“My life was at a standstill as my MS worsened exponentially by the day. I barely left the house. I had to stop all sports; I couldn’t stand up without a walker. I had turned 50 and I was considering throwing in the towel. I confided in my family that this was my intention. Not in a jump-off-the-Brooklyn Bridge way, but in a final-party, say-farewell, down-some-pills-and-end-my-misery way. All I wanted was to be involved in a sport; my mind and my soul thrive on it. I hadn’t even heard of wheelchair tennis. I didn’t care if I had to learn a new sport, I needed something to help me choose to live.”
In 2014, Terri Ferraro of Briarcliff Manor, NY, wrote these words in a soul-baring note of gratitude to USTA tennis professional Aki Takayama-Wolfson, the woman who taught her to play wheelchair tennis. Less than a year prior, Ferraro, a devoted recreational athlete suffering from multiple sclerosis, had finally lost the ability to do what she loved most—to run and sweat and compete. She appealed to a host of doctors, physical therapists and psychologists for solutions, but received the same verbal door slam from each of them: “Those days are over.”
Ferraro had never cared much for tennis. Growing up on the less fashionable south side of New Rochelle, NY, she had been a softball girl who loved sliding into second base, getting dirty. To her crowd, tennis was something played by the hoity-toity ladies who lunched on the north side of town.
But as middle-age descended and her MS advanced, Ferraro found herself at a crossroads. She couldn’t get around without a walker or climb a ladder to paint murals, her other pastime. Consumed by the void, she had thoughts of suicide, but then a chain of introductions and clinics led her to a Sunday afternoon wheelchair tennis program run by Takayama-Wolfson at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
This woman who had always frowned on tennis found new life on the court. “I just wanted to sweat again,” says Ferraro. “I wanted to work at life. I loved every second of it.”
Ferraro took such pleasure in tennis that she began supplementing group lessons with private ones. In June, she competed in the Jana Hunsaker Memorial Tennis Tournament at the National Tennis Center, even playing one doubles match on Louis Armstrong Stadium. But don’t let that give you any illusions about her aptitude: “I’m old and fat and I suck at tennis,” laughs Ferraro. Then she adds the kicker: “But what fun!”
Ferraro’s story is a variation on a theme that dates back to the origins of wheelchair tennis. The sport has helped innumerable players, both recreational and professional, reconnect with their sense of self, and with the world.
“For some, it’s a transition sport,” says Dan James, national manager of wheelchair tennis for the USTA. “It’s an activity that takes them from rehab, dealing with the fact that they now have a physical disability, and brings them back into life.”
Brad Parks, the father of wheelchair tennis, recalls that after the skiing accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, “I needed something I could do with my able-bodied friends from before I got hurt. With wheelchair tennis, I could go out and hit with somebody I used to ski with. That was important for my self-esteem.”
Generally speaking, wheelchair tennis holds this power for those who “get their chair” later in life. Mike Zangari, wheelchair technician for the US Open since 2006, and a lifelong wheelchair basketball player, says, “I was born disabled, so I never had the luxury of being on two feet and having it taken away. For those who lose the ability to walk through accident or illness, their whole world is flip-flopped, and sports will give them that confidence again.”
Rick Slaughter, who was a ranked junior player in the 1970s, was paralyzed in a car accident when he was 17. After a one-year period of anger and denial, he gave wheelchair tennis a try and was soon a fixture on the American circuit. In the 1980s, he joined Parks and other players to spread the word across Europe. “They couldn’t believe what they were seeing,” Slaughter says. “Once they tried it, they transitioned, too.”
