He Didn’t Let the Game Get Past Him : Tennis: In the wheelchair game, top-ranked Randy Snow is a cut above the rest.

If I woke up tomorrow and God said, “You’ve done your time, here are your legs back,” I’d have to say, “But I’ve got a wheelchair tennis tournament coming up in Lake Tahoe. Can I do that first?”

--RANDY SNOW, the No. 1-ranked wheelchair tennis player in the world

Gathered in a semicircle, the wheelchair tennis players at the Racquet Club of Irvine form an amphitheater of sorts for Randy Snow.

“Let the parts of you that know how to play tennis, play tennis,” he says. “Don’t clutter your mind. And, most important, don’t beat yourself down.”

Lessons in tennis or lessons in life?

Snow insists there are no heavy messages here, it’s just another tennis clinic in progress during a break in the action at the U.S. Open wheelchair tennis championships, known affectionately as Wheelchair Wimbledon. Just some drills, some strategy, and, sure, a little psychology.

After all, don’t all tennis coaches throw in heavy doses of psychology?

Snow figures most of these players don’t need motivational pep talks, anyway. He thinks the majority of them are going through life better than most.

If you want to watch us play, he says, that’s great. But leave the sympathy in the parking lot.

This is a man at peace with himself and his lot in life. He’s as comfortable wheeling through an international airport as he is ripping a cross-court, topspin backhand.

Still, he remembers what it was like in the beginning. He remembers what it feels like to be a 16-year-old nationally ranked junior tennis player with a broken back.

A ranching accident left Snow a paraplegic 14 years ago. And the first time that wheelchair-bound teen-ager rolled out onto the tennis court in the back yard of his family’s home, he cried.

Now, when he’s on the court, he grunts, sweats, exults . . . and laughs.

Having a 1,000-pound bale of hay land on your back and render your legs useless is the kind of nightmare that only happens to someone else. If you spent your life worrying about such things, you’d never get out of bed.

Snow is convinced, however, that if people knew how good life on wheels can be, they wouldn’t lose any sleep fretting, anyway.

“There’s nothing worse than the Florence Nightingales who fawn over you,” he said, grimacing. “If you want to help me, show me how to improve my backhand.

“People just don’t understand that this made me something. I was a nobody in a blase world. This taught me a lesson about never taking things for granted. That may be a cliche, but it’s a lesson some people never learn.

“Sure, you have your bad days. Everybody gets down. But, hey, people pay me to travel all over the world to play tennis! That accident gave me this life. It made me somebody.”

Indeed, Randy Snow is somebody. To folks on spokes, he’s almost a legend: an Olympic silver medalist, a former world record-holder and a role model for everyone whose life was changed overnight.

Snow said he recovered from the initial shock of his accident rather quickly and that it wasn’t until he matured a bit that the inevitable depression began to envelop him, like an early-morning fog.

“At first I thought I was OK,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘Well, I can still do this and still do that.’ I got back into high school and for a couple of years, I just partied a lot.

“But then it hit me that I was going to be in this chair forever .”

So he ventured back on the tennis court at home, and hated it. Some friends got him to try wheelchair basketball. He hated that, too.

“It was horrible,” he said. “They were making us do wind sprints and laps around the gym. “I thought, ‘I’m in a wheelchair and I gotta do this?’ So I quit.”

But by 1979, four years after the accident, Snow found himself “craving a life fix.” He was now physically better equipped to handle the chair so he gave basketball another chance. The second time, he got hooked.

“When I finally got into wheelchair sports, I couldn’t get enough,” he said. “After that, the sports started coming in waves. I was going to school at the University of Texas, but I couldn’t concentrate on school work. All I could think about was wheelchair sports.”

His first successes were in track events. Shortly after he learned that national competition existed, he was competing and winning. In the 1979 Wheelchair Games in New York, he won a bronze medal in the 100 meters.

And he really had yet to train much.

“I was an athlete again,” Snow said, smiling. “And I loved it.”

In 1984, Snow set a national record and a world record. He was training now and, like any other world-class athlete, that meant training full-time, pushing himself up to 20 miles a day.

The work was worth it, though. Later that year, he realized the goal of every track athlete, competing in the 1,500-meter exhibition wheelchair race in the 1984 Olympic Games.

“The whole two weeks was like a dream,” Snow said. “Words can’t begin to describe it.”

Millions saw it on television. More than 80,000 saw it with their own eyes, but only a handful of young men in wheelchairs had a view like Randy Snow’s.

“The 4-by-100 relay semis had just finished and Carl Lewis, who trained at the same track I did in Houston, came over and shook my hand,” Snow said.

“I was pretty high.”

With 100 meters to go, Snow was in seventh place. He made up enough ground to finish second to Paul Van Winkle of Belgium.

Once again, Snow was reminded that the view from the victory stand looks just as good when you’re sitting down.

Snow and San Clemente’s Brad Parks, the founder of wheelchair tennis, will probably renew their decade-long battle for the singles title at this year’s U.S. Open wheelchair tournament.

No one else has won it in the 10-year history of the event.

Snow won in 1981, ‘82, ‘83, ‘84, ’86 and ’88. Parks took the title in 1980, ’85 and ’87.

“As hard as it is to admit--because I’m so competitive--Brad is my role model,” Snow said. “I saw him play once and that made me decide to give tennis another chance.”

Sometimes, success is that much sweeter the second time around.

“It’s kind of funny, but I play better tennis now. I could easily have beaten myself. We’re not Lendl and Becker, out here. We play tennis more like the chess game it is. But this is no invalid sport. Show a weakness and we attack it.”

Snow, who works as a recreation therapist at the Lakeshore Rehabilitation Complex in Birmingham, Ala., when he’s not touring the world playing and teaching wheelchair tennis, says he helps others deal with catastrophic accidents by showing them that partial paralysis doesn’t have to mean inactivity.

In other words, working legs are nice, but not necessarily a key to happiness.

“I’ve sort of backed up to the simplicity of life,” he said. “I used to worry about what people thought and everything working out the way I wanted it to.

“I’ve come to realize that the most important thing is to enjoy what you have.”

Snow happens to have a wicked down-the-line forehand with lots of pace. So he wheeled off to enjoy it.