News &
Advocacy in Disability Rights
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News &
Advocacy in Disability Rights |
By William G. Stothers
Traditionalists in the golfing fraternity and their caddies in the media are horrified at the court ruling allowing Casey Martin to use a golf cart in PGA tournament play.
What next? they ask, shaking their heads.
How about this: Canadian Donovan Bailey holds the record for the 100 meter dash at 9.8 seconds. Tony Volpentest, who was born without hands or feet, ran the 100 meters in 11.36 seconds; that's a world record for athletes with disabilities.
Trisha Zorn, who is legally blind, has won 41 gold Paralympic medals and missed making the U.S. Olympic Team in 1992 by 1/100th of a second.
Zorn and Volpentest are just two athletes with disabilities who perform at elite levels. They compete against other elite athletes from around the world in ongoing competitions highlighted by the Paralympic Games that are now part and parcel with the Olympic Games.
And yet competition among athletes with disabilities tends to be ignored. The Paralympics in Atlanta in 1996 were largely treated like the ugly stepchild.
But the gap between disabled and non-disabled athletes is closing.
Technology and training have not been the exclusive property of non-disabled athletes. Thanks to advances in medicine, rehabilitation, and great leaps in equipment, people with disabilities are better able to function -- and compete -- than ever before.
Acceptance by the non-disabled world hasn't kept up.
In 1975, a wheelchair user named Bob Hall talked his way into the Boston Marathon. He was the first, and competed as part of the crowd. But then he improved his performance level and other wheelchair users entered. When it appeared that they had a real chance of winning the august Marathon, officials suddenly decided that they had an unfair advantage. So they created a separate division for wheelchair racers.
Could it be that they were afraid of a person with a disability defeating all those elite non-disabled marathoners? Or maybe they thought Bob Hall needed some real competition.
Even today, the New York Marathon, which only grudgingly allows wheelchair runners to participate, doesn't want the wheelchair runners cross the finish line first. Wheelchair runners are faster, but they have to wait at the bridges until the elite non-disabled runners finish.
The idea of losing to a person with a disability is hard to swallow.
Does the golfing establishment fear Casey Martin? What if he plays well and wins consistently? How will that make the other golfers feel? Does that matter?
I know a man named Tom Houston who developed a power-driven wheelchair that can stand him up. He plays golf. I don't know that he plays well enough to try out for the PGA Tour. But it's possible. Someday, someone will come along who can. And why not?
What major sport has not changed over time to accommodate new technology? Hockey? When I was growing up, only wimps wore helmets or face masks. Football? Rules changed to protect the quarterbacks and -- more significant -- to meet the needs of TV.
Sports has changed when it was in the best interest of the particular game to change. It was not long ago that people were horrified at the idea of non-amateurs participating in the Olympic Games. Now consider the recent Winter Games in Japan and all those professional hockey players. The National Hockey League closed up shop so their players could participate.
There are 25 million golfers in the U.S. About 23,000 of them are PGA professionals. But only 291 hold PGA Tour cards. That hearty little band, one-thousandth of 1 percent of all U.S. golfers, are not allowed to use a cart. Unless, that is, the PGA needs them to use a cart (to get them to the tee in a hurry, for example).
People like Casey Martin, Trisha Zorn, Bob Hall and Tony Volpentest force society to confront widespread stereotypes of disability. The easy out would be to consider them as exceptions. The better way þ the one that is at the heart of the disability rights movement þ is to rethink our outdated notion of "disability."
William G. Stothers is editor of MAINSTREAM.
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