Rolling to New Heights : Ex-Marine Ambler Excels in Wheelchair Athletics After Fall

Tim Ambler throws a tennis ball high above his head and swings his racquet to meet it. Then, he rolls his wheelchair to the net--ready to volley.

“Good shot, buddy,” he calls across the court to his hitting partner after the return glides out of his reach. Ambler, 26, is quick to encourage and to smile. Freckles and red hair show under his baseball cap.

Ambler took up wheelchair tennis a few months after a 1990 rock-climbing accident left him unable to walk for more than 15-20 minutes at a time. Since then, he has shot to the top echelon in the sport, the open level, and is ranked sixth nationally.

After lettering in golf and football at De Ridder High in southwest Louisiana during the early 1980s and attending college at Louisiana Tech for two years, Ambler joined the Marines in 1987 because he believed it to be the most physically challenging branch of the military.

But a recreational activity on a weekend away from duty changed his life. On Jan. 10, 1990, Ambler fell 40 feet off a cliff while rock climbing. His left arm was broken in more places than he remembers and his back was broken in two spots.

The road to recovery was painful. But for Ambler, who lives in Ventura, his love for athletic competition did not lie broken with his body.

“It’s just a matter of putting things in perspective,” he says. “It was never really difficult to make the transition, it was just another way of looking at things. . . . You’re just running with your arms now, and not your legs.”

Four months after his accident, Ambler was out on the courts, playing wheelchair tennis.

Six months after the injury, he played in the National Veterans Wheelchair Games in New Orleans, winning gold medals at the novice level in the javelin, discus and shotput.

Wheelchair sports keep Ambler on a busy schedule. In addition to studying for a bachelor’s degree in aquatic biology at UC Santa Barbara, Ambler travels the country, playing in tennis tournaments and other wheelchair competitions.

He played in the National Veterans Wheelchair Games in Dayton, Ohio, July 14-18. His team won a gold medal in basketball and he took a silver in the javelin.

In wheelchair tennis, Ambler was ranked No. 1 nationally in the B level last year, his first in organized competition. He went 9-0 in the A level this year before switching to the open level, in which he is 7-5.

Clearly, Ambler does not pass leisurely through life, as his name suggests. He is a competitor.

He considers himself a California boy at heart because he was born in Redondo Beach, but he has lived most of his life in Louisiana.

Ambler cites his positive attitude as the most important quality in surviving three years in the Marines: “In any military service, if you don’t have a good, positive attitude, life is going to suck. You have to put up with a lot of. . . .,” he said.

Ambler spent a year of duty in Adak, Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands at a naval air station, where temperatures average 35 degrees.

“We would have to spend a week out in that weather,” he says. “It’s cold, icy, wet. You never get dry. Stuff like that, if you can’t keep a positive attitude, you’re really miserable,” he said.

Ambler had just returned home from a six-month tour of the Western Pacific when he and a friend went rock climbing at Ortega Falls, a dried up waterfall in the Cleveland National Forest near San Juan Capistrano.

In the Marines, Ambler was an assault climber, who scales cliffs to set up ropes for the rest of the company to climb.

At Ortega Falls that day, however, Ambler and his friend were just scaling lower rocks without climbing equipment.

It was an easy climb, so easy that for a long time Ambler didn’t notice how high he had gotten. At about 30 feet, however, he realized he was in danger. There was no way off the rock except to keep climbing higher.

At about 40 feet, Ambler found himself extended over a ledge, barely hanging on and his center of gravity pulling him away from the cliff. He paused, not knowing what to do. Then, his hands gave way.

“No!” is all Ambler remembers saying before hitting the ground. He doesn’t remember the impact, but his body was twisted, strangely. Ambler lay on his left hip, but his right shoulder also touched the ground.

Luckily, he fell in a small space of sand, the only soft ground surrounded by a large area of rock. If he had hit the rock, he might not have lived.

“I live a charmed life,” he says.

Ambler’s left leg is in a brace and he can walk short distances, but he limps. He gets around mostly with the help of a wheelchair. Ambler also can’t pronate his left arm, meaning he can’t lay his hand flat on a table.

Fortunately, he is right-handed.

After the accident, Ambler’s positive attitude was called upon in a way he never imagined, but it helped. “I realized that, No. 1, I could be dead, and No. 2, it could be a hell of a lot worse,” he says. “It was just like, well, let’s figure out what I was going to do with it.”

The staff at the San Diego Veterans Administration Medical Center in La Jolla, where Ambler went through rehabilitation, encouraged patients to participate in athletics. But Ambler didn’t need much encouragement.

Before he was discharged from the hospital, he was practicing for the National Veterans Games. Ambler would roll his wheelchair outside the hospital, his back and torso still locked in a brace, and practice field events.

Ambler’s favorite wheelchair sports are tennis and basketball, which he does mostly in the tennis off-season to keep in shape. He hopes someday to become a coach in those wheelchair sports.

But for now, Ambler is concentrating on his own game.

Ambler won a semifinal match of the Ventura Coast Classic Wheelchair tennis tournament Saturday at Ventura College, but the final was canceled.

Ambler is attending the National Wheelchair Basketball Assn./Paralyzed Veterans Assn. basketball camp in San Jose this week and he will participate in the Pacific Northwest tennis championship Aug. 14-16 in Seattle.

He also will play in the nation’s biggest wheelchair tennis tournament, the U.S. Open at the Racquet Club of Irvine, Oct. 10-18, along with 300 players from around the world.

Ambler’s travels, both for the Marines and for wheelchair athletics, have fueled his optimism.

“Thailand was my favorite country that I’ve been to,” Ambler says. “We spent a week in the field and they were constantly bringing us food and soda and everything. They were the most giving people I’ve ever met in my life. When you see what they were living with and their living conditions, it really makes you appreciate the United States.

“But then, they have such a positive attitude about life. You’re like, something’s wrong here. We’ve got all this but yet we don’t appreciate it, and they’ve got so little, but to them, they’ve got so much.”

Ambler grins. It’s all a matter of perspective.