1976: Brad Parks tries wheelchair tennis as therapy; a new sport is born

This year marks the 50th anniversary of TENNIS Magazine's founding in 1965. To commemorate the occasion, we'll look back each Thursday at one of the 50 moments that have defined the last half-century in our sport.

The most far-reaching, and life-changing, product of the 1970s U.S. tennis boom was also its most unlikely.

Since its origins in 1873, the sport had consisted of two formats, singles and doubles. In 1976, at a rehabilitation center in Downey, Calif., a third was born: Wheelchair tennis. Few games have grown as quickly or spread as widely in so short a time. This year the sport will be played in at least 80 countries, and professionals will travel to 160 tournaments to earn money playing it. More than with most organized activities, there was a need for wheelchair tennis.

That need first began to be filled in ’76, when Brad Parks, a former skier who had been paralyzed in an accident, was introduced to his new recreational therapist, Jeff Minnebraker, at the Rancho Los Amigos rehabilitation center in Downey, Calif. Parks had been playing wheelchair basketball, but had recently tried out tennis with his father. Minnebraker, who had been injured in a car accident, had recently designed a lighter chair specifically for the game.

“That chance encounter,” Andrew Friedman wrote for TENNIS.com last year, “was the equivalent of John Lennon meeting Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs hooking up with Steve Wozniak—creating an alchemy that changed things forever.”

Minnebraker and Parks were soon more than wheelchair players; they were in business together, selling Minnebraker’s invention. News about the chair, and the sport, began to get around at local community centers, and Parks started the National Foundation of Wheelchair Tennis, and the Wheelchair Tennis Player’s Association.

Two other players, from very different places, would further expand the sport in the 1980s.

Randy Snow, a man with a personality the size of his native Texas, helped popularize the game in the States and would win its national title at the U.S. Open 10 times. Along with Parks, Snow is one of two wheelchair players in the International Tennis Hall of Fame. (Below, Snow at left and Parks at right)

Jean-Pierre Limborg is a Frenchman who took on the difficult task of building the game in his native country, and eventually around the world. Getting Yannick Noah to join a wheelchair exhibition in 1982 was a publicity breakthrough for the game. It was Limborg, in an interview with Friedman, who also put his finger on the appeal of wheelchair tennis for disabled people everywhere.

“When I arrived in the U.S. in 1981,” he said, “the first thing that really impressed me was so many people smiled to me and gave me a thumbs-up just seeing me pushing along on the sidewalk. In France, you get out of the hospital with a list of what you cannot do; you generated pity. But in the U.S., you were more like a hero; the definition of the hero in American culture is the one who by accident or destiny gets knocked down, and gets up again.”

In the 1970s, much to the dismay of its old-guard officials, the sport of tennis became, in their words, "Americanized." Looking back, the start of the wheelchair game was one of the indisputable upsides of that development. It has helped spread the idea formulated by Parks and articulated by Limborg above, that disabled athletes can be every bit as dynamic, gritty, and heroic as able-bodied athletes. One thing you can say about wheelchair players, they don’t feel sorry for themselves or their opponents.

They can also, in the case of one woman, have their names mentioned among the most dominant athletes in history. The best and most famous wheelchair player of all time is Holland’s Esther Vergeer. When she retired in 2013, she had won 42 Grand Slam titles, been ranked No. 1 for 14 straight years, and had won her last 470—yes, 470—matches, a run of success virtually without comparison in sports.

Vergeer echoed all of her fellow wheelchair athletes when she said, “I want recognition for what I am doing as an athlete—I don’t want anyone’s pity.” Maybe the ultimate recognition of what she, and by extension the wheelchair game, had accomplished was her appearance on the cover of the 2010 edition of ESPN The Magazine’s "Body Issue," a magazine dedicated to what the body can do, rather than what it can’t.

“In the beginning, it was hard,” said Vergeer, who was paralyzed after a spinal surgery at 8 went wrong. “But tennis,” which she took up at 12, “made realize that the world doesn’t end.”

If there’s nothing else that comes out of the rise in tennis’s popularity over the last 50 years, the wheelchair game alone, and its ability to make thousands of people feel like Vergeer, will have made it all worthwhile.