Giving an Assist

In the emergency room, 14-year-old Jamie Whitlow listened as doctors told her parents: She’ll never walk again.

“My dad passed out,” she remembers. But later, when it sank in, she recalls, “I wasn’t upset that I wasn’t going to walk.

“I was upset that I wasn’t going to play basketball.”

A top high school athlete, she’d dreamed of becoming a professional basketball player. There was no women’s league at that time, but she “figured there would be by the time I got old enough.”

Now 26, and married since 1992 to Edward Danskin, she still plays, with athleticism and determination that have earned her all-star and MVP honors and spots on teams competing in tournaments from Caracas, Venezuela, to Sydney, Australia.

She plays in a wheelchair.

Currently, she is point guard on the L.A. Sparks, a newly formed women’s wheelchair team affiliated with the Women’s National Basketball Assn.’s Los Angeles Sparks. It will be one of three California teams competing Feb. 20-21 against teams from Japan, Canada and Mexico in an international women’s tournament at Rogers Park in Inglewood--a seminal event in women’s wheelchair basketball, marking the first time multiple teams from outside the United States will compete.

And Jamie Danskin is coordinating the event. For her, wheelchair basketball is more than just a sport about which she’s passionate. A certified occupational therapy assistant at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, she also is coordinator of Freeman Sports on Wheels, a program that encourages others with spinal cord injuries to play ball.

Her own life changed forever the night of Oct. 21, 1987, as she was riding with a friend to evening services at a Baptist church in tiny Lawson, Mo. (population: 2,000). They were late, so they decided to take a shortcut that neither she nor the driver knew well.

“We missed a curve,” she says. Not wearing a seat belt, she was thrown into the back seat where she lay screaming, covered with shattered glass until she was taken to the emergency room.

Then came the terrible news from doctors: broken back, spinal cord injury, permanent paralysis from the waist down.

When she returned to classes at Lawson High, it was in a wheelchair--on her own terms. She’d tried crutches and braces--”My parents wanted me to walk so bad”--but she “hated it.” She felt comfortable in the chair, even though it made her something of a curiosity at first.

She still feels comfortable in her chair. “It’s part of my body.”

Her attitude about life: “OK, what’s the problem? I can do that.” And she can. She drives to Daniel Freeman in a specially equipped car, dropping her 3-year-old son, Kyle, off at day care.

In Freeman’s spinal-cord injury rehab unit, she teaches the newly injured how to master the basics: bathing, dressing, cooking, cleaning. She also teaches subjects ranging from sexuality to wheelchair care to community reentry.

“When you’re first injured, all you think about is walking,” she says. But she insists that patients learn coping skills, because the reality is that many won’t walk again. Still, as she says, “you don’t want to take away their hope,” so she tells them: “I’ve been in a chair for 11 years, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be.”

Because she is one of them, she says, “I can get a lot of the patients to do a lot of things for me. They see me as a role model.” Indeed, Robyn Ogawa, her supervisor for Freeman Sports on Wheels, says that when able-bodied staff members give instruction to patients, many take it with “a bit of cynicism,” but because Danskin “lives that every day, it gives her a certain credibility.”

“She’s just a very special person,” Ogawa adds. “Although something unfortunate has happened in her life, she’s been able to turn that into something that’s very positive to help other people.”

Right after the car accident, her mother, a nurse, tried to interest her in wheelchair sports, but, Danskin says, “there was no way I was going to play basketball in a wheelchair.” She was young; she’d prove the doctors wrong.

In time, though, she came to accept the truth, and, while undergoing rehab at a hospital in Colorado in 1988, she decided to give wheelchair basketball a try. The decision changed the course of her life.

While playing in the Pan American Games in Caracas in 1990, just before her senior year of high school, she met Edward, who had come to Caracas from Manhattan Beach with a friend who was coaching a basketball team. He immediately was attracted to Jamie.

“She had lots of energy,” he recalls, “and a bubbly personality,” and a long-distance romance ensued. Her being in a chair, he says, “was never a factor.”

Two years later they married and settled in Los Angeles, where Edward earned a doctorate in education at UCLA. He is now site administrator for the Berenece Carlson Hospital School near USC, coach of her team and the commissioner of the WNBA’s 12-team women’s wheelchair basketball division.

In the wheelchair game, Jamie Danskin explains, “All the rules are the same . . . the only difference is we get four seconds in the key instead of three.”

Danskin approaches basketball just as she approaches life--with total enthusiasm.

“I don’t remember what it feels like to walk,” she says, and “it doesn’t really matter. I’m happy. My goal in life is not to walk again. My focus is trying to raise my family, be good at the things I do now, get a better education.”

Having earned a two-year degree from Mount St. Mary’s College in 1994, she is a part-time student at USC, attending on a scholarship for the physically challenged, established in honor of USC All-American swimmer Mike Nyeholt who was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident in 1981. She hopes to graduate in three years with a degree in sports management and to start the first wheelchair sports program at an area university.

Meanwhile, she does motivational speaking, promoting wheelchair sports and showing what those with handicaps can do.

All in all, she says, “I’m very fortunate. If it weren’t for the accident, I wouldn’t have had everything I have”--Edward and Kyle, a rewarding job, world travel.

“I couldn’t ask for a better life. If I have to live it in a chair, so be it.”