Nick Springer, who became a Paralympic gold medalist in
wheelchair rugby at Beijing in 2008, only nine years after contracting
meningococcal meningitis, which caused the partial amputations of his arms and
legs, died April 14 in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. He was 35.
اضافة اعلان
His father, Gary, said that Springer, who lived in Phoenix,
died in a friend’s pool after finishing a lap. A cause of death has not yet
been determined, but he had been seeing a cardiologist for an arrhythmia.
Wheelchair rugby — also known as “
Murderball,” which was the
title of a 2005 documentary about the sport — suited Springer’s love of
rough-and-tumble action. He had played hockey from age 5 or 6, hoping to become
a New York Ranger.
In 2000, a year after losing parts of his arms and his legs
above the knees, he turned to sled hockey while still in rehabilitation. He
later took up wheelchair rugby, an often violent sport that contains elements
of traditional rugby, basketball and handball.
“A lot of people look at me like I’m fragile,” Springer told
The New York Times in 2003. “Sports gives me a chance to get out there and bang
myself up.”
After Springer tried wheelchair rugby for the first time in
2003, “He rolled off the court with an ear-to-ear grin, saying, ‘Dad, I think I
can be really good at this,’” said Gary Springer, who drove Nick from their
home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, in Westchester County, to Hackensack, New
Jersey, where he practiced, and to tournaments where he competed with a team from
the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (now the United States Spinal
Association).
He excelled quickly: He joined the development squad of USA
Wheelchair Rugby, the sport’s governing body, in the spring of 2005, and made
the US national team the next year, when it won the gold medal at the world
championships. In 2008, the team won the Canada Cup and the gold medal over
Australia at the Paralympics in Beijing.
“He was a great defender — probably for a long period of
time the best defender in the world,” said Scott Hogsett, a friend and a
teammate of Springer’s on the 2008 team. “He’s the main reason we won the gold;
he defended one of the best players in the world” — Australian wheelchair rugby
star Ryley Batt — “and shut him down.”
But the victory in China came amid sadness. Springer’s
mother, Nancy (Ford) Springer, was dying of cancer while her husband and their
daughter, Olivia, were at the Paralympics.
When she first learned she had cancer, in January 2008,
Springer had offered to stop playing wheelchair rugby and move home.
“She looked me in the eye and said, ‘It would crush me if
you don’t go to the Olympics,’” he said, recalling her conversation to The
Journal News, a newspaper based in White Plains, New York, in 2008. “And she
said, ‘The one thing you have to promise is that you won’t let this keep you
from winning the gold medal.’”
Nancy Springer was in a coma, surrounded by friends and
family watching the gold medal game on a laptop and hearing the announcer refer
to her son as “Nick the Tank.” She died the next day, before her son, husband
and daughter got home.
The gold medal, Springer said, was how he would remember
her.
“It’s my mother’s medal,” he told The Journal News.
Nicholas Bowen Springer was born on June 9, 1985, in
Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn and Croton-on-Hudson. His father is an
entertainment publicist, and his mother taught deaf children and was one of
several founders of the
National Meningitis Association.
Springer had hockey on his mind in August 1999. He had just
completed two weeks of goaltender camp near Toronto — he was going to play the
position on his high school’s junior varsity team that fall — and was attending
sleepaway camp in western Massachusetts.
After a three-day, 48km hike, he began feeling flulike
symptoms, which continued to worsen over the next 16 hours. Purple blotches
appeared on his abdomen, indicating blood clots. All were symptoms of
meningococcal meningitis, a bacterial infection that causes swelling of the
protective membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord.
Up to 1 in 5 people who survive meningitis may suffer
amputations, deafness, and brain and kidney damage; 10 to 15 percent die, even
with rapid treatment, according to the National Meningitis Association.
Springer was sent to a hospital in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, then was quickly airlifted to another in Springfield, where his
organs began to fail and his blood pressure fell to almost zero. He was given a
10 percent chance of survival.
He was transferred to a hospital in Manhattan, where, while
he was in a medically induced coma that would last eight weeks, he underwent
the amputations.
After awakening, according to the 2003 New York Times
article, he told his father: “Dad, I don’t think I have any fingers. I think I
know about my legs, too.” Gary Springer recalled: “My wife and I looked at each
other and said, ‘This is our new normal.’ Because Nick is alive. He’s still
Nick.”
Springer declined to wear prosthetics or use an electric wheelchair.
And he played wheelchair rugby relentlessly.
“At a very high level, it can be really violent, and that’s
what people like about it,” Hogsett said. “Who doesn’t want to watch two people
crash in wheelchairs as hard as you can?”
Springer was named the 2009 athlete of the year by the US
Quad Rugby Association, which oversees a league of local teams like the ones he
played for in Sarasota, Florida, and in Phoenix, where Hogsett was a teammate.
He was also on the 2010 world championship team and the 2012 Paralympic team
that won a bronze medal.
“Nick was just ferocious,” Joe Delagrave, a teammate on the
2012 Paralympic team, said. “We met in 2009 and he got me playing at a high
level. He was phenomenal at mentoring people and loving them.”
In addition to his father, Springer is survived by his
sister, Olivia McCall, and his father’s partner, Elizabeth Cier.
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