Wheelchair rugby: It's a smashing good time

The original name of the sport was murderball, which tells you a little something about the ruggedness, if not the ruthlessness, of wheelchair rugby.

Here's another hint: These athletes play hard, they play fast and they play without fear.

Collisions? Gonna happen.

"There's definitely an aggression thing out there," said Curt Chapman, a 50-year-old attorney from Edmonds and a 10-year veteran of the sport.

Kindness, it seems, is hardly a cornerstone of wheelchair rugby.

"People with disabilities, and especially those of us who lived as an able-bodied person before and then became disabled, we have a certain amount of aggression that builds up just because of all the stuff we have to put up with throughout the day," explained Chapman, a co-captain of the Seattle Slam wheelchair rugby team. "And whether you like it or not, that aggression sort of comes out during the game."

The sport is designed for those who are wheelchair-bound, typically as a result of an injury. But although these men and even a few women no longer have the same mobility, they still enjoy a vigorous and sometimes violent sport.

Matches are a little bit like watching bumper cars -- without bumpers. Inevitably, someone goes down. Maybe two players. Or maybe it's a multi-chair pileup, and spectators are "looking around for someone to come clean up the wreckage," said Chapman, a onetime football player and wrestler.

Still, hard crashes rarely lead to hard feelings. Once the game is over, there is usually handshaking, backslapping and general camaraderie.

"You can go out there and just beat the heck out of somebody," said the Slam's Neil Sperry, a 29-year-old civil drafting student from Everett. "But as soon as you get off the court, they're your best friend."

Chapman and Sperry both ended up in wheelchairs after construction accidents. Chapman, who grew up in a town outside Des Moines, Iowa, fell off a roof in 1981, when he was 22. Sperry graduated from Granite Falls High School in the spring of 1998, and two weeks later, he suffered a broken neck when a wall fell on him.

Like anyone who suffers a debilitating injury, Chapman and Sperry went through periods of physical and emotional lethargy. But both men, in time, began to yearn for a sporting activity and the chance to interact with other wheelchair-bound individuals.

"I'm a pretty competitive person by nature," Chapman said. "And this sport is a lot harder than it looks. It's extremely tiring. When you come off (after a game), you're totally dead."

"And if you're not," added Sperry, who is in his fifth season, "you're not trying."

Given the speed of wheelchair rugby, not to mention the collisions, injuries are commonplace. The most frequent, Chapman said, are hand injuries, which usually occur when someone's hand is smashed between two wheelchairs. Players also are hurt in falls, and they occasionally suffer rotator-cuff shoulder injuries from strenuous pushing.

Yet for all the hazards, the sport is "a hell of a lot of fun," Chapman said. "There's something addictive about it. It really gets in your blood. I think about it all the time. Too much, actually. It's always a major part of the day.

"Before I got involved in this," he went on, "there were times when I'd have a day off and I'd have to think about what I was going to do to entertain myself. (People in wheelchairs) need something to do that you really want to do, and rugby has been that for me."

For Sperry, the sport helped him find a new and much-needed perspective about himself and his disability.

"I used to not like being in my wheelchair," said Sperry, who can go short distances using crutches and leg braces. "But then I started coming out to (Slam) practices and I saw these guys who had way, way less ability doing everything all by themselves. That was a really big eye-opener to me.

"When I was in the hospital (after the injury), and even after I got out and went to live with my mom and dad, people did everything for me. It wasn't until I moved out and started going to rugby that I really learned how to do stuff on my own. … I probably wouldn't be going to school now if I hadn't seen all these (rugby players) doing all the things they do."

And, like Chapman, Sperry finds the sport "really addicting. I like the contact, the camaraderie and everything about it. It's a big part of my week, every week."