1 of 2
Photography by Brian Sirimaturos
2 of 2
Photography by Brian Sirimaturos
Eric Newby (right) and the Rugby Rams face off against Chuck Aoki (left) and the Steelheads.
A couple of strong pushes send Eric Newby rolling down the sideline. He coasts for a few yards, reclining to crack his back. Newby’s St. Louis Rugby Rams, the hosts of this weekend’s Crazy 8s tournament, are about to take on the Minnesota Steelheads, and players from both teams are taking pregame laps. Some players talk and joke, but Newby’s goateed face is blank. Maybe he’s hyperfocused, in the zone. Or maybe he’s bored, impatient for tipoff. Then a grin appears. His palms flash across the tops of his wheels, and he makes a sharp turn. He sprints across the floor, straight for Steelheads star Chuck Aoki, who sees Newby coming just in time to brace himself. The chairs slam together in what sounds like a car accident, and both pop up off the floor.
To an outsider, this pregame assault might signal sabotage, like Tonya Harding on wheels. But Newby and Aoki are laughing. Though they’re opponents today, they play together on the USA wheelchair rugby team. This brain-jiggling blow is just Newby’s way of saying, “Nice to see you.”
The hits keep coming. Every play includes a vicious collision…or two…or four. With your eyes closed, the game sounds like the demolition derby at a county fair. The ear-splitting crashes drown out even the cacophony of cowbells and noisemakers rattled by the home crowd. A player passes the ball just before he’s taken out by a charging defender, like a quarterback being leveled as he throws. Teammates clear the way for a ball carrier by setting high-speed blind-side screens.
To withstand this punishment, rugby chairs are fitted with angled wheels, which give them a wider, more stable base. Those wheels are covered with protective plates, and the chairs are built up with metal guards, all scarred with more craters and dents than the surface of the moon. The players are secured with heavy-duty snowboard binding straps across their waists and feet. Still, one impact sends Aoki sprawling onto his back, more angry than injured. Play stops so a pit crew can race out onto the floor to pick him up.
What little most people know about the sport comes from the excellent documentary Murderball, which set these wrecks to heavy metal—a brutal ballet. But even though Newby embraces the game’s violence, he loves it for the strategy. “It looks like bumper cars, but you play it like chess,” he explains.
Quad rugby is played four-against-four on a standard basketball court, with cones at each end marking goals. The object is to carry a modified volleyball across the goal line, good for one point. To be eligible to play, a person must have impairment in three or four limbs. Each player is given a rating based on his disability, ranging from a 0.5 for those with the most severe impairments to a 3.5 for those with the most function. Aoki is a 3.5, Newby a 2. At any one time, a team may have only eight points on the floor. The game is called rugby, but it has more in common with basketball: Dribbling is required. There are pick and rolls on offense and full-court presses on defense. The action favors the offense, with just about every possession ending in a point, meaning that a single timely defensive stop can decide the outcome.
A first-time observer wouldn’t guess that the players are quadriplegic. Partly that’s because of the misconception that the term means total paralysis below the neck. And partly it’s a testament to these players’ years of practice. His hands don’t work well enough to shake, but Newby can throw a 30-foot pass right into the lap of a moving teammate. Even a person with no knowledge of the rules can instantly recognize the talents of players like Aoki and Newby. Exceptional athletes simply possess an ineffable universal quality, a sort of poetry in motion that transcends context. Usain Bolt running, Tom Brady passing, Vladimir Tarasenko finding the back of the net—these things would stir the soul of even a recently landed Martian.
Aoki is like a Kobe Bryant, fast and deceptively strong, scoring at will. On play after play, the Steelheads simply inbound the ball to him, then watch as he spins and knifes through the defense. He leaves the Rams choking on his exhaust as he slams the ball down in the goal. “He’s one of the most dominant players in the world,” Newby says. “The second you think you have him, he just pushes you out of the way, calls you a bad word, and leaves you behind.” Newby’s talent is more understated. He’s a LeBron James, scoring when he needs to but also throwing beautiful passes or setting crucial picks. At times, he appears to be playing in slow motion, calmly directing the action, waiting for an opening, then seizing it. Defensively, he’s among the best in the world at forcing turnovers, using his long arms to swipe at the ball.
Today, though each excels, Aoki gets the best of the matchup, and Minnesota wins, 56–48. Both teams are in the top five of the national rankings, and the Rams will have the rest of the season to plot their revenge. In the stands, the mother of a player from Milwaukee explains the sport to me. “They have a better life now than if they hadn’t been in chairs,” she says. “If they had the choice, they’d stay in the chair. Isn’t that crazy?”
Newby remembers everything. The night of his graduation from Nashville Community High School, in rural southern Illinois, he was at a park for a party hosted by a fellow member of the class of 2006. The weather was warm, and Newby wore sandals, khaki shorts, and an orange T-shirt from a three-on-three basketball tournament. He had a reputation as a badass, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound powerhouse who could bench press 300.
Just before midnight, he and a few friends decided to drive to his buddy Drew’s house to jump in the pool. It was only a couple of miles away—Newby could look across a field from the park and see the lights at Drew’s house, though the winding road wasn’t such a straight shot.
Newby had outs. More than one sober friend had offered him a ride home. But instead, he jumped into his friend Kevin’s* truck. They were both drunk. The Chevy pickup had a restrictor feature that cut the engine at 99 mph. As they burned down the road toward Drew’s, the truck kept hitting that cap. Kevin kept the pedal to the floor. “Dime” by Mike Jones blared on the radio, and both boys stuck their heads out the window, letting the warm wind wash over their faces, two graduates on top of the world.
It was about then that Newby noticed tall grass coming over the hood. “Dude, you’re going off the road!” he yelled. When Kevin tried to correct course, the back end cut loose, and they shot across the road and off in the other direction. There was only a wide-open field in front of them, but it was then that their bad decisions met with bad luck. In that exact spot, a concrete post stood by the side of the road. It caught the front bumper, and the truck went airborne, flipping end over end. The truck came down at a diagonal; the roof above Newby’s head was the first thing to hit.
For weeks, friends had been giving Kevin shit about his broken passenger seatbelt, which would latch but not lock. It held long enough to break Newby’s collarbone and snap his scapula in half, but then it let loose, possibly saving his life. When the truck’s ceiling came crashing down, Newby was pushed to the floorboards. If the seatbelt had held him in place, he might have lost his head.
He tried to push his door open, but it wouldn’t budge. He saw Kevin climb free, unharmed. Newby yelled for an ambulance. A girl in the car behind them had already made the call. He tried to squeeze his head through the narrow opening where the window used to be and slashed his face on the glass. “I’m screwed,” Newby thought. About then, a group of friends arrived from Drew’s house on four-wheelers. Newby doesn’t remember feeling any pain, didn’t cry or scream. But he couldn’t hold his head up. When Drew’s mother approached the car, Newby told her, “I know my neck is broken, so hold my head still. Keep me stable.” She held him until the ambulance arrived. The flashing lights drew a crowd from the party, so half of the class watched him being cut from the car.
As an Eagle Scout trained in first aid, he knew how bad this was. He remembers being on the stretcher in a neck brace. His mother, a hospital administrator, was there.
“Mom, I’m paralyzed,” Newby told her.
“You don’t know that,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m paralyzed.”
He was loaded into a helicopter for the flight to St. Louis. The 30-minute trip seemed to take three hours. There was a bright light shining in his face, and a man kept yelling at him to count. There were six screws around the light, and he counted them in a repeating circuit. Every time he got to about 12, he blacked out. Then he’d wake up to the ringing from the flat line on the monitor. “You gotta keep counting!” the man would shout. “You gotta stay awake!” Newby drifted in and out countless times.
Then he remembers being pushed into the emergency department at Saint Louis University Hospital. Somebody stuck a needle into his arm, and he woke up three days later.
*Not his real name
While Newby was under, doctors performed surgery on his back, a procedure that lasted many hours. When the truck roof came down on his head, his C7 vertebra exploded. The surgeon removed the fragments, then replaced them with cadaver bone, two plates, and six screws. After three days in intensive care, Newby was transferred to SSM St. Mary’s for rehab. He was paralyzed below the nipples, for lack of a better reference point, and though he maintained control of his arms, his hand function was limited.
Before the accident, Newby had been an apathetic student who was considering college only because of parental pressure. The baby of the family, with three older sisters, he was shy but loved. (Although he grew up as the only boy, now his sisters have six children among them—all boys. “It’s payback,” Newby says.) His sense of humor is desert dry, and he tends to fill any awkward silence with a self-deprecating wisecrack.
Newby decided that he was going to make it and said “screw it” to everything else. But adjusting to his new body, and his new reality, made the rehabilitation process maddening. He speaks highly of the people who treated him, but he found some of the tasks insultingly tedious. A therapist gave him a colorful children’s pegboard. The idea was to help Newby regain fine motor skills, but he saw it as an annoying waste of time. “This is stupid,” he said. The therapist told Newby that he wasn’t allowed to leave until he mastered the pegboard. Instead, he threw it against the wall. “I hate the pegboard,” he told his mother. “I don’t care what you do with that pegboard—I am not going to master it.”
He would spend hours trying to put on a pair of socks. His feet didn’t work, and he couldn’t lift his leg, couldn’t control his fingers. “I will never wear socks again,” he said. “I’ll tear these socks in half. I hate socks.” He felt like an infant, relearning everything. He couldn’t envision having a life again. Support from his parents and sisters helped, as did the flood of emails from his friends back home. And he made friends with an occupational therapy student. She hung out with him, played cards, didn’t mention the pegboard.
Then, she showed him Murderball. The film proved his life wasn’t over.
Part of his rehab included a day visit away from the hospital. Newby went to the health and wellness center at Paraquad to research his post-injury workout options. There, a woman asked whether he might want to play rugby. He told her that he wanted nothing more. She introduced herself as Sue Tucker, coach of the Rugby Rams, and she told him about a clinic coming up in a couple of weeks. James Gumbert, coach of Team USA, would be in town to give new players some pointers.
On the day that Newby was released from rehab, he didn’t go home. He went straight to that clinic. New players from all over the country had come in to learn from Gumbert. Newby was still weak, had dreadfully low blood pressure, was at a continuous risk of passing out. But he borrowed a chair from Tim Ostler, a former professional snowboarder who was paralyzed during a photo shoot in a half-pipe, and pushed his way up and down the floor a few times.
He was hooked.
The Rams practice on Monday and Wednesday nights in the gym at South Technical High School. Tonight, a new player, Jake, has been cleared by his doctor to practice for the first time. “It should be a long night for him,” Newby says with a smirk. I ask about his own first practice. “It was ugly,” he says.
When the players break off into teams for a warmup game, Newby ends up on the same team as his longtime rugby buddy, Chuck Melton, who has a speaker hooked up to his chair, blaring rock music. On one of the first plays, Newby heaves a full-court pass to Melton, who catches it just as he crosses the goal line. “Did it count?” Newby yells down the court. “It looked cool.”
Melton is also from rural Illinois. He broke his neck in 2002, diving into Washington County Lake. Now, he drives 75 miles each way for practice. “It’s worth it, absolutely,” he tells me during a break in the action. Melton is a bull on the court; rugby acts as a release valve for anger and frustration. “I never did go into any type of support group. I didn’t want to talk about it,” he says, “but coming around here, it just seemed like it was so much easier to talk to these guys.” He credits the sport with saving his marriage of 17 years. He works as an unpaid chauffeur for his three children, driving them to school and basketball and volleyball and dance.
Melton and Newby have now been playing together for the better part of a decade. They’ve worked out together, pushing at the park and lifting weights. Newby’s mother likes to talk about how much he’s helped Melton. Melton’s wife likes to talk about how much he’s helped Newby. They’re both right. Together, the pair brought the Rams to new heights, finishing as high as sixth in the nation, often against long odds. A prototypical quad rugby lineup is composed of a dominant scorer with a 3.5 rating (denoting less impairment), a couple of second-fiddle players with ratings of 2.0 or so, and then a more limited defensive specialist with a rating of 0.5 or 1, for a total of eight. The Rams, though, have lacked that leading 3.5 player, which meant that Newby and Melton, both 2.0s, have had to play above their ratings, taking on opponents with much more function.
Along the way, they’ve developed a sixth sense. “We can just look at each other two plays before and know what [the other one is] going to do,” Newby says. Both men play for Team USA, and each credits the other for getting him to that level. In that way, their friendship has propelled them around the globe.
As practice moves on, the players circle up to stretch, pulling their arms this way and that, rolling their necks. Then they run through a series of passing drills. As a result of their paralysis, many of the athletes, including Newby, can neither sweat nor shiver, making temperature regulation a pressing concern. On the sideline, players douse themselves with water from spray bottles.
The team’s only woman, Kerri Morgan, has been playing since about 2000. An occupational therapist at Washington University, Morgan contracted a virus called transverse spinal myelitis on the day after her first birthday. It causes inflammation in her back that basically has the same effect as a spinal cord injury. In 2009, Morgan became the first woman ever to make Team USA. Considering her diminutive stature, she’s a good rugby player, but her best sport is track. At the 2012 Paralympics, in London, she won two bronze medals. Still, rugby is her first love. She watches young players such as Newby with pride. “He’s absolutely one of the best rugby players in his class in the country,” she says. “He just brings an extra level, not only of athletic ability but just competitive nature. He brings that drive to our team.”
This year, the team imported a player named Leevi Ylönen from Finland. The former European MVP has finally given the Rams that dominant scorer. Ylönen is a quadruple amputee, which gives him an advantage over paralyzed opponents, however counterintuitive that might seem. Because he has control of his abs and torso, he can turn his chair just by twisting his body. But so far, the transition has been clunky. Newby’s struggled to give up his ball-handling duties, and the players occasionally get in each others’ way. Tonight, they work on it. For maybe an hour, they run through their half-court offense. It’s a brutally physical drill, with the two sides slamming together like opposing armies in Braveheart, if those medieval Scots had been driving tanks. It sounds like a thunderstorm. Newby clears a path for Ylönen, smashing into defenders to knock them out of his way. Then Ylönen drops the ball off to Newby for a goal.
The orchestration that goes into each score is a thing of beauty—the precise passes, the screens, the way the players dance across the court to find openings. Newby was wrong when he said that this game is played like chess. Wheelchair rugby is far tougher. Garry Kasparov wouldn’t stand a chance.
The players on Team USA take representing their country seriously. If you’re not ready to compete on their level, they’ll take your head off. During her first USA tryout, Morgan felt like a high school football player thrown into the NFL. Newby’s first tryout was in 2009. He wasn’t ready. “I looked like an idiot out there,” he tells me.
Rugby changed Newby. More than helping him move past his accident, it gave him purpose and direction. Being cut from Team USA had an even bigger impact. It showed him how hard he needed to train, the long hours required to be better, faster, stronger. It was a wakeup call for life, too.
He went back to school, earning his degree in graphic design at Maryville University. He got married to a blue-eyed brunette he met at his 21st-birthday party, bought a house in Maryland Heights, and adopted two dogs. They’re miniature schnauzers that his wife, Emily, named Evelyn and Esther. “I guess she likes old lady names,” he jokes.
In December 2012, he received another invitation to try out for Team USA. This time, he felt like he belonged, and he made it. Melton did, too. The next year was a big one for the Americans. They played in three international tournaments and won three gold medals. Newby’s favorite was the Tri-Nations tournament held in Sydney. It was played outside, which had never been done before. The team stayed right in Darling Harbour, visited the aquarium, rolled past the famous opera house…
During the season, Newby spends about one week of every month at the Lakeshore Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama, which is Team USA’s home base. Coach Gumbert puts the team through three grueling three-hour sessions per day. The players stay in dorms, where practical jokes are a constant. The coach gets in on the action, too. When Newby’s Cardinals were in the playoffs last October, Gumbert would come to practice wearing the jersey of whatever team they were facing. “He was the world’s biggest Dodgers fan for a week,” Newby says, “then, all of a sudden, he got Giants T-shirts.”
Gumbert, a former player who was paralyzed 33 years ago on Christmas night, is matter-of-fact about his disability. “You get a choice every day when you wake up how you’re going to live,” he says. “You could give up, or you can get going. My choice was to get going.”
As the head coach of the Texas Stampede, he embraces the sport’s role as a support group. After his accident, Gumbert spent months in a hospital. These days, insurance companies cut people off after maybe 30 days. At that point, people haven’t even had time to comprehend their impairment, much less overcome it. He gives the example of a new player who spends 10 minutes before practice trying to tie his shoes.
“Why are you tying your shoes?” Gumbert will ask.
“Well, that’s what I’ve always done.”
“Yeah, but we don’t walk. Tie it loose, put it on, and let’s go! Get on with life.”
By the time players get to the international level, they’ve mastered the basics, and they quickly acclimate to the challenges of global travel (for instance, a 15-hour flight without being able to stretch your legs or get up to use the restroom, or explaining to the TSA that your back is full of metal). On Team USA, Gumbert has no time for stragglers. “We can’t put a team out on the floor if you’re stuck in the bathroom because you can’t get out of the toilet,” he says. When he interviewed for the job, he was asked about his goals and responded frankly: “The only reason I’m here is to win gold.”
Last year, in the World Championships, Team USA came up short of that goal. In the semifinals, the Americans lost to their longtime rivals from Canada, who went on to lose to Australia in the finals. The third-place finish was devastating. “It’s hard to talk about,” Newby says. “I basically look up at that bronze medal every day and get real pissed off. It really sucks to train so hard for that long and get to the big stage and blow it.”
Shortly after that disappointment, Team USA hosted Australia, the No. 1 team in the world, for a series of five games. The Americans won them all, and Newby, usually a bench player, was put into the starting lineup. Still, the wins felt hollow. They didn’t count for the world rankings, because they were friendlies, in the parlance of international competition. “They came over and we kicked their ass and they went home,” Newby deadpans. “It was very friendly.”
Afterward, his training sessions lacked their usual intensity. He went through the motions on autopilot. It took refocusing on his ultimate goal to snap out of it. Tryouts for the 2015 season will be held in April. In 2016, Team USA will play in the Paralympics in Brazil. Newby needs to be there.
“We hope to see Eric do great things in 2015 and in ’16,” Gumbert says. The coach pauses for a second, reconsidering. “We don’t hope. We expect to see great things from Eric.”
Newby’s truck, a Chevy Colorado Xtreme, sits low enough that he doesn’t need a lift. To see him climb into the driver’s seat is to witness a magic trick. In a flash, he transfers his uncooperative body, pops the wheels off his everyday chair, and loads the components into the back seat of his extended cab. By the time a passenger walks around to the other side, he’s ready to go. He drives with a hand control, which manipulates the pedals through a series of levers. When I idiotically ask whether the truck is a standard or an automatic, Newby laughs off the question. “I’d be pretty bad at the clutch,” he says.
At the Jewish Community Center, where Newby lifts weights, he takes the handicap spot farthest from the entrance. A bus is blocking the ramp to the sidewalk, but Newby refuses help and narrowly avoids tipping while ramming his way over the curb. Inside, he heads to a cable machine near the back of the weight room. It’s still set up the way he likes it, from when he was here yesterday.
It’s a frigid December morning, and because of his limited hand function, it takes him forever to warm his fingers. To help hold the weights, he pulls out a medal hook on a Velcro strap and fastens it in his palm. Then for about an hour, he alternates between series of pulldowns and rows. He can only lift with one hand at a time; because of his lack of trunk control, he’ll topple over if he raises both arms above his head at once. His chair doesn’t have brakes, so he piles stuff in front of the wheels to keep it from rolling around. One benefit of paralysis: It improves his form. No trainer will ever have to tell him to stop using his legs for a back exercise. One might assume, as I did, that pushing fast would require strong arm and chest muscles for propelling the chair forward. But the key is actually not how hard Newby can push but rather how quickly and forcefully he can pull his arms back to push again, making back strength paramount.
Between sets, we talk about costs. Newby says that his chair, with the insurance markup, was $12,000. The retail price for somebody paying out of pocket might be half that, still far from affordable. The chairs typically last three to four years, and insurance will pay for a new one every five. How does Newby make up the difference? “Duct tape.” Rugby chairs, which are customized for each athlete, also run about $6,000, though Vesco Metal Craft recently picked up Newby as a sponsored athlete, giving him access to free chairs. Smaller expenses add up, too. Newby might pop five tires in a practice, and inner tubes cost $4 apiece. “That’s where it comes in handy to have a sugar mama like my wife,” he jokes.
When he’s done lifting, Newby heads back out to his truck for the drive to nearby Creve Coeur Lake Park. On the way, he tells accident stories that he’s collected over the years. One guy was at a zoo, taking pictures of tigers. He fell into their enclosure and landed, unconscious, in a pool of water. A tiger snatched the guy up and saved him from drowning, but its teeth broke his neck. Newby met another man who was bitten in the neck by a brown recluse. He had the venom removed and thought he was fine. A year later, he woke up and couldn’t move his legs. Some venom was still in him, slowly dissolving his spinal cord. The third story is the worst. Whenever Newby tells it, people try not to laugh but chuckle in spite of themselves. A constipated woman on the toilet strained too hard, passed out, and broke her neck when she hit the floor.
At the park, Newby has a routine. He goes from the truck to his everyday chair, then lifts his rugby chair down from the bed. Positioning his back against a truck wheel for support, he moves between chairs. Then he spends a few minutes tightening straps, pulling on pads, taping on gloves. Usually, he’ll push several miles. Sometimes, he goes to a parking garage to do “hills.” But today, because it’s cold and he has me in tow, we decide on a mile loop at a slower-than-usual pace. The path is full of goose poop, which Newby weaves around, lest it wind up on his wheels and, in turn, on his hands.
The first time Newby tried out for Team USA, he did a mile in 10 minutes. Last year, thanks to the training regimen designed by his strength and conditioning coach, he did it in 6 minutes and 3 seconds, the fastest on the team. His biggest improvement, he says, has come in those mental, chess-like aspects of the game. He’s watched hours of film, breaking down opponents’ tendencies. Now, whatever the player across from him does, he knows exactly how to counter. It’s become reflexive, and because he doesn’t have to think, the game slows down.
We return to the truck, where Newby goes through the same routine in reverse. He’s parked on a hill, so when he goes to put his rugby chair back in the bed, he rolls away before he can set it down. He refuses help. On his fourth attempt, he adjusts his approach, taking sort of a running start, and heaves the chair onto the tailgate.
Newby’s hardware box used to live in his truck, but it’s now moved into the house. He leads the way to the front door, where we’re greeted with a flurry of menacing barking from his not-at-all-menacing miniature guard dogs.
Newby leads the way across the threshold, banishes the pups to the back yard, then heads down the hallway to the laundry room, which doubles as his wardrobe. His massive hat collection is arranged below the window, and his equally large sneaker collection is piled on the floor of the closet. The hardware box is buried in the back. He parts a rack of athletic shirts like theater curtains, then digs. After a few curse-filled minutes, he produces an orange size 13 Nike shoebox. It’s a humble home for dozens of rugby plaques and trophies.
He pulls out gold medals won in Denmark and Mexico and Australia. He won the Spoke Buster award, given to the biggest hitter, at a tournament called the Iron Horse Rumble in 2009. The plaque shows a “creepy guy with a porn mustache” in what does not appear to be a rugby chair. There are several MVP and Best 2.0 trophies. In 2012, the Rams won the Division II national championship (the equivalent of finishing ninth in the country). Newby was named tournament MVP.
That trophy is one of three that he allows to see the light of day, displaying it in the living room. Another is his bronze medal from the World Championships, which he keeps out for motivation. The third one is his favorite.
In 2013, Newby was frustrated with the Rams’ performance at nationals. “We got our asses kicked all weekend,” he says. “We played well, but we just didn’t have a very strong lineup.” Afterward, he was standing with his parents, and he told them he wanted to skip the awards banquet. The commissioner of the league came up to the family and asked Newby’s father, who’s an amateur photographer, to shoot the ceremony. They’d have to stick around after all.
Newby sat at a table with Melton and a friend from California, Lee Mercado. Newby was concentrating on cutting his prime rib, not even listening to the proceedings. The organizers were about to give out the Athlete of the Year award, the top honor in the sport. To build suspense, they describe the winner’s credentials before naming him.
Mercado turned to Newby and said, “Dude, they’re talking about you.”
“No, they’re not,” Newby said. “Shut up.” Then he started listening. They were talking about him. Surreal. He doesn’t even remember what he said when he went up to accept the award, but he does remember one detail from that moment. He had brought only one pair of blue jeans with him to the tournament, and when he went to put them on that day, he tore a big hole in them. He received wheelchair rugby’s biggest award while looking like a hobo. Who cares? He’d gone from being a teenager with no plans or prospects to the best wheelchair rugby player in the country.
When you put together all of the time that Newby spends playing, practicing, or training for rugby, it’s basically a full-time job. In January, he emails me with good news: He’s found a second full-time job, and this one pays. “I got a job finally, so feel free not to list me as an unemployed loser in the story,” he writes. At Stealth Creative, a downtown advertising agency, he designs marketing emails. Newby absolutely loves it—the people are great, and his bosses are cool with working around his rugby schedule.
Morgan, Newby’s teammate who teaches at Wash. U., gives him props for balancing life and rugby. “A lot of the guys that get into the wheelchair rugby world and really do well in rugby—and Eric does really well in rugby—they don’t do anything else with their life,” she says. “He is a student at school, getting his degree, looking for a job, living his life… I respect that a lot about him.”
In February, the Rams travel to Phoenix for a tournament that includes seven of the country’s top 10 teams. On the final day, they play Aoki and the Steelheads, who entered the tournament ranked No. 1 in the nation. It’s a chance for payback. More than that, it’s a chance to prove that, with Ylönen, the Rams will be a force at the United States Quad Rugby Association national championships in April.
It’s a close game, but in the final minute, it doesn’t look good for the Rams. With Minnesota up by two, Aoki is sprinting down the sideline with a chance to go up by three and seal the win. Newby chases after him, pushing as hard as he can, as hard as he ever has. He catches Aoki and slams him out of bounds. Turnover. The Rams score to pull within one. Thirteen seconds left. A Minnesota player fumbles the ball, and Melton scoops it up and scores. Tie game. Three seconds left. The Rams turn up their pressure defense, try to keep Minnesota from inbounding. A teammate throws a long pass to Aoki, but he crashes into a Rams player and the ball goes out of bounds. Two seconds left. Ylönen throws a perfect pass to Newby, making the connection that had been missing all season. Newby muscles his way into the goal with one second to spare.
I ask him about what the mom from Milwaukee had said: After mountaintop moments like that one, would he undo the accident, if given the chance? “I wouldn’t,” he says. “Being in a wheelchair isn’t that bad. It sucks at times. But if you have a good attitude about it, it’s not like it’s the end of the world.”
His mother agrees. “God forbid this would ever happen to anybody, but I think, in Eric’s case, he really has made the most of it,” she says. “It made him a much stronger individual than I think he ever would have been otherwise.”
But before we close the T-shirt curtain on the hardware box, I need to keep a promise I made to Gumbert. He wants you to know that although Newby is an inspiration—and boy, his story would do wonders for ratings on an NBC Olympics broadcast—he’s also more than that. See, a lot of people will hear about Newby and think, “What an amazing athlete for someone in a wheelchair.” Those last five words are an insult. Eric Newby is not a great athlete for someone in a wheelchair. Eric Newby is a great athlete.
