Consider Mark Zupan, probably the best player in the sport today. He was paralyzed when he was 18. He fell asleep in the bed of a pickup driven by his friend, Christopher Igoe, who drove away not realizing Mark was aboard. The truck crashed, Mark was thrown into a canal, and wasn't found for 13 hours. It took them a long time, but he and Christopher are friendly again.
During a discussion after a festival screening of the movie, he was asked, "If you could, would you turn back the clock on that day?" You could have heard a pin drop as he answered: "No, I don't think so. My injury has led me to opportunities and experiences and friendships I would never have had before. And it has taught me about myself." He paused. "In some ways, it's the best thing that ever happened to me."
This is hard to believe, but from him, I believe it. The movie follows Zupan and his teammates on Team USA during a couple of seasons where the off-court drama is fraught with tension. We meet Joe Soares, an all-American for many years, who with advancing age is dropped from the American team, is angry, and gets revenge by becoming the coach of the Canadians. Under Soares, Canada beats the U.S. for the first time in 12 years. There is no love between Soares and Zupan ("If he were on fire, I wouldn't piss on him to put it out").
Wheelchair rugby is a full-contact sport. Chairs are reinforced to take the hammering. One strategy is to knock over your opponent's chair and land him on the floor; that's not a foul, although the referees helpfully put the players back on their wheels. Has anybody been injured again while playing the game? So far, no.
Many people think quadriplegics have no control over their four limbs, like Christopher Reeve, but most of them retain some degree of movement. Their level of disability is rated on a scale from 0.5 to 3.5, and a team can have a total of eight points on the court at once. This leads to an ironic paradox: The athletes spend their lives overcoming and diminishing their disabilities, and then hope for higher handicaps.
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