Sam Panepinto (left) played for the Brooklyn Whirlaways,
coached by Al Youakim (right), in the early days of
wheelchair basketball. Sam and Al met again for the first time
in years at United Spinal’s 60th Anniversary celebration
at Grand Central Station last May.
(Photo by Emile Wamsteker)
The histories of United Spinal and wheelchair sports in the US run parallel and often overlap.
By Terry Moakley
First, there was wheelchair basketball.
Any historical accounts, be they written or conversational, credit restless paraplegic survivors of World War II with starting wheelchair basketball sometime in 1946 at military and veterans hospitals in the New York, Boston, and Long Beach, California areas. The West Coasters won the very first all paraplegic veteran league “national championship” in 1948, but one year later it was the Bronx Rollers romping to the country-wide crown. That same year, the first “non-veteran” team was formed in Kansas City, and in 1949 under the leadership of Dr. Tim Nugent at the University of Illinois, the National Wheelchair Basketball Association (www.nwba.org) was founded and continues to thrive today.
No less than five distinguished members of our association are enshrined in the NWBA Hall of Fame. Founding members Harry A. Schweikert, Jr., Jack Gerhardt, and Angelo Nicosia were also players on that championship Bronx squad, and two of them- Schweikert and Nicosia-are past presidents of our group. Gerhardt was featured on the cover of Newsweek during this period to illustrate a story about the value of sports participation in the rehabilitation process, and he was a member of the 1954 national championship New Jersey Wheelers hoops team.
That Wheelers team was coached by none other than Hall of Famer Al Youakim, an amazing gentleman who has volunteered for us for all 60 years of our existence, and who has coached U.S. wheelchair athletes in no less than 18 international competitions. And the venerable Junius Kellogg, a basketball star at Manhattan College and for the Harlem Globetrotters who became a quadriplegic from an automobile accident while serving in the U.S. Army, went on to earn his way into the Hall by successfully coaching seven U.S. wheelchair basketball teams in the fifties and sixties in world events. Beyond this, Junius gave us many years of exceptional service on our Board of Directors.
The Bulova Connection
There are other sports, too, like track and field, road racing, swimming, weightlifting, table tennis, archery, and shooting-all of which are contested under the auspices of Wheelchair Sports USA (www.wsusa.org), originally organized in 1956 as the National Wheelchair Athletic Association. For the first quarter century of its being, this group was underwritten by the Bulova School of Watchmaking, which was housed in the same building where today the headquarters of United Spinal Association is located. Under the leadership of its longtime Executive Director Ben Lipton, the NWAA organized annual national championships and a competitive international team. There were many ties then which continue today between this sport organizing group and our association.
Wheelchair Sports USA’s impact received a jump start via relocation to Colorado Springs in 1982-home of the U.S. Olympic Training Center-and an exhibition of wheelchair track events at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Today, it works with 14 different regional wheelchair sports competition entities, and it runs the annual Junior National Championships meet. United Spinal Association has traditionally been a major sponsor of a regional event in our backyard, the Tri- State Wheelchair Games, where athletes may qualify to compete in the National games and perhaps earn a Paralympic team tryout. Our athletes also enjoy every opportunity they get to share their wheelchair sports acumen with youngsters with disabilities.
While United Spinal can’t claim that we helped to invent wheelchair softball (Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is its birthplace) or wheelchair tennis (probably originated in California), we have earned some recent claims to fame. Our Mets wheelchair softball team, organized in 1998, finished in second place in the Division II National Championships in 2002, and they snagged that title outright the following year. And, with the National Tennis Center literally in our backyard, United Spinal has played a strong supporting role in recent years in staging the U.S. Wheelchair Tennis Open Championships there.
Whatever the sport, no doubt you can “just do it” from a wheelchair, too, and there’s even less doubt that it’s part of our history.
Terry Moakley, associate executive director of Public Affair, is United Spinal’s official historian.
