Wheels Have Kept Them in the Game

The flags are flying at the Racquet Club of Irvine. There are 21 of them, from Sweden, Holland, Australia, Brazil and any other country represented in this tournament’s 235-player field.

The wheels are flying, too. They stop, they start, they spin, they whirl, they transport players from net to baseline, they help deliver forehands, backhands, serves and overhead smashes.

“This is my dream,” Brad Parks says as he looks out over the courts from his seat in the pro shop’s upstairs lounge. “I always wanted to play in a tennis tournament like this, at a tennis club like this . . . in real tennis clothes like this.”

A man and his sport can travel great distances in a wheelchair.

“The first tournament we held,” Parks is saying, “we had guys in Levis, with no shirts on. Wearing leg braces. Sitting in homemade chairs or big, old-style hospital chairs.”

That was in 1977. Back then, the concept of wheelchair tennis came attached to a question mark. At the time, it was too new and too strange to be a curiosity. Obscurity was closer to the truth.

Today, Irvine hosts the U.S. Open Wheelchair Championships and an international field shows up to compete for $30,000 in prize money and trophies.

Earlier this year, wheelchair tennis held its French Open, British Open, Swiss Open, German Open and Israel Open.

Last month in Barcelona, gold medals were awarded in wheelchair tennis for the first time in the Paralympics. Parks won one, in men’s doubles, alongside longtime rival Randy Snow, in front of 4,000 chanting, screaming fans.

“They gave us a standing ovation,” says Parks, beaming at the recollection. “Both Randy and I are sort of at the ends of our careers. I told him, ‘If we’re on the way out, what a great way to end it.’ ”

Especially when one considers the beginning.

Parks helped invent the sport after breaking his back in a freestyle skiing accident 17 years ago, and the early going was rough sledding. “My first chair weighed 50 pounds,” Parks says. “It was terrible. I couldn’t maneuver or turn or do much of anything in it.

“It got so frustrating, I wound up embedding it into the drywall in my bedroom.”

The sport wasn’t going to take off until it dropped some weight. The pioneers of the late ‘70s began tinkering with the equipment and gradually devised a better wheelchair--with cambered, or slanted, wheels and streamlined frames.

The cambering gave the player the ability to turn at sharp angles and, thus, more mobility.

The lighter frames gave the player more quickness.

Technology picked it up from there. Chairs were aerodynamically designed, built closer to the ground and out of such light-weight materials as composite graphite, aluminum and titanium. Neon colors were added to the wheels. Seat fabric was decorated with trendy designer-label patterns.

Today’s chairs now weigh about 16 pounds and look like nothing so much as a high-tech cousin to the racing bike family.

They also cost $3,000 apiece.

If you want to play, you have to pay.

Parks estimates that 12,000 now participate in the sport worldwide. And in Europe, wheelchair tennis has generated such a fervor, among players and spectators alike, that Parks worries that he “may have created this major monster.”

“In Europe, especially, there’s such an emphasis on the Open division. I appreciate the professionalism, but let’s not get carried away and forget the reality of wheelchair tennis. It was created for having a good time, enjoying yourself, making yourself better. That’s what it’s all about.

“We can’t forget the majority of our players, who don’t play for money.”

Parks, 35, is still alive in this year’s U.S. Open, much to his own surprise. The “Jimmy Connors of wheelchair tennis” has pieced together a very Jimbo-like run here, reaching the semifinals with a 7-5, 6-4 victory over Michael Foulks of La Jolla Thursday.

“It’s a battle for me,” he says. “I still enjoy playing, but playing is no longer my No. 1 priority.”

After founding the sport in the 1970s and dominating it in the 1980s, Parks has determined marketing to be the task for the 1990s. He wants to see front-page newspaper coverage. He wants to see national television coverage.

“Typically, we go to a city for the first time and there’s all this publicity,” Parks says. “All the TV stations come out. All these stories are written about us.

“The next year, we come back to the same city and nobody’s there. We go to the news media and they say, ‘Oh, we covered that last year.’

“We need to lose that stigma--’Wheelchair tennis is not a sport.’ It’s an exciting sport, it’s a real sport and it deserves to be covered like one.”

Later this month, Parks will receive the Woody Deitch Courage Award from the Orange County Sports Hall of Fame, traditionally given to someone who has overcome great odds or physical handicap.

Parks, who lives in San Clemente, calls the award “an honor,” but muses about the real thing--being enshrined as a permanent inductee alongside Jim Fregosi, Jack Youngblood and Mickey Flynn.

“Not to sound braggadocio,” he says, “but anyone in wheelchair tennis who has accomplished what I’ve accomplished should receive the real award.

“Maybe someday.”

Those wheels have taken Parks this far. Why not?