April 13. 2006

A life in motion

Paralyzed rugby player shares story of guts, hope.

By ADAM JACKSON
Tribune Staff Writer

CULVER -- Even on stage in front of thousands of people, Mark Zupan never stops moving.

The rubber tires of his wheelchair roll silently back and forth, tracing half circles and arcs on the wooden floor as he fires a Gatling-gun monologue at the audience of teenagers, drawing both silent attention and gales of laughter.

That never-ending movement is an appropriate metaphor for the life of the young civil engineer, who as a teenager took a crippling car accident and turned it into a chance to become one of the world's best wheelchair rugby players, an accomplishment showcased in "Murderball," the Oscar-nominated documentary on the sport that also won a number of other film awards.

But beyond his near-superhuman stoicism, and his fiery determination, Zupan, with his close-cropped hair and heavily tattooed left leg, showed the students at Culver Academies he had something else Wednesday -- a great sense of humor.

"The first time after my accident that they put me in a wheelchair, I hadn't sat up for, like, two weeks," he said. "Basically, I passed out.
(Tribune photo/Barbara Allison)
"So, the therapist asked me why I didn't tell her I was getting light-headed," Zupan deadpanned. "And I said 'Because I like that feeling.'"

That was just one of dozens of jokes Zupan cracked during his presentation Wednesday, which was a feature of the school's Montgomery Lecture Series. It was, quite possibly, one of the few times a traumatic injury to someone's C6 and C7 vertebrae came across as more inspiring than tragic to a group of young people.

Not that Zupan's accident wasn't horrific. It was in 1993, after a night of drinking with a friend, that the then 18-year-old overdid it at a Florida bar, then staggered to the back of a friend's pickup to pass out.

When that friend was kicked out of the bar later that night, he hopped in the truck and tried to drive home, but instead became lost and attempted to turn around on a highway off ramp, losing control of the truck and crashing into a ditch.

Zupan was flung from the bed of the truck, through some trees and into a canal, where he lay with only his eyes, mouth and nose above water. Trouble was, no one knew he had been in the truck, meaning he wasn't found until a man eating his lunch near the canal heard his stifled cries for help the next day.

"I spent 14 hours in that canal," Zupan said. "It is a wonder that I didn't make friends with an alligator."

But that was just the beginning of his ordeal. In the hospital, he faced months of painful recuperation, moving from a state where he was on a feeding tube and a ventilator to one where he was working to find strength to move around in a wheelchair.

Along the way, he described times when his friends bribed nurses with seafood dinners for extra visiting time, a trip in which he made a brief excursion from the hospital for a disastrous attempt at consuming a pulled pork sandwich at a Hard Rock Cafe, and the horror of discovering that his "bed bath" would not be administered by an attractive member of the opposite sex.

"In comes this huge burly guy with a sponge," Zupan said with a laugh. "I was like, 'Please be gentle with me.'"

But his recovery brought more than just humor to his life; it brought a slow realization that the former soccer player had had a fundamental shift occur in his life. There would be no more soccer games. There would be long hours spent relearning the simplest life skills. But there would also be life, which was so much better than the alternative.

Seizing the opportunity, Zupan once again left home, this time heading off to Georgia Tech to study engineering. It was there that a therapist introduced him to wheelchair rugby, a sport he said was once described as "paraplegics kicking the crap out of each other."

It was a godsend.

"Rugby filled that part of me that needs competition," he said. "That was what I was missing."

With rugby, Zupan took his inner strength and put it to work in a sport that features players careening at one another on a smooth floor, passing a round ball back and forth in an attempt to cross through the opponent's goal.

Along the way, competitors crash heavily into one another, throw full body blocks, and often end up sporting bruises and blood for their efforts. Indeed, Zupan once had to leave a team after a trainer caught him trying to continue to play with a broken rib.

It is a sport so visceral that it drew the interest of the makers of "Murderball," which won the Audience Award and Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. As one of the major players in the film, Zupan spent years with a camera following him through life, although he drew the line at a request to film his intimate life.

"You know, I applaud them for getting that white elephant out of the way and showing that, yes, people in wheelchairs can have sex," he said with a laugh. "I just didn't want to be the guy they used to do it."

The movie, which follows the national team to a third-place finish at the 2004 Paralympics, catapulted Zupan into fame in short order. He recalled going to post-Sundance parties with the likes of David Schwimmer of the television show "Friends."

But the attention has not blunted his true drive -- to excel in the sport he loves. Zupan confessed that he is currently spending hours a day training, working toward a shot at both this fall's world championships and the 2008 Paralympics.

Along the way, he's spreading a message at talks like the one he gave in Culver Wednesday. Namely, life is short, so learn to love it.

"Chris, my friend who was driving that night, he had felt so badly about what had happened," Zupan said. "One day, I just said to him, 'Man, did it ever occur to you that this was the best thing to happen to me?'"