Blacktop Gladiators

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.