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How on earth do you consume pizza with your elbows? Its a perfectly normal question for a child to pose to a quadraplegic, and Bob Lujano loves to respond to it. He along with other stars of the documentary film called Murderball hope more people would prefer asking more questions rather than remaining restrained around wheelchair users, and so do Bob and his peers. Perhaps, after this film, they might. You don’t have to be sorry for feeling awkward around wheelchair rugby athletes who happen to be quadriplegics.
It is one of those unusual documentaries like Hoop Dreams, where life brings more subjects than the filmmaker envisioned. Just like Hoop Dreams, this one is no different in essence, not a sports movie it is a movie about people, with dreams and fears who happen to revolve around a sport. These rugged all-Americans battle it out at international competitions. They used to be broken young men who once opened their eyes to a hospital room and were told they would never walk again.
Let us choose Mark Zupan, arguably one of the best players in the sport today. He became paralyzed at the age of 18. One day he fell asleep in his friend Christopher Igoe’s pickup. However, Christopher did not realize that Mark was in the car and drove away. The car got into an accident, and Mark was thrown into a canal. He went undiscovered for 13 hours. Christopher and Mark are now friends, though it took them time to rekindle the relationship.
“Would you turn back the clock on that day if you could?” he was asked during a conversation that occurred after a festival screening of the movie. His answer was shocking: “No, I don’t think so. My injury has led me to opportunities experiences and friendships I would never have had before. And it has taught me about myself.” He continued “In some ways, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” He paused.
The movie is about Zupan and his teammates on Team USA, focusing on the two seasons where the off-court drama is quite pronounced. Soares is introduced, an all-American who, together with the rest of the team, is angry because as he gets older, he is dropped from the team. In revenge, he becomes a Canadian coach. Soares leads Canada to beat the USA for the first time in 12 years. Soares doesn’t have any better feelings for Zupan than Zupan has for him. “If he was on fire, I wouldn’t piss on him to put it out.”
Wheelchair rugby is a full-contact game. The chairs used in the game are built to withstand this ‘hammering’ and are reinforced to take as much damage as necessary. Among the many strategies in this sport, one involves the player bodyslamming their opponent out of their chair. Although referees forbid this, many enjoy it and claim it to be a fun pastime. Has anyone ever gotten hurt while playing this game? No…not yet.
Most people think that a quadriplegic person like Christopher Reeve has no control over all four limbs of their body. But life is not that harsh. Most of them do possess some degree of movement. Based on their disability, they are rated from 0.5 to 3.5. A team can have only a total of 8 points (0.5–3.5) on the court at one time. This creates an ironic paradox, because athletes spend almost their entire lives trying to overcome their disabilities to get something more, just to wish to ‘handicap’ themselves later.
While the sports scenes are filled with deep emotion and brutal wheelchair fights, the soul of the film lies off the court. A young man named Keith Cavill, who has suffered from a motocross accident, is undergoing the slow and painful process of rehabilitation. The encouragement of wheelchair athletes is pivotal to his progress. Later, Walter Reed Hospital receives casualties from Iraq, who are trying to cope with their new life. Injuries of these sorts are becoming more frequent; in Iraq, many more people die due to explosions and shrapnel than to gunfire, while Harper’s magazine claims that better body armor has resulted in countless injured troops whose trunks are untouched, but arms and legs are shattered.
If Zupan is the hero of the movie, Joe Soares is its enigma. His childhood was tragic. Stricken with polio, he lost the ability to walk and had to crawl around on his hands and knees for years, until his poor Portuguese-American family finally got him a wheelchair. He was a fighter squealing for respect, an education, and even dearer to him, a competitive spirit. He seems ready to tear his old friends apart on the court, but it is his Team Canada’s sigil on his jersey.
This is the story of Soares and his son. At home, Soares desires Robert to become a jock just like him. Unfortunately, Robert would rather prefer to play the viola. Soares’s son also brazenly claims that one of the chores he truly detests is “dusting the trophy wall of dad.” Then something astonishing happens (which, coincidentally, gets caught on camera) and this leads Soares to take a moment, breathe deeply, and think about his life, and his relationship with his son. Therapy starts with getting in shape, but it doesn’t just end there.
While interacting, players uncover how quadriplegic sex takes place, something many of us wish to know but never inquire about. According to one player, the chair functions as a babe magnet since women love to ask whether they can engage in sexual activities. The response, as revealed in the documentary clips, is frequently ‘yes’ as animated figures demonstrate some of the moves. We also find out that there is no longer a need for self-consciousness when talking about their condition for people in chairs, and they detest being ignored or not spoken to. “I’m a guy in a chair,” Zupan says. “I am just like you, only sitting down.”
“Murderball,” directed by Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro, produced by Jeffrey Mandel and Shapiro, and photographed by Rubin is one of those marvelous documentaries that make us reflect on the state of humanity beyond the subject most of us are not athletes and are not in chairs but all of us have weaknesses, some are even spiritual.
It is astonishing to see most of these men today with the pure zest of athletes when only a few months ago they were fighting through sleepless nights and bleak days contemplating their injuries. This tells us something important about human resilience. Think about the kid who was told by a friend of his to eat pizza, and ask Bob Lujano He was known for his motto that says, ‘No legs and arms means no problem.’
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