Blacktop Gladiators

Jeff Gustafson can do things you can’t. The star left fielder of the Courage Rolling Twins—one of two wheelchair softball teams in the Twin Cities—can field a sharply hit ball on one hop without a glove (gloves aren’t used in wheelchair softball other than by the pitcher and the first baseman) and in one motion take the bigger-than-normal, sixteen-inch ball and gun a 130-foot rope to nail the base runner at first. Yes, he throws people out at first from left field. And he makes this peculiar 7–3 putout with an unnerving regularity. And he does it sitting down.

The weird thing is, Gustafson probably draws more attention when he does the things that you can do. As a result of a rare hereditary condition that has impaired his legs (his mother, sister, daughter, and a niece cope with the same disease, though it has spared his son), Gustafson, at thirty-six, has been playing wheelchair athletics, both softball and basketball, for eleven years. But when he’s not on the field or the court, he doesn’t spend much time in a chair, unless he would have to be on his feet for a long period of time. Though it’s painful, he can walk. “The farthest I like to go is to and from the parking lot to my car,” he says. Not long ago, when he was visiting the zoo with his sister, a guy held the door for them while they tried to negotiate their wheelchairs through the turnstiles. It was an awkward maneuver, so Gustafson popped up out of his chair to avoid the hassle. “The guy holding the door looked at me like I was trying to get away with something,” he says.

In or out of a chair, Gustafson is an imposing man, with massive forearms and a perpetual three-day beard. The type of blue-collar, tough-looking dude who wears a ball cap whether playing softball or not, he doesn’t seem to be someone who needs a door held for him, literally or figuratively. He’s twice earned MVP honors, once in 1998 and again in 2002, at the National Wheelchair Softball Association’s national tournament—as a member of a team that finished seventh.

The Twins aren’t even the superior team in the Twin Cities. That would be the St. Paul Saints. And the Saints are not only the better of the two local teams, they’re the reigning national champions—and, coincidentally, the hosts of this summer’s national tournament. The 2006 title was their second as the Saints (the first was in 2000); prior to that, the St. Paul Rolling Thunder, winners of seven of the last fourteen national tournaments, folded what was left of their aging roster into the Saints’ organization. The only member of that Thunder team to still play with the Saints is their graybeard pitcher, Jerry Anderson, but the Saints have absorbed the Thunder’s legacy. They have a collective swagger befitting a team with a well-stocked trophy case. The easiest sports cliché would be to label them the Yankees of wheelchair softball, but while the Saints have the trophies and a Hall of Fame infield, there’s a rough, thuggish aura about them. The coaches and many of the players are full of tattoos. There’s a lively, profane banter constantly emanating from their sideline. One of the Twins told me that once a summer there’s a brawl. And he didn’t mean a bench-clearing dustup with the opposing team—he meant among the Saints themselves. Plus, every year they’re accused of bringing a couple of ringers to the nationals. Gustafson calls the Saints “one of the most disliked teams in the tournament.”

While the Saints have a Yankee-esque hold on the record book, a more fitting analog might be the Harlem Globetrotters. Because if the Saints are the Trotters, the Twins are the Saints’ own Washington Generals. For years the Saints have scrimmaged the Twins every summer Thursday evening, alternating between the Aldrich Arena parking lot in Maplewood and the Twins’ home field—a parking lot adjacent to the community center in Brooklyn Park—and for years the Saints would win 18–1 or 25–3. “We would be down 15–0,” Gustafson says, “and they would intentionally walk me.” After humiliating him, they would try to recruit him in the parking lot following the game.

Gustafson never defected, but he watched several of his teammates cross the river. Manuel Guerra Jr.  is now the Saints’ hulking first baseman. Scott Berg is now the Saints’ speedy outfielder. Both used to play for the Twins, and both have now won championships and accolades with the Saints. Gustafson has stubbornly played the role of Tony Gwynn—the lone winner on a team of losers. A doubles hitter on a team that couldn’t get runners on base. A brilliant fielder on an undisciplined team that would cough up a crooked number at least once a game. More recently, with a pair of bum wrists (as a physical basketball player who roams the paint, he lands on his hands constantly), Gustafson was beginning to take consolation in his two MVPs and the fact that he never gave in to those cocky bastards on the opposite bench.

But, in 2005, Gustafson was pleasantly surprised. A couple of the Twins’ vets moved on, and a few new talented players meant there were runners on base when he hit those doubles. Two new coaches—good cop Bill Schaetzel and bad cop Bill Richardson—seemed to instill in the team the objective self-awareness they needed and tightened up their defensive discipline. The Twins now had situational hitters who could keep a big inning going and, while in the field, didn’t give up the big inning so easily. The Thursday night scrimmages became more competitive, and, perhaps more importantly, the guys didn’t go their separate ways after the game. Instead, they shared their cooler of beer and talked softball for a couple of hours. At the national tournament that year, they finished fifth—their best finish ever.

The Saints still treated the scrimmages like scrimmages. They seemed to smirk at what they considered their only marginally improved whipping boys; Thursdays were only a warm-up for the tournament. But then, last summer, in the semifinal round of the nationals in Chicago, the Twins were tied 8–8 with the Saints in extra innings. In the bottom of the eighth (regulation games go seven), the Saints came up to bat, and Gustafson took his spot in left. The Twins hadn’t scored during the top of the inning, but their defense had improved to the point where Gustafson was feeling good about their prospects. “Either of us could win,” he thought.

Berg, the Saints’ center fielder, smoked one in the gap for a double. With big righty third basemen George Kiefner at the plate, Gustafson inched his cambered wheels forward, ready for a line drive that he could return to the infield in a hurry. But Kiefner rapped a line drive into right. The ball landed at the feet of Kurt Greniger. The Twins’ other veteran, Greniger was in right center for the semifinal, and he came up throwing to first. That was a mistake. Berg was going home on contact, and as the ball sailed toward first, he was already rounding third. Gustafson sat helpless and watched the Saints score the winning run. “They got lucky,” he would say later. “Could’ve gone either way.”

I’m not a fan of women’s basketball. I’m not a minor league baseball booster either. I don’t care if it’s played outdoors “among the people” and that the players aren’t spoiled millionaires. I watch sports to watch the best athletes play at the highest levels. I watch sports to see athletes do things that I can’t imagine doing myself. I switch channels as soon as they run the highlights on SportsCenter, before the requisite “inspiring” or “uplifting” feature on the disabled amateur athlete who “overcame the odds” and earned a visit from his or her professional hero. Maybe that sort of thing makes you feel better about spending an afternoon on the couch, but I don’t have those guilt issues. For that matter, there are a lot of ways to tell a sports story, and I’m not interested in telling a tale that leads you to conclude, “There but for the grace of God . . . .”

So when I sat down with Brian Chavez, the Rolling Twins’ thirty-four-year-old right fielder and reigning rookie of the year (his peers voted for him after last year’s national tourney—it was the second year in a row a Twins outfielder copped the honor), he seemed to be exactly the kind of handicapped athlete it would be difficult to feel sorry for, much less find inspiringly uplifting. Chavez played basketball at Spring Lake Park High School during the 1980s, but sometimes got in trouble. He tells me about the time he challenged a coach one day during open gym. “I’m gonna dunk on you, Coach!” he shouted, racing down the court. “You better not, Chavez!” the coach shouted back, No Dunking signs prominently posted around the gym. Chavez puts his head back and laughs. “Now when I see the guy, I always tell him, ‘You can say you got dunked on by a Mexican in a wheelchair.’ ”

After Chavez got drunk and fell sixty-seven feet from a parking garage in Orlando, Florida, on Memorial Day 2005, compressing a vertebrae and fracturing his spinal column “like,” as he puts it, “a squished-out cigarette,” he vowed he’d never touch a basketball again. He’d never taken organized sports that seriously—he tried to walk-on at the University of Minnesota as a quarterback before eventually dropping out of school and later played some semipro football and basketball before concentrating on the Twin Cities construction company he started. But he did have a big-time reputation playing street ball with Nate Archambeaux, Prentis Perkins, and other former Gophers. “Playing at the level I played was quite a mental high,” he says. “So trying to play basketball in a chair—it’s just something that I told myself I would never do.”

Chavez was in limbo. He broke up with his girlfriend of seven years. He moved out of his house because his wheelchair didn’t fit through the doors, and he bounced between his sister’s house and his father’s. “I could never be mad at anybody for this,” he says of his injury. “If somebody had done this to me, if I were in a car accident or somebody had facilitated this happening to me, I’d probably be a real bitter bastard. But I did it all to myself, so there is absolutely nobody that I can be mad at.” Still, Chavez had zero motivation. For three months after the accident, he didn’t even want to live. He refused to go to therapy. Then, in December 2005, he began going to Courage Center in Golden Valley. There, he says, “a nurse gave me Scott Rickford’s number. And Scott Rickford’s name will go down in history because Scott Rickford is the reason why I am.”

Rickford is the Rolling Twins’ second baseman. He had suffered a similar spinal injury when he was fifteen, in an ATV accident on his family’s farm in North Dakota. Now he’s a stockbroker living and working in the Twin Cities, and he’s been playing with the Twins for six years. After Chavez’s call, Rickford was relentless. He pestered Chavez about working out. And then he started bugging him about playing softball. At first, Chavez didn’t want to. “No way,” Chavez says. “I didn’t want to open myself to categorization. I didn’t want to do anything where somebody could say, ‘Oh, look at the gimp.’ ”

When I ask Chavez if he thought Rickford was trying to recruit him (the previous rookie of the year, Jake Karels, had been recruited at Courage Center and Courage Center is a Rolling Twins’ sponsor), he can’t believe I asked. “Nah, man,” he says. “Scott wanted to be my friend. I mean, what’s there not to like about me? I’m a good shit. I have good charisma about me.” In any case, Chavez finally gave in to the wheedling. In the spring of 2006, Chavez told Rickford he would meet him at practice. But when Chavez  showed up at the softball field at the Brooklyn Park Community Activity Center on a Tuesday night, he waited—and waited. “Finally, I call Scott. I’m like, ‘Somebody could have called and told me there wasn’t going to be any practice today.’ And he’s like, ‘We are practicing.’ He’s like, ‘Let me guess—you’re at the softball fields, right?’ ” Rickford told him to come to the parking lot on the other side of the building. “I’m in my car thinking, ‘Of course—it’s on blacktop! Why would they play on grass?’ ” 

Now that he’s found the field, Chavez has grown comfortable on it. He’s brought his own street style to the game. After the most recent of his three spinal surgeries, he had an angel wing tattooed on each hand. He rolls in a bright yellow sports chair with a high camber that’s even sportier than the big pimpin’ cream-colored Chrysler 300 he parks in center field just beyond the reach of a moon shot (the field is a parking lot, after all). Chavez’s swing is similar to the swing of most players with spinal cord injuries: Because they have limited use of their abdominal muscles, they swing the bat with one arm for a longer arc with added centrifugal force. If Chavez doesn’t like a pitch, he leans back and scratches his back with his bat as if to say, “Whatever, dawg.”

His motto is “No regrets”—he wears a rubber bracelet stamped with the line—and he claims that his injury is the best thing that ever happened to him. He says he wouldn’t have accomplished the things he’s accomplished and been to the places and tournaments he’s been to (he believes he has a shot at making the U.S. ParaOlympic team in 2008) if he hadn’t been injured—though at times during our conversation he seems to be trying to convince himself of this. “I wouldn’t have gone to the Olympics as a basketball player,” he says. But when it comes to making a name as a wheelchair softball star, “to tell you the truth, I got this.”

Perhaps his brashness is a remnant of his high school aversion to authority, or perhaps—though Chavez seems to take pains to avoid admitting it—he uses softball to channel resentment and anger about his injury. He seems to motivate himself by nursing a blue-collar sort of vocal resentment of other players he perceives as elite, whether they’re on the opposing team or his own. A typical rant: “Nebraska has a great fielder, used to play semipro ball—on a scale of one to ten the guy is probably a nine. But he’s an amputee. He can walk. I give him shit all the time. ‘You come around me with your big-headedness. Take off your other leg, and we’ll see how well you can play in a chair.’ I tell him, ‘I just wish I could have met you two years earlier. Just two.’ ” Or regarding his teammate, Jeff Gustafson: “I say, ‘So you’ve been playing this for ten years, I’m only giving myself seven years . . . to crush every stat that you have. I want to one-up you on everything you’ve ever done. You’re no longer going to be the poster boy of the Rolling Twins. I’m going to politely and calmly take that right away from you.’ ”

When I ask Gustafson about Chavez’s comments, he smiles as if he’s been waiting to hear something like that from somebody. “I love it,” he says. “That’s great. If I can motivate somebody like that . . . that will make us better—bring it on.” When Chavez joined the team, and it was clear how fast he was and how strong his arm was, Gustafson offered him his left field spot, but Chavez refused, wanting to make his own mark in right. Rickford, for his part, claims that Chavez is still pissed at the world. “I was hurt when I was fifteen,” Rickford says. “He was hurt two years ago. He’s still working through it.”

I was wrong to expect Chavez to share my disdain for women’s basketball. He says the women’s college game is now his favorite. He appreciates the women’s strict adherence to fundamentals. And the way they “play the game right,” solely for the love of it. Indeed, this summer he’s been missing Tuesday softball practice to coach a seventh-grade girl’s traveling team.

One of the major misconceptions about wheelchair softball is that it’s a sport for “special” athletes. Organizations such as the Miracle League and the Special Olympics receive millions of dollars in contributions to build fields and put together teams for kids with severe mental and physical disabilities. Some of the local softball guys resent the fact that organizations that insist “everyone’s a winner” seem to receive more attention and philanthropic money than the ultracompetitive, obsessive athletes who make up the National Wheelchair Softball Association. “No offense,” Scott Rickford points out, “but wheelchair softball isn’t about young kids in motorized chairs who are awarded first base for showing up. We’re trying to kick each other’s asses out there.”

In that vein, there’s a calculus to wheelchair softball that’s even more ruthless than the system of economic exploitation made famous by Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane in the book Moneyball. A classification number—I, II, or III—is given to each wheelchair player based on the player’s limitations: Amputees and lower-body muscle degenerations are usually Class IIIs, spinal injuries are typically Class II or I, depending on where and how extensive the spinal injury is. Each team is also required to play a quadriplegic at all times. In a wheelchair softball game, the total number of points on the field can’t exceed twenty-two. For years, the Rolling Twins were known as a team of Class Is, possibly because their most promising Class IIIs would end up playing for the Saints. “Most teams load their lineup with six IIIs, a II, a I, and a quad, and are set for the year,” says Twins first baseman Jeff Fischer, a slick-fielding Class I. “We've never had the ability to do that.” But in the past two years, the Twins’ makeup has changed. Rookies-of-the-year Karels and Chavez are a III and a II, respectively, and the Twins hope their new right center fielder, amputee Wyatt Halvorson, will be this summer’s top tyro. With the infusion of new talent, the Twins are on the verge of having what has to be considered a good problem, though a challenge to team chemistry nonetheless.

Chavez, for instance, is a Class II, but has the skills of a III, a net numerical benefit. The Twins’ young Class III third baseman, David (“Richie”) Richardson, despite his recent improvement as a hitter, has the chair speed of a Class I, making him, arguably, a net numerical deficit. Further complicating the situation: Richie is coach Bill Richardson’s son, and the coach—of the “not-afraid-to-chew-butts” mentality—is such an acknowledged asset Richie may still be a net numerical plus.

A team can also make points at the quad position. While an outsider could mistake the quad requirement as something akin to the old “one-girl” tokenism in intramural sports, Fischer is quick to remind me that most quads are not paralyzed. The wheelchair league rules define a quad as somebody with impairment, not paralysis, in all four limbs. The Twins’ quad is Chad O’Fallon, who, like most  teams’ quads, is the catcher. In many ways, he’s representative of the Twins’ collective identity (at least relative to the decidedly unsaintly Saints): Having sung in his Great Falls, Montana, high school chorale, he’s an actual choirboy. He’s also one of several family men on the team—a newlywed who met his wife through an Internet dating service three years ago. O’Fallon’s four limbs are impaired by a rare birth defect with one of those sinister acronyms (PFFD, for Proximal Femoral Focal Deficiency), but when he’s not sitting in his chair behind the plate, he walks with the aid of crutches. Over the past three seasons, he has vastly improved as a ballplayer, especially on defense. “My most important job is to hang on to the ball during plays at the plate,” he explains. And though he currently bats tenth, he believes he has yet to reach his potential as a hitter. He concedes he’ll never hit for power; his goal is to become a situational hitter, somebody who won’t kill a rally with a double play.

While some teams can hit the ball over the fence—the Nebraska Barons are feared for this ability—the home run has been rare in wheelchair softball, and the Twins are, fairly typically, a team of doubles and singles hitters. They score runs by placing the ball and moving around the bases with their notable speed. Though they’re beginning to earn a reputation for defense, particularly for the live arms in their outfield, defense can take a wheelchair softball team only so far. In order to win, the six best players in the middle of the lineup have to excel at situational hitting and avoid making stupid mistakes on the base paths.

Jeff Gustafson believes his team has the potential to win it all. “We could have won it all last year,” he says. “And I know that at least half the team is gung-ho for it this year. With the group of guys we have right now—a core that could have a five-, six-year window—it would be a great fricking thing to win the national championship.” O’Fallon says simply, “It would be cool to finally get Jeff G. a title.”

The Twins’ competition at this summer’s nationals will include, of course, the defending champion Saints as well as the season’s powerful odds-on favorites, the Nebraska Barons. Then there are the newly formed Schaumburg Flyers, who are basically the reconstituted RIC Cubs. The Cubs finished second to the Saints last year, but their coach was busted after allegedly throwing a team party that featured strippers and midgets(!), and the Cubs were forced to fire him after their sponsor, the prestigious Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, applied heat. Chastened maybe, but not defeated, the coach promptly founded a new team, the Flyers, and, according to their Twin Cities’ opponents, most of the best Cubs went with him.

“See, there’s even the same scandals with these guys,” Chavez says of his chair-riding contemporaries. “There have been a few times at tournaments where I’ve turned around and said, ‘Wow, I never thought I’d see that again . . . but there it is.’ ” 

Associate editor Steve Marsh profiled restaurateur Thom Pham in July.