Brush Up on The History of Wheelchair Basketball
World War II was over. Wounded veterans had sacrificed their glorious youth for their country and for freedom. They were alive, but some of their bodies were paralyzed and souls damaged. They wanted no sympathy or special treatment. They simply wanted the opportunity to regain their sense of wholeness and to take their rightful place in society. They did so through sport, particularly the sport of wheelchair basketball.
A book by David Davis, Wheels of Courage: How Paralyzed Veterans from World War II Invented Wheel Chair Sports, Fought for Disability Rights, and Inspired a Nation, reveals the pioneering story of the world’s first wheelchair athletes: U.S. soldiers, sailors, and Marines who were paralyzed on the battlefield during World War II. They organized the first-ever wheelchair basketball teams within V.A. hospitals after the war, which quickly spread across the nation and changed the perception and treatment of disabled people.
This book weaves the long-forgotten story of how three groups of courageous and unbreakable pioneers —paralyzed veterans from World War II; the doctors and physical therapists who created the rehabilitative treatments to keep them alive; and the educators and coaches who used sports to motivate them—came together to change their world and ours. To that point in time, wheelchair sports did not exist yet.
Enter two doctors, Ernest Bors in California and Howard Rusk in New York, who helped popularize treatments in which wounded veterans used recreation to rehabilitate their bodies and to adjust to their “new normal.” Veterans and their doctors experimented with several sports, including seated volleyball and wheelchair baseball, but none caught on until a physical education instructor at Birmingham VA hospital in Van Nuys, California, created a new sport: wheelchair basketball. That P.E. teacher, Bob Rynearson, noticed that the paralyzed veterans liked to play a crude form of pickup basketball after the non-disabled players abandoned the court. He began organizing practices for the wheelchair crew and then wrote the first set of rules for the sport.
While watching the men wheel up and down the court and jockey for position, Rynearson arrived at his most perceptive insight: that the wheelchair should be considered an extension of the athlete’s body. In this he was aided by the new-fangled wheelchair models being produced in Southern California, which the rising aviation industry had turned into an engineering capital.
Wheelchair “technology” had long been mired in Civil War-era design. Old-school chairs were all-wooden, rigid-frame models that were essentially pieces of bulky furniture, with all of the maneuverability of an aircraft carrier. That changed in the late 1930s, when engineers Herbert Everest and Harry Jennings started to fashion something more maneuverable.
The pioneering wheelchair athletes didn’t just revolutionize the possibility of sport, but their public presence also helped reduce the stigma of disability outside the gymnasium- they couldn’t possibly be considered “wheelchair-bound” or “confined to a wheelchair.” Given the chance, they were obviously capable of doing everything non-disabled veterans could do. “In essence, these pioneering athletes marked the beginning of organized sports for individuals with all types of disabilities,” said Davis. “A movement that eventually included women and youth.”
In demonstrating that ability matters more than disability, these veterans fired the first shots in what would become the protracted fight for disability rights in this country.
NOTE: This article includes a portion of the aforementioned book and an article written by the book’s author, David Davis, a Los Angeles-based journalist.
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