In wheelchair, Queens man still has hoop dreams
And the wheels kept spinning and spinning and spinning.
While hurrying back on defense, Bulova Nets starting shooting guard Mark James put his head down and frantically rolled his wheelchair down the basketball court behind the play. Then, in a violent crash, he hit the player deliberately waiting in his path.
It was only a flash, but in a collision of flesh and steel the 41-year-old Long Island City resident fell until his face met the hardwood floor of Manhattan College’s Draddy Gymnasium with a resounding “THUD.”
Then he twisted his torso in a way that revealed a face that looked younger than his 41 years. His black skin was smooth – as was his shaven head. His eyes looked intense and penetrating. The only signs of the age were the gray whiskers along the edges of his shadow-length black goatee.
He lay there, still strapped into his Radio-Flyer-red sports chair, with the wheels spinning. He waited just shy of half court for play to come back his way and for someone to help him up off the floor – but he’d been further from success in this sport before.
If you pause James’s story right there during the recent 10th Annual Mayor’s Cup Wheelchair Basketball Tournament and rewind it through his 20-year wheelchair basketball career, one fact above all others becomes apparent: it is a story that could have understandably ended a number of times, but James didn’t let it.
It began in 1988 with an angry 18-year-old gunshot victim from Jamaica and a visitor to his bedside at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital. Looking back, James called the meeting “the best thing in the world.”
“I was angry at everybody, so they sent a veteran up to talk to me,” James said. “I didn’t know anything about wheelchair basketball until he told me. I was just like, ‘Wow. So there is a life after being hurt.’ I could still play basketball, which was all I did growing up.”
But everything was different his first time back on the court. Before he was shot, he stood 6-feet-2-inches tall, he was athletic – he played football for Springfield High School. Sitting in the wheelchair he was closer to the ground, he wasn’t as strong – he couldn’t even make a free throw.
“Halfway to the foul line was probably the furthest I could shoot the first week or so until I built up my strength,” he said recently, now with massive shoulders and arms fit for a professional athlete. “But it was fun. I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to play every day when they first introduced the sport to me.”
So began James’s transformation into one of the Queens wheelchair basketball scene’s best individual players. He moved from Elmhurst Memorial Hospital to Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island for rehab. He lifted weights. And he played basketball. Occasionally he’d invite friends and the occasional girlfriend to his games, but with most games early in the morning and outside of Queens, he grew accustomed to an empty rooting section.
“Years ago you could always find him in the gym playing basketball,” said fellow player David Deas, who’s known James for more than 15 years. “He was a lights-out shooter. You could always count on him for 10 to 15 points a game. His defense was always good.”
But as luck would have it, the teams he played on were not.
For 18 years he practiced at night and played over the weekends with the now-defunct Bulova Renegades, a New York City-based team with athletes from multiple boroughs. James guessed the team made the playoffs of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association “two or three times,” but never advanced very far once it got there. He’s played in all nine previous editions of the Mayor’s Cup Wheelchair Basketball Tournament and has little more than the 2003 sportsmanship award to show for it.
“Most of the time it’s been mediocre and not really that great,” James said of his track record in what many regard as the biggest competition on the East Coast.
For almost two decades his teams practiced in New York. Last year his Renegades merged with the Hackensack, N.J.-based Nets. With the merger, the unmarried father of one son had to drive to New Jersey after work (at a job he declined to specify) for the once- and sometimes twice-a-week practices. But armed with new teammates, he recently looked at his lack of team success and said, “This year, though, we’re planning to change that.”
Watching from the baseline as the Nets played the New England Paralyzed Veterans of America Celtics in the semi-finals of this year’s Mayor’s Cup, Deas explained that James’s speed on the court has dwindled in recent years. But now, Deas said, James dedicates himself to the team concept of the game.
It was early in the first half and the Nets were leading when the Celtic offense wheeled into place around the hoop. James, positioned at the center of the Nets defense, barked instructions to his teammates on where to play and how to defend against specific opposing players.
“For Mark to take charge and be a leader, it’s something that we definitely needed on our team,” said Jason Soricelli, James’s backup. “He really looks out for the younger players, someone like me who’s only been playing the game for four years now.”
That’s why, in a semi-final game the Nets would lose 45-34, James rolled full-bore down court and into a pick. And that’s how he ended up on the ground with his wheels spinning.
The consolation game, for third place, followed a similar script: the Nets took an early lead, held it for most of the game and then let it slip – but after a quiet all-around game, James emerged to pluck a Connecticut Spokebender pass from the air with 2:25 left and the Nets hanging on to a one-point lead. Then with 19 seconds left, James sat at the foul line with a chance to clinch the game with two free throws. James sank both and the Nets won 45-40.
“Mark is a ballplayer,” said Nets coach Tom McDonald, who played against James in his younger, non-coaching days. “Even if he wasn’t disabled I think he’d be playing ball. He’s an athlete.”
And that’s why his wheels kept spinning and spinning and spinning into the future, as he searched for success.
