 Quadriplegics tackle rugby
by Darragh Johnson - Sarasota Herald
Tribune
The buzzer goes off -- an electric jolt. And No.11
from the Suncoast Storm heads to the penalty box.
Opportunity has reared her golden locks.
With an easy toss upcourt, the Sarasota Riptide
plunges forward, ready to sweep in another score. Pat
O'Connor wheels up, scoops the ball and zigs into the
space where, normally, the defense would have knotted
together.
"There it is!" yells Sarasota co-captain
Dale Santella."BANG!" screams teammate Nick
Price.O'Connor scores.
As the first quarter ends, Sarasota has pulled ahead
of the second-toughest team to beat at the Sarasota Smash
Quadriplegic Rugby tournament.
But there are three more quarters to go. And games can
turn on anything
"What?" said Ed Hooper, 18 years ago, after
the car accident. "What do you mean you can't fix
me?""What do you mean—" he repeated
as the news settled in bones he would no longer move
"—a wheelchair? "Billie Wilson was almost
left for dead. Sgt. Pat O'Connor was the victim of an
angry and irreverent 6-foot-4-inch
Army enlisted man in Turkey. Dale Santella pounded
into
the Nokomis surf after high school tennis practice,
"like you've done a million times before," and
hit the wave wrong. Nick Price was 19 when a drunken pal
lifted him by his waist and dropped him, head first.
Wendell Mack dove from a boat, Scott Graham from a canoe.
"Sixone doesn't fit in a foot
and a half of water," Graham said.
They all broke their necks. They're all quadriplegics.
They're all playing rugby.And they're not just playing,
not just out there marveling at the delightful exercise.
They're breathlessly competitive, going for bone rattling
collisions, where wheelchairs crash like grinding car
fenders and people get thrown to the floor, their heads
bouncing with a hollow-pumpkin thud on the gymnasium
floor.
"Murderball" was the game's first name. It
was changed to Quad Rugby when it emigrated from Canada
about a decade ago: The original was bad p.r.
The game itself is a talisman, a release, and proof
that quadriplegic does not mean that you die or drop out.
You go on, even if the only muscles left are your biceps,
even if it aches your head sometimes to remember how easy
it once was.
You go on, you get married have kids, get a job. And a
few times a week, at practice after work, and a few times
a year, at national tournaments far away, you get
together with others in "wheelchair world" to
play a game where the chair is not the issue. Where the
chair is to the sport what cars are to car racing.
"Don 't let them root you out!"
It's a molasses voice but the tone is bore-through-you
hunger and heart. Co-captain Santella sometimes plays so
hard that he makes himself sick. He does not sweat—
none of them do, those glands went with the
accidents—and he easily overheats. But he has been
with the Riptide since its inception five years ago, and
this year the team has a shot at competitive glory.
"Seal him inside!"
The voice of the other co-captain Hooper, comes out
gravelly and older—he's 50 and graying—and it's
winded.
Last October, at the start of the season, the Riptide
heard their first velvet rustle of success. They had
found a coach, they had recruited nimble O'Connor, and
they had stopped the Atlanta Rolling Thunder—the
team expected to compete for he national championship
this year-- from clobbering them.
They've been investing and reinvesting their best
commodities— practice and time—and they're
hoping that maybe after this weekend's tournament they'll
hear those rustlings of success start to become  rattlings. And then rankings.
National Top 20.
The Smash tournament, where the Riptide will play
against five other teams from Florida, Maine and
Washington state, is another notch along the way.
"You don't," O'Connor says with the patience
of one who had to relearn everything, "just get good
in a hurry. '
These are not the antics of dreamers. These are the
exuberant voices of players who have taken what they had
and refused to let it go. Seven years ago, O'Connor was a
hearty, 24-year-old Army sergeant. He was 5 feet 11
inches, 175 pounds, with the physique and mentality of an
adventurer. The attack by the enlisted manset off the
damage. The Turkish medics who wrenched his neck around
for a few days settled it: O'Connor lost use of his legs
and some of his trunk and a bit of his arms.
A few years after the accident his wife divorced him.
He's now a single dad—his girl is 8 and the son he
fathered after the accident is 6. He cooks, does laundry
and sometimes threads needles for minor repairs. He
drives the cherubs to dance and softball and soccer and
piano and T-ball. He substitute teaches at Braden River
Middle School.
Still a daredevil, O'Connor also skis the Rockies,
swims competitively and scuba dives in the Caymans, the
Keys, and Belize. His baby face has drawn tighter and he
has rugged furrows along his mouth. Often, after
executing an especially clever play, he'll grin in impish
glee. And sometimes after practice he dances with his
boy, Shane: O'Connor circling backward faster and faster,
while Shane giggles with a toothless gap and follows
dizzily forward.
"Don't feel sorry for me. There are lots of
people to feel sorry for. But don't feel sorry for
me" he said.
Yes, the accident changed things. But "I'm
probably a better parent, I'm more compassionate and
empathetic to other people. I made some good investments.
I went back to school. I get to be around my kids,"
he said."Sometimes, though, when I see other people
out there giving (Shane) airplane spins, I kind of wish
that was me."That's the worst."
Here are the anatomical particulars of the six men and
the one high school girl on the Sarasota Riptide Quad
Rugby team:
Their nerve impulses reach only a few muscles in each
of their arms and nearly none in their legs. They are not
absolutely paralyzed, but moving isn't simple.
They maneuver in manual wheelchairs, transporting the
ball from one end of a basketball court to the other.
They score when they cross the baseline.
All of the Riptide quads have use of their biceps,
some of them have use of their triceps. A few have a bit
of forearm movement and some back-and-forth movement in
the wrists. Few of them have total use of their hands and
fingers. Mostly, they move from sheer will, forcing small
groups of muscles to do what in other bodies, the entire
physiological system accomplishes.
The rules of the game are these: Four men play on each
team (out of the 450 players and 44 teams in the USQRA,
six are women and one is Sarasota's Billie Wilson, who is
17). The Sarasota players are: O'Connor, who is 31;
Santella, 40; Graham, 31; Price, 22; Hooper, 50; Mack,
36; and Wilson.
You might be tempted to think of Billie Wilson as an
amazing case. She is a girl with deep grit and grace.But
she shrinks from such a stereotype. Wheelchairs, as
Hooper says, are magnets for one-sided assumptions, both
dismal ("Ahhh, that must be a fate worse than
death") and romantic ("Wow, what a story of
triumph over tragedy"). Somewhere between the
extremes lies the truth, he says. Somewhere between lies
Wilson who might be your hero except that she would
rather be your pal. She is a 17-year-old senior at
Bayshore High in Bradenton. She has got long, taffy-silk
hair, and since her accident she grew three inches and
lost all her baby fat, emerging into elegant womanhood.
Two years ago, on the second day of spring break her
sophomore year, she and her boyfriend and another friend
were driving to play basketball. The boyfriend ran the
stop sign near her house. His truck overturned. The
friend died six weeks later; Wilson lived, although the
paramedics at the scene were convinced she had to be
dead. The boyfriend disappeared, unhurt. He visited once,
when she was still in intensive care, to talk about how
devastated his truck was.
Wilson had been a whirlwind: softball, volleyball,
basketball, the high school Army ROTC program, canoeing,
repelling and running. Since the accident she spends a
lot of time reading, watching movies, singing to herself
with the radio and talking to her cat. She jokes about
this mildly, acting goofy, but in the soul of every
wisecrack beats the pulse of truth.
"I had to grow up really fast."
Right before she wheeled into the rugby gym for the
first time two months ago, she winced, ready for bitter
recognition.
"I worried it would bring back some memories. But
I got into that gym, and I smelled that smell—that
musky sock-and-sweat smell—and I said, 'Ah! This
feels good. This makes everything feel better.'
"Life can go on; you don't always have to think
of the chair as a holdback," she said. " I went
to that image thing, and I know people are going to
stare.... When I'm in a store—I don't have the use
of my hands—they don't hand the money back to me. Or
they bend down and scream at me, like I can't hear."
Does it get tiresome? No, you can't think about it, or
you'd get depressed. And I don't have a choice. I can't
say, 'Well, today I'm going to spend the day in the
chair,' " she said."
Rugby's a good thing to get me out of the house and to
be out playing sports again. When people ask, 'Billie,
what are you doing tonight? I say, 'I'm going to play
rugby.' And that's good."
It's the start of the second half. Sarasota is down by
two. Two minutes pass and the score becomes 22-16.
Tampa's Suncoast Storm is pulling ahead fast, so
Sarasota's coach. calls a time-out."
They're sucking us all in," Greg Benson lectures.
"Shadow him on the inbound. And as soon as the
whistle blows, lock him up! They're burning us out
there."
The adrenaline thickens and races. When O'Connor
starts for a, play, his chair rears back, then charges
ahead.
Price screams, "Fifty-one seconds.
Come on!"Benson yells, "Forty-nine
seconds!"
And as Tampa gums up its defense at the goal, O'Connor
spins, zags and strikes, in through a crack. Sarasota
finishes the game with a loss 37-25.
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