Winning is not always special

The nation's foremost constitutional lawyers continue to grapple with the matter of the so-called Americans with Disabilities Act and how it relates to sport, but thus far we have learned this much: Casey Martin requires a court order to use a motorised golf cart in officially-sanctioned events, but in order to enter, say, the wheelchair division of the Boston Marathon, one need only own a wheelchair.

Martin, a struggling professional golfer and former Stanford team-mate of Tiger Woods and Notah Begay, is afflicted with a progressively debilitating disorder which virtually precludes him from walking 72 holes over four days. (Or, in the case of this week's qualifying school, where Martin will attempt to keep his Tour card, 108 holes in six days). In an effort to prevent him from doing so, the USGA and the PGA Tour have spent more money in a series of court battles over the past several years than they have fighting the more insidious threat posed by Callaway's new, non-conforming ERC driver. In their battles to force Martin off his wheels, golfdom's powers-that-be have trotted out everyone from Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer to, interestingly, Woods himself to testify that Martin's use of a cart in sanctioned competition is somehow antithetical to the traditions and "integrity" of the game.

That Nicklaus and Palmer are allowed to, and do, use carts in Senior Tour events has, conveniently, been allowed to slide in the midst of such arguments, as has Palmer's more recent, and even more controversial, public endorsement of the illegal ERC club.

Although I consider myself a traditionalist in golfing matters, my support of Martin's position has, I believe, ample basis. For one thing, the rules of golf include enough specific references to procedure governing carts to suggest that their use is acceptable. For another, one need only look back to the last century and the home of golf to find a precedent: it was not unusual for gentlemen members playing St Andrews to proceed on horseback from shot to shot.

Be that as it may, this wheelchair thing is a touchy subject indeed. A few years ago, a colleague and I were at a post-race gathering following the Falmouth Road Race on Cape Cod. Following the awards ceremony, competitors were diving, alternately, into the swimming pool and into the beer, and I spotted a fellow on the high board about to dive into the water. I identified the diver to my fellow journalist as the winner of the wheelchair competition in that afternoon's race.

The fellow at that point neatly executed a half-gainer off the springboard. While he will remain nameless here, it might be pointed out that he had also won the wheelchair division of the Boston Marathon a few times. And while he is afflicted with a slight handicap, he literally did not use a wheelchair for anything other than wheelchair racing.

To my mind, the difference between his condition and that of, say, a legless Vietnam veteran is hardly insignificant. A quarter-century after establishing a recognised wheelchair division, the Boston Marathon offers substantial prize money to its male and female winners, and the event has become almost a soap-box derby between aerodynamic, high-tech racing machines. A few years ago a female competitor found herself out of control going down one of Boston's steep hills and crashed over a curb. She had begun the day paralysed from the waist down and ended it a quadriplegic.

This autumn I served on the committee for a Thanksgiving Day road race to benefit my 16-year-old daughter's cross country team. A manufacturer of athletic gear sponsored the race, and the prizes included running shoes for the winner of each division. We had also obtained equivalent prizes for wheelchair athletes, but during a meeting, a lawyer on the committee suggested this might not be good enough. Unless we provided exactly the same prizes, he cautioned, we might technically be in violation of the Disabilities Act.

"But what," I asked (not entirely unreasonably, I thought), "if the wheelchair winner doesn't have any feet?"

While leaving this intriguing matter to sharper legal minds, another bit of news from Australia seems far less ambiguous.

You will recall that the Paralympic Games held in Sydney a few weeks after September's Olympics resulted in an alarming number of positive drug tests. This week came word that several countries may have used athletes who had no disabilities at all.

The most specific charge has been levied by a member of the Spanish "intellectually disabled" basketball team, who claimed that, in violation of the rules, only two members of the gold medal-winning squad actually had IQs below the requisite level of 75!

The Spaniards apparently recruited able-bodied (and able-minded) players for their team in order to bolster funding efforts. According to one Carlos Ribagorda, who infiltrated the basketball squad, Spain's mentally-disabled team included engineers, holders of university degrees, and at least one journalist, namely himself.

Having covered the National Football League for 30 years, I can safely say that possession of a college degree does not constitute ipso facto proof of an IQ over 75, but that the makeup of the Spanish basketball team constituted a violation of the spirit and letter of the rules ought to be self-evident.

There's a fine line here somewhere, and without diminishing in the least the courage of genuinely disabled athletes, it strikes me that the leap between what happened in Australia and an otherwise-ambulatory fellow racing in a wheelchair isn't all that great. Somewhere, somehow, common sense ought to prevail.