Last Saturday Pam and I were in Atlanta to visit her dad, Jack, in the hospital. Most of you are aware that he was injured in a fall last November and was essentially paralyzed from the neck down. After a frustrating two months in hospitals near his home, where he showed little improvement, he was transferred to the Shepherd Center in downtown Atlanta, a hospital that specializes in spinal cord injuries.
The results have been amazing, and our family is looking forward to Jack returning home—walking!—in a couple more months. The Shepherd Center is little short of miraculous.
Anyway, back to the point. So on Saturday we’re there hanging out with Jack and Fran, when we saw a publicity flyer on sports tournament, being held in the basketball gym there on site. The tournament was for—and I’m not making this up—“paraplegic rugby.” Yes, you heard me right. I was intrigued, to say the least, especially since our son is one of those crazy ruggers himself, and has been trying to get us to see how great a sport it really is (for the record, rugby most closely resembles a brawl between large, crazy men in a back alley).
So we all went down to the rugby tournament. You’d never believe it. There were probably eight teams, all of them made up of men in wheelchairs, who had no use of their legs. The wheelchairs themselves were clearly made for heavy banging, complete with steel bumpers, over-sized wheels (angled inward to add stability) and sturdy frames. The game itself is played with five to a side, on a basketball court. They used a soccer ball instead of a rugby ball because the players had to be able to pick up the ball one-handed off the floor. As we got there, the two teams lined up for the beginning scrum, and they were off!
I’ve never seen wheelchairs handled with such skill. They could just fly up and down the court and turn on a dime. One team (the Brooks Bashers) had a young teenager who was so quick in his chair that no one could stop him. He scored four or five “tries” in the blink of an eye. But then the other team (the Shepherd Smash) figured out they had better play some tough defense on him, and they set two of their burly guys on him. One of them, a tattooed man with a Mohawk, ran into the young man with such force at one point that I thought he had killed him. But he got up.
On and on it went, banging, yelling, screaming fans, the whole thing. It was great fun. But then I noticed one of the players who really stood out. He was about twenty years old, a good-looking young man. But his disability was even more pronounced than the others. He only had partial use of his arms, so his turning of the wheels was done so awkwardly that he could barely move. The other players swirled around him at a great pace, but this guy just barely moved. But he never stopped. Never complained. Just kept giving it everything he had. He was working harder than anyone else out there but to much less effect. I must confess I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
I couldn’t help but to compare that young man on the rugby court with an example of sports conduct I had witnessed the day before, when on national television Tiger Woods, the most celebrated athlete in the world, pre-empted the Olympics in order to offer his wooden, self-serving apology to anyone who was interested. There he was, sport’s first billionaire, reading the standard litany of contrition in front of a breathless audience. So that he could go back to being a billionaire.
Then there was a forgotten young man, whose prospects for life lie in a totally different direction. But who refused to wallow in self pity and instead laid everything he had on the line for no reason other than his love for the game.
Tiger Woods may have the notoriety, the money, the talent. But that nameless young man, laboriously maneuvering his way around a basement gym, playing a game he’ll never win—he’s my hero.
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