. So all three of us were kind of dangling out in the water for a little bit. We kicked ourselves out of the riptide and started to head back to shore, and by then the lifeguards came out. So that was my last day. It was quite an open-water experience."

Fassel says it didn't take long to realize the man was in trouble, but his reaction time was quick.

"Yeah, I don't even know if it was three minutes or 10 minutes," he said. "It was just ... we saw the guy and we looked at him for a second, didn't look right. So we got to him pretty quick and it happened fast."

Fassel, however, has had no interaction with the man he saved.

"We brought him to the shore and the paramedics took over," he said. "There were probably 15 of them. They kind of blocked the area off and they moved everybody out of the way. They worked on him for about an hour before they took him in an ambulance. So I didn't know his name. I think he's OK from whatever somebody read me the story. But he didn't speak English, so they had to bring an interpreter in. So there was no way to communicate with him."

Fassel attributes his ability to act quickly and courageously to his triathlon training, something he's been doing for quite some time.

"Every spring and summer, I'll compete in three or four, and I think the open water and swimming in the triathlons helped me out a little bit."

That "little bit" was just enough to save a man's life.

You can follow Jase Bandelow on Twitter at @JASEBANDELOW or email him at jase.bandelow@foxsports.net.