The Wheelchair Runningback

Alright, I admit that I haven’t had enough coffee. Accordingly there are cobwebs in my belfry. But here’s the thing: I go to bed with a disability and when I wake up I still have it. And in turn this means that even in the half awake-half asleep intersection, the state that Edgar Alan Poe admired, I am still blind. I am blind when counting backwards by sevens. I’m blind when I watch the TV.

The experience of disability is invariably the “half-awake-half asleep” World view of Edgar Alan Poe: at once terrifying, revealing, darkly beautiful, unforeseen, foreseeable, sacred and profane, you name it. Disability defies our notion of stable space both in physical and metaphysical terms. Disability is the sore thumb of a saint: it reveals where culture must go if society will be just. And yes, people aren’t ready for it.

I remember being in a meeting some years ago with administrators whose job it was to provide services for the blind. The meeting had something to do with hum drum budgetary matters. I was the only blind person in the group. Everyone was talking about the legal battle between Casey Martin, a professional golfer who had sued the Professional Golfer’s Association over the right to use a golf cart during PGA sanctioned golf matches. Casey Martin won the right to use a motorized cart as a means of getting from one tee to another—a right that was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices agreed with Martin’s assertion that his disability didn’t prevent him from hitting a golf ball and they disagreed with the PGA’s assertion that allowing Casey Martin to ride from one spot to another would fundamentally alter the nature of the game. I agreed with the Supreme Court on that occasion and I was surprised by the evident distress of the other men in the meeting. They felt that allowing Casey Martin to ride in a golf cart from one fairway to another would radically destroy professional golf.

“But Hector,” I said (name altered), “Hector, don’t you use a golf cart when you go golfing?”

“Yeah,” said Hector, “But I’m not a professional.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, much like one of the Supreme Court justices.

“When I go golfing I’m just goofing off,” said Hector. “I’m relaxing. But when a pro golfer is in a tournament he’s supposed to walk from one end of the course to another.”

“He or she,” I said, reminding him that there are women in professional golf. “And why does walking in order to hit a ball really matter?” I persisted.

“Because walking tires a person and hitting a golf shot successfully at the close of a tournament is different from hitting one successfully at the start when you’re tired from walking 18 holes.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s true, but did you know that having a disability makes a person even more exhausted than your average Temporarily Able Bodied person?”

By now Hector’s colleague Achilles (not his real name) was getting hot.

“One of the greatest PGA championships of all time", he shouted, “came when Ben Hogan, who had survived a near fatal auto accident, had to walk painfully down the fairway on the last hole and overcome his pain to hit the ball. If you allow Casey Martin to use a golf cart you take away the element of stamina from the game. You fundamentally alter the game of professional golf.”

I didn’t have enough common sense to stop talking because I was still a young man, barely forty—an “enfant terrible” compared to Hector and Achilles. “Look,” I said, “You could say that Ben Hogan’s deep physical pain and the fact that he had to practically crawl down the last fairway simply means that the other golfers had an unfair advantage. How come they got to hit the ball without pain? Maybe everybody needs the same level of pain in order for us to have sporting events? Isn’t that what you’re arguing? If so, then we should also rule that professional baseball players can’t wear batting gloves to prevent blisters on their hands; pro American football players shouldn’t have knee pads—heck, if comparative pain is central to fairness in sports we should really really parcel out the pain. In other words,” I persisted, “The guys golfing against Casey Martin could wear iron slabs on their legs while he walks from one hole to another. Wouldn’t that make the game more interesting?”

It was not a good start for our meeting. Hector and Achilles felt that somehow, some way, Casey Martin had gotten an unfair advantage by not being able to walk and then ride a golf cart. When I suggested that we could make the game equally awful for everyone they didn’t like the idea. I couldn’t blame them. They were exhibiting the basic human need for stability. We humans love structure and organization. As an English professor I occasionally remind my students that the most popular book in 19th century London wasn’t “David Copperfield”—it was the railway timetable.

Disability troubles cultural presentiments for unexamined rules of order. It’s the sore thumb of the saint. God help us if we’re forced to examine both why and how we do things.

Luckily for Casey Martin the Supreme Court didn’t buy the PGA’s claim that walking long distances was central to the activity of hitting a golf ball.

“Look!” shouted Achilles, “What if they allowed baseball players to use wheelchairs? That would destroy the nature of the game!”

“Well, Achilles, you’re right, but here’s the thing: hitting a baseball from a wheelchair would be harder than hitting one standing up. So if competition is the issue, then you see, “difference” is actually rather wonderful.”

The guys hated me after that.

Now a story has broken about a 7th grader who uses a wheelchair who wants to play flag football with his classmates.

Predictably, even though a doctor has signed the form saying this boy is safe to play, the school district and the coaching staff are putting the opportunity on hold citing “safety issues”.  A wheelchair is, after all, a hard, physical object.

Flag football is not a game that’s designed for the kind of physical contact we associate with the big time college or professional sport.

The school district and the coaches are now presented with a substantive disability problem. Should they simply adapt the student’s wheelchair with lots of foam so that other students won’t get hurt by a hard, metal object?  Should they declare that by allowing a person with a wheelchair to play a leisure sport that they would be unfairly altering the game?  Or should they just let the kids play?

Perplexity leads to fear all too often when the problem at hand is a disability related matter.

There will undoubtedly be “football purists” who, fearing the introduction of a wheelchair athlete into a game of flag football will imagine that this will lead to armies of wheelchair users trying out for the Green Bay Packers.

Disability shock invariably leads to what I like to call “panic-cluster thinking”—a mode of cognition best exemplified by the adage: “If we let you do this, then 'everybody' will want to do it, and we can’t have that, can we?”

Once the panic cluster starts then bid farewell to imaginative prospects. We alter sporting events all the time in order to make them safer—we put padding on the outfield walls, hockey players actually wear helmets.

Here’s the deal: if you run around with other people, with the aim of catching a ball, you run the risk of hurting yourself. If the game is flag football you run a reduced risk of serious injury than the risk incurred by playing “contact” football, but there’s still an injury risk. I run a risk when I get out of bed and step out into the blind day. I run a risk whenever I cross a street. So do you, even if you’re not blind. “Life,” is risk. Just about everybody gets to be Ernest Hemingway at least once a day. You almost fall on the stairs; just miss getting creamed by the errant bicyclist.

If the school district and its coaches and the likely armada of lawyers can resist a collective panic cluster they will conclude, reasonably enough, that a soft wheelchair poses no significant threat to kids who’re running at one another in the measured endorphin tilt of play. I know of no great world records in flag football that will be destroyed by this potential accommodation.

And now I have to “harness up” my guide dog, who as you probably know, gives me an unfair advantage when it comes to just about everything from flirting to finding the family car in a parking lot.

SK

Comments

[andrea]

HAH! You rock, Stephen! Fantastic analysis of the origin to all those absurd complaints, as well as spot-on retorts.

[Ira]

Fantastic, my friend. Hector and Achilles friends? United against the disabled?! Beautiful!

[Jan]

Vida is just adorable - I checked out her photo in the "Steve who?" section. Ahem, shouldn't it be entitled, "Who are Steve & Veda?"

[Jan]

Sorry my own eye sight let me down - I meant Vidal. So "Who are Steve and Vidal?"

[Rob at Kintropy]

The "sore thumb of the saint" image will stick with me - a good description.

I imagine the next argument will be to segregate all the kids that use wheelchairs into a parallel, but separate league. That's one we fall for pretty regularly, unfortunately.