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Originally Posted by Welly
I'm posting this because it was a pretty crazy experience for me and I'm not quite sure on how I feel about the morality of the situation.
My friend and I went down to the gym earlier today to play some ball. My local gym is fairly new, and it's not huge or anything, they have a room with all the weights and cardio machines, and an upstairs mezzanine area for the classes like Pump and Step and Tai Bo and all that kind of shit, then nextdoor they've got kind of a multi-purpose indoor basketball/netball/tennis court area. We had booked in to use it for an hour to play some 1 on 1, it's NEVER in use from what I've seen and I didn't think it'd be a problem.
We're playing for about 5 minutes before five guys in wheelchairs come in and roll over to us. One of the guys, he was probably 30 or so, shaved head, mean looking, said to me "What the fuck are you doing on our court?". I was like.. what? I didn't understand why he was being rude to begin with, and secondly, I'd signed in the book like 3 days ago that we were going to be using it and nobody else had written their name on this weeks booking sheet for today at ALL let alone at the time I signed up for. So I just said "hey dude, we booked it in.. we wont be too long."
The guy winced at me like I was some kind of fuckwit and goes "how about, we play our game and you guys fuck off?"
I couldn't believe my ears. My friend, who is a bit of a hothead, was on the verge of saying something, judging by the look on his face, but I shot him a look like "no way are you getting us into a fight with these guys" and I guess he got the picture because he didn't say anything. I tried to reason with the guy but he basically kept saying that it was their court and we had to leave. After probably a full minute of me going around in circles with this guy, my friend says "how about we play you for it? first to 10 gets the court." The bald guy got this psycho look on his face and sat up a bit and went "YOU GOT IT", pulled his jumper off, and, all the while staring at me, said "Josh, you and me vs these faggots". The guy who I now knew as Josh (who looked like an exact clone of this guy except he had red hair) rolled on over and reached into a little bag he had hanging off the back of his chair. Out of it, he pulled a basketball, and said "we'll use our ball hey?", and threw it to his bald friend.
So, the game was on. I had no idea how a game of basketball could be played against guys in wheelchairs, but before we started, the bald guy goes "how we play this is, we only travel if we don't dribble once every two pushes, you guys can play by standard rules, got it?" We said yeah and the game was on.
Holy fuck. These guys were AWESOME. At first my friend and I were trying to go easy because we thought they'd be easy to beat, but those fuckers could play! And they didn't even really use their own travelling rules, they would basically dribble like a normal player as they rolled along. I'd never seen someone in a wheelchair dribble that well, although I've never really watched the handicapped olympics or anything so maybe it's not so rare for a handicapped basketball player to be able to do that.
Also, they were fast as FUCK, I never expected them to be able to manoeuvre that well. I guess it was a weird experience for us too, as you can't help but play differently when you're playing against guys in wheelchairs. They kept psyching me out by charging at me and I'd fumble the ball and try to avoid them (cause they're in a fucking steel chair hurtling towards me) and it was generally pretty weird, but we were holding our own. It was easy to move around them but they would charge us every time we went to shoot and it's hard to concentrate on the hoop when you've got someone coming at you full speed in a wheelchair.
About 10 minutes in, we were tied at 7 to 7. They had been trash talking us the ENTIRE time, and their three friends who were waiting off the court were cheering them and calling us faggots for most of the game, so we were getting a bit annoyed at the whole thing. My friend had made a couple of shots back at the guys on the sidelines, such as when one guy said "Hey honey you want me to come over there and help you out a bit?" and he said "No thanks I only eat vegetables at night" and shit like that. One of the handicapped guys had this giganticly fat gut and tiny shrivelled legs - which looked REALLY weird - yelled at me when I missed a shot "NICE SHOT YOU STUPID WOG!" (I'm not even Greek or Italian or whatever the hell that term refers to) and my friend answered back to them "Hey at least he can walk up stairs you fat fuck". I wasn't really impressed that he was firing them up but I figured I'd talk to him about it later.
Like I said, we're 7 to 7, and these guys amp it up even further. What I mean is, they start to play REALLY dirty. More than once, they rammed me with their chair, or ran over my foot, and every time I tried to steal from the bald guy, he'd wait for me to lunge, then push forward into me and fall back off his chair and accuse me of a foul. The whole thing was really fucking with my head because whenever his chair went over and I tried to help him up he'd refuse my help and spend a good minute pushing his chair back over and getting back up in it.
The game went on like this, with them playing really dirty, for another 5 minutes, without any of us scoring, before they amped it up again. My right calf was killing me from when he rammed into me with one of his wheels and burnt my leg as the wheel span on my skin. It fucking hurt. I guess he could tell because he kept charging at me trying to get that spot again.
Finally, I had an opening, and went to shoot, when BAM, the red haired guy slammed into my knee and slapped the ball out of my hand. It went out of bounds, and I knelt down to hold my knee, which had begun to bleed. The bald guy wheeled over to me and said "whats the matter, faggot, not tough enough to play a couple of cripples?"
For some reason, I saw red, and I'm not sure why I did it, but I stood up and grabbed the guys shirt and said something like (I was pretty mad, the kind of mad where you hear your heart beat in your head, so I can't remember exactly) "fuck you, why are you you guys being such dickheads??". His friends started to wheel over to us and my buddy came over to try and cool things down, getting in between me and them and saying "hey relax, you guys can have the court, we'll just go". Considering his earlier comments and the fact that he's usually the type that would snap, I was surprised, but I guess he didn't want to fight a bunch of handicapped guys in a gym.
They didn't like him getting in their way because one of the guys literally crashed into him and pushed him to the ground as he lost his balance. This distracted me and while I looked over at the commotion, the bald guy who's shirt I was holding grabbed my arm and pulled me down then slapped me in the face. Fucking slapped me. I couldn't fucking believe it and turned and looked at him, and thought, fuck this shit, let go of his shirt, and punched him square on the nose. As my swing was connecting he reached up for my arm and grabbed it, and after I hit him, he started going back, holding on to my arm. I got caught off balance as his chair started tipping back, then his wheelchair tipped right over and I fell on top of him, and we both went to the ground. I got blood all over my shirt from his nose.
I quickly rolled off and began to stand up, when one of this friends (the fat guy with tiny legs) started grabbing at my shorts and trying to pull them down. The guy who had tipped over in his wheelchair was screaming FUCK THOSE CUNTS UP or something similar (he sounded pretty fucked up) - everything was degenerating really badly. I have no idea what the fuck the fat guy was thinking by trying to pull my pants down, but I swung at him too and hit him square on the cheek, and he grabbed at my arm, trying to hold on to it and pull me in close.
His grip was fucking strong, I guess from all the upper body work of wheeling his fat ass around, so I put one foot on his chair and pushed as hard as I could. This ended up in his chair disappearing beneath him and him falling onto the ground. As a side note, after he'd landed, I got hit with this disgusting stench, and his white shorts were totally discolored at the back. No joke, I think this guy had shit himself recently.
Anyway, I jumped back up onto these really long, wide, flat, wood boxes that were piled about half a meter high at the edge of the court - I think they're used every so often for makeshift stages etc - which was relative safety considering the circumstances. My friend ran over, and jumped up with me, then started screaming that he was going to "fuck you guys up" and things like that. The bald guy and the fat guy were on the ground screaming all kinds of shit that I couldn't even properly understand, the bald guy had blood all over his face, it was like some kind of fucked up warzone.
I told my buddy to be quie, and said to the handicapped guys "fuck it, we're leaving, OK? No more trouble" or something to that effect, and we both jogged over to the door and got the fuck out of there.
Now that I'm home and I've calmed down, I actually feel really really bad about what happened. I know they started it and what not, but my friend did trash them back, and I can't imagine how I'd feel if I was living in a wheelchair and maybe these guys have anger issues or something. Would you guys have done the same thing? What's the etiquette in a situation like that?
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09-Jun-2006, 11:04
