Olympic athlete rolls full speed ahead

He broke a leg sky diving. He bungee jumped off a 500-foot gorge. He excels on an Olympic level at a sport so rough it was once dubbed “murder ball.”

Scott Hogsett, 31, lives one of those daredevil lives that gives a couch potato like me the chills.

“I’m the most competitive, goal-oriented human being you’ll ever meet,” says Hogsett. “I don’t fear anything. What’s the worst that can happen, I end up in a chair?”

Oh, right. The chair.

Listening to Hogsett’s adventures, I almost forget about that wheelchair he’s been tethered to for the last 12 years.

It’s a blazing summer day. Hogsett and I share an outside table on the newspaper’s rooftop patio.

He’s come to tell me some terrific news. After years of shedding a great deal of sweat and a fair amount of blood, Scott has made the United States Wheelchair Rugby team. The former Spokane resident, who nowadays divides his time between Phoenix and Coeur d’Alene, will represent our country at the 2004 Paralympic Games next month in Athens.

Never heard of the sport? Go online at quadrugby.com. Check out the video clip.

Wheelchair rugby is a cross between hockey, basketball and demolition derby. This is a game where partially paralyzed wheelchair athletes slam into each other at great speed while trying to move a ball across a goal line.

It’s common for a collision to send a player tumbling onto a hard gym floor. If these competitors didn’t already have spinal injuries, playing wheelchair rugby could definitely do the job.

“My face just got stitched up, and I had a mild concussion,” says Hogsett of a recent wipeout. He grins. “It came from a big hit. I got blindsided. Definitely an adrenaline rush.”

“Teenager faces the toughest test of his life.”

That headline appeared over a column I wrote about Hogsett in May 1992. I met him in his hospital room. He was a scared and confused 19-year-old whose world had been turned inside out and sideways.

Hogsett had been a pitching ace for Ferris High School and American Legion baseball. Then he fell backward off a deck at a winter party. It was just a 6-foot drop, but Hogsett’s neck took most of the blow.

“I felt my body go from the toes up,” he told me at the time.

A fracture to the sixth cervical vertebra paralyzed him from the upper chest down. There is still movement in his shoulders and arms, but much of his finger and hand control departed upon impact.

Even back in those terrible early days, however, Hogsett had this hard-nosed resolve.

“I figure once you quit doing the rehabilitation, you’ve given up,” he told me. “I’ll never do that. I’ll never be happy doing that.”

There was no way to know it at the time, but this kid had just uttered a mission statement.

Over the last dozen years, Hogsett set about living up to his credo.

He went to college and earned a degree in recreational therapy. He learned to live independently. He stayed positive and pursued life – with a vengeance. “I don’t say no to anything,” he says. “I’ve been injured 12 years, and I’ve accomplished more than most able-bodied people do in a lifetime.”

And there is so much more to come.

The Paralympics, for example. Want to know how committed Scott Hogsett is to that?

“If somebody came to me and said we’ve got a cure for you and we’ll give it to you next week, I’d tell them to wait until after Athens. My main focus right now is winning that gold medal.”

He’s already hit gold. A few days ago, Hogsett proposed to his girlfriend, schoolteacher Michelle Tsacoumangos. She said yes.

“He embraces life,” says the 30-year-old of her fiancé. “He knows there’s a reason as to why he is where he is.”

It’s a bad pun, but I’ll say it anyway. Being put in a wheelchair turned Scott Hogsett into a roll model.

Donna, Hogsett’s mother, says it best.

“I see what he goes through, oh, my gosh, and it amazes me to watch him,” she says. “He does have his down time, but he just continually picks it all up and gets rolling again.”

“I’m making it better for everybody out there in wheelchairs,” says Hogsett. “Does being in a wheelchair suck? Yeah, at times it does. But it’s just part of my life.”