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