By Adam Bulger
Depending on how you read the situation, the Connecticut Jammers are either having a bad year or a great one.
The state’s wheelchair rugby team’s one-and-nine record
isn’t impressive, but other factors have to be considered. Like
how the team’s roster has swelled to 10 players thanks to recent
mainstream exposure to the sport, and some of the team’s troubles
are explained by the addition of players new to the game.
“My team is fairly new and fairly young. I have a bunch of new
players, which is good, but it’s going to take us a while to get
back up to speed,” Jammers coach Bud Harvey said. “Some of
my older players are starting to retire. We’ve lost a couple of
experienced players and gained a couple of new players. We’re in
a building year.”
Earlier this month, the annual Connecticut Classic Wheelchair Rugby
Tournament was held in Wallingford. Four teams — the Jammers, the
New York Jets, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Casco Bay Navigators
— competed in a six-game round robin tournament.
The Jammers took the court for their second game of the day at around
1:30 (I missed their first game which was played at the ungodly
Saturday hour of 9 a.m.) to play the Philly team. Techno music played
over the PA system as the 10-man team rolled up and down the indoor
basketball court in a series of drills.
Soon the game got underway. Several of the players moved the angled
wheels on their specially designed wheelchairs with surprising
dexterity and speed. The metal and plastic plates covering the
chairs’ spokes clanged loudly when one player battered another
with their chair, and the audience responded with concerned gasps.
The concern is understandable. Quad rugby is played exclusively by
people with disabilities affecting both their arms and legs. The
players themselves think the concern is unfounded. Sure, quad rugby is
a high-impact sport, and collisions not only happen, they’re
encouraged. But the injuries are mostly minor and the game’s
benefits outweigh the minor risks.
“You’ll see a scraped elbow here and there, but the
sport’s pretty safe,” Jammer Rick Farmiglietti said.
“I’m usually good to get knocked out of the chair about
once a tournament.”
In quad rugby, a player scores by carrying the ball through the goal.
Moving the ball across the court, players must dribble or pass the ball
every 10 seconds.
The Jammers seemed overmatched by the Philadelphia team. It looked like
the Jammers were a little lost on the court. Four of the team’s
10 players were rookies, including Clinton Cowen; the team hasn’t
quite had a chance to gel yet. For two of the latest additions to the
team, Joseph Stramando and Jon Sigworth, it was the second and first
times they had played in competitive games, respectively.
Sigworth, a freshman at Wesleyan University and a former extreme
unicyclist, broke his neck while mountain biking in northern India
earlier this year. After finding out about the team through Villardi,
he was anxious to play.
“I had my accident early this February. I went to a practice
wearing my neck collar. They said I could roll around in a chair for a
while, but that I couldn’t play until I got my neck collar off. I
was like ‘Darn it.’ But I’ve been playing with them
since July,” Sigworth said.
Unlike the other players on the team, Stramondo is not a quadriplegic.
The Trinity College administrator and voting member of the
state’s Independent Living Council has a rare form of dwarfism
called micromelic dysplasia, and uses a motorized wheelchair. His
fellow Independent Living Council member Jim Quick encouraged him to
join the team.
“My Disability is something I’ve lived with all my life,
and organized sport is something I haven’t had the opportunity to
do, and especially not organized sport that’s this
exciting,” Stramondo said.
Quad rugby was invented in Canada in 1977. While other sports like
wheelchair basketball were already established, quad rugby — or
murderball, as it was called originally — was the first sport
that allowed quadriplegic athletes of all functioning abilities to have
important roles on both offense and defense. Despite the name, it has
little in common with traditional rugby.
“Rugby and wheelchair rugby are totally different as far as the
rules go,” International Quad Rugby Association official John
Bishop said. “The name ‘rugby’ was chosen because of
the similar camaraderie and the aggressiveness of the sport.”
The game spread like a virus to countries all across the globe, and now
is considered the fastest-growing wheelchair sport in the world, played
in 26 countries and a featured part of the Paralympic Games.
The game made its way to Connecticut in the early ’90s when a
group of dedicated wheelchair athletes started playing ramshackle games
outside Gaylord rehab hospital in Wallingford.
“We were practicing on a tennis court in the parking lot. We were
basically using everyday chairs that we would duct tape pieces of wood
over the chairs so they wouldn’t fold up when we hit each
other,” Jammers co-founder Jimmy Quick said.
Quick added: “It was pretty gruesome in the early days.”
Quick, the former president of the Connecticut chapter of the National
Spinal Cord Injury Association, was a member of the national wheelchair
rugby team in the mid ’90s. This season marks his return to the
sport after a five-year hiatus.
Gaylord rehab hospital has been active with the team since its inception.
“We’ve sponsored the team for about 10 or 11 years. We
sponsor the team financially through fund-raising we do through the
sports association,” Gaylord Hospital Sports Association
Coordinator Todd Munn said.
Despite Gaylord hospital’s support, the team is currently looking for a place to play.
“We need a gym and we need storage. Ideally, it would be a
basketball court on a Saturday or a Sunday for three or four
hours,” Jammers coach Bud Harvey said.
The sport is currently enjoying a surge of popular interest thanks to the acclaimed 2005 documentary Murderball
. The movie documents the rivalry between the U.S. wheelchair rugby
team and Canada’s team. Despite the sport’s Canadian roots,
America has traditionally dominated quad rugby. However, when one of
America’s star players, the cantankerous Joe Soares, became
Canada’s coach after getting cut from America’s team, the
Canadian team took the gold medal in 2002. The movie documents Soares
and players for the American team preparing for the 2004 paralympic
game.
The film is gripping, entertaining, human and at your local Blockbuster
right now — rent it immediately. Thanks to its success, the
Connecticut Jammers and teams across the country have enjoyed renewed
interest among both disabled and able-bodied people.
“Just before the movie came out we were struggling to field a
team and have enough athletes that have the spinal cord injury level
come out and be on the team. Murderball drummed up a lot of interest among people both injured and not injured,” Munn said.
A review of the film on the Web site quadrugby.com said Murderball
“doesn’t dispel myths and stereotypes. It takes big fat
bites out of those sugary sweet, pathetic images and stereotypes, chews
’em up and spits ’em out.”
One reason why the movie is so engaging is its frankness. Joe Soares,
for instance, comes across as one of the world’s biggest
assholes. The honesty makes the film entertaining, but it also makes it
more important. There’s a temptation on the part of a lot of
able-bodied folks to think of disabled people as saints, or objects of
pity. As coach Harvey said, often upon meeting wheelchair-bound people
you only see the chair; seeing past the disability and seeing the
person is a challenge for a lot of people.
“You’ve got to be able to get over the chair. The instant
response is to say ‘look at these poor guys.’ There’s
nothing poor about these guys,” Harvey said. “They are
tough and they don’t cut each other any slack. They’re
human beings and deserve and demand to be treated like human
beings.”
In the recent tournament, the Jammers and the other teams’
players didn’t look like saints. In fact, many of the goateed,
tattooed crew wouldn’t look out of place closing down a
disreputable dive bar on any given Tuesday night. The guys I talked to
are really good dudes, and aspects of their lives are heroic, I
suppose. But they’re not saints. They’re, for lack of a
better classification, normal dudes who happen to be in chairs.
“People are always like ‘you’re a saint, or
you’re an inspiration’ — I hate it when people say
I’m an inspiration,” Jammer team member Joseph Stramondo
said. “I’m an inspiration because I can wipe my ass?
Thanks. I don’t want to be your inspiration; I want to be your
equal.”
Several members of the Jammers told me they believed quad rugby helps
to shift people’s perceptions because it’s an aggressive
game with a sexy allure.
“I think the game breaks a lot of barriers down because they see
people trying to have fun with sports like everybody else and being
crazy like everybody else,” Quick said. “We aren’t
china dolls. We’re not going to break.”
|
