On March 10, 1948, cheers echoed through the old Madison Square Garden. Some 15,000 fans went wild over a spirited game of basketball as the players checked each other hard and passed with precision.
Though it preceded the main event of the New York Knicks vs. the St. Louis Bombers, the action brimmed with pro-level intensity. But these ballers were no ordinary athletes. They were World War II veterans — corralled from Halloran General Hospital on Staten Island and Cushing General Hospital in Framingham, Mass. — paralyzed below the waist and storming the court in wheelchairs.
Among those wearing Staten Island colors was Selig Boshnack, a 22-year-old from The Bronx who had been sprayed with shrapnel as a field sergeant. “My dad and his teammates were real-deal athletes,” Mark Boshnack told The Post of his father, who passed away in 2008. “Their game at the Garden was not looked at as a freak show.”
The match served as a breakout moment for wheelchair basketball, garnering the cover of Newsweek. But it was more than that. As the new book “Wheels of Courage” (Center Street), by David Davis, explains, the game gave a fresh lease on life to paralyzed vets who would have once been considered “dead enders” by the medical community.
“It showed that they could participate in life,” said Davis. “These guys played basketball, held down jobs, had families.”
The game was conceived at Birmingham Army Hospital in Van Nuys, Calif., in 1946, as doctors took paraplegic vets to a gym for upper-body exercise.
“One of the guys rolled across an empty basketball court, picked up a ball and took a shot from . . . his wheelchair,” said Davis. Physical therapist Bob Rynearson devised 11 rules — including two wheel-pushes before a player dribbled, passed or shot — for a new game. “It started as a form of rehabilitation and became competition.”
Players refused to go easy on themselves. “Shooting into a 10-foot-high basket from a wheelchair is hard,” said Davis. “There was talk of lowering the rim, but the men wanted to play with the same rules as the uninjured.”
Movie producer Stanley Kramer observed a game between Birmingham’s Flying Wheels and the Rolling Devils from Corona, Calif. That led to “The Men,” a drama based on the wheelchair-basketball scene, and gave Marlon Brando his first starring role.
The game got so popular that the Queens-based Bulova watch company sponsored a team — Boshnack played for Bulova, which put him through watch-repair school. “The Rolling Devils flew to Oakland and played a semi-pro team there,” said Davis. “The Devils kicked their asses. They made fools of able-bodied teams [who played] in borrowed wheelchairs.”
For Armand “Tip” Thiboutot, who suffered paralysis and lost a leg due to a car accident while in the Army, opportunities to prove his mettle were vital. “I gained satisfaction from being competitive,” said Thiboutot, 83, formerly a French teacher at Boston University. (He also wrote the book “Wheelchairs Can Jump.”) “Other guys thought my amputated leg would make me a bad shooter. I liked showing how good I was. Usually I was the best foul shooter on the team.”
Later, Pan Am sponsored a top team and participants came to include civilians. By the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, the sport had gone global and was part of the Paralympic Games. Teams from four countries competed and America took home the gold. Selig Boshnack played for the US; Mark keeps his dad’s medal in his bedroom.
Worldwide, wheelchair basketball is now more than 100,000 players deep and (as part of the Paralympics) organized parallel with the Olympics. “It’s a seamless part of our sports landscape,” said Davis. “That is the legacy of those veterans.”
