Paralympic Hopeful Takes Flight

August 27, 2011

Tony Davis’ journey to Lake Mercer and the 2011 USRowing Adaptive World Championship Trials was a long and painful ordeal that began six years ago, when he was thrown out of the back seat of his Jeep during a horrific crash on a California freeway.

On the way back to his home near Seattle, following an 18-month stint as a Navy rescue diver in the Persian Gulf, Davis suffered a severely fractured back. He woke up in a veteran’s hospital a month later, where he was told in the company of his family, that he would live the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Davis can remember hearing the doctors run down the list of things he would never be able to do again and watching the reaction on the faces of his parents, his brother and sister, his aunt and his grandparents.

“The doctors got all my family together that wanted to come and decided to tell them all these things I would never be able to do again,” Davis said. “I would never be able to go to the bathroom on my own again, I would never be able to have kids or be with a woman again, I was never going to be able to walk again and all these other things.

“My entire family was surrounding my bed and they were crying and my grandmother was hysterical. I was just sitting there. I wasn’t thinking that was going to be me. Now that I am older, I think I was either naive or stubborn, but I didn’t believe that was going to be me,” he said.

And it wasn’t.

Yes, Davis, 29, is still a paraplegic and he cannot do many of the things the doctors outlined, but he ultimately refused to live in a wheelchair. He learned to walk by watching his toddler son, pulled himself out of the grief and self-hatred that was drowning him and, on this week, earned a spot on the adaptive national rowing team in the mixed arms and back double sculls with his partner, Jacqui Kapinowski.

They will represent the United States at the 2011 World Rowing Championships in Bled, Slovenia next week with the ultimate hope of making it to the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.

No matter what happens at worlds, it will not be the end of Davis’ goal of setting an example. He loves rowing and competing, but what Davis said he is doing is more about letting people see that boundaries can be broken.

“I did this with God’s help, but I did this,” he said. “And I want people to see – people that don’t have families, or jobs, or people that think their lives are over. I want them to see that they can make decisions to make things better.”

And Davis wants them all to know that it took him a while to figure it out as well.

He can’t remember how the accident actually happened. But he does know the story. He was driving home after serving five years in the Navy, the last 18 months off the coast of Iraq, where he won a medal for logging 150 hours of combat flight time in a helicopter.

His younger sister and brother were with him and they have since filled in the details of the crash.

Davis said that while he slept in the backseat of the Jeep, with his seatbelt on, his brother was driving, but looking at the radio as the vehicle drifted out of the fast lane and onto the rumble bumps that are made to alert drivers that they are going off the road.

The noise woke Davis and he leaned over the seat to grab the wheel. “As I reached up to help him, he pulled the wheel to the right as I pulled to the right and the Jeep just crossed over and then rolled four times across the freeway. My seatbelt broke and I was thrown out of the window.”

He was found in a ditch unconscious and with a broken back.

He stayed four months in the Seattle veteran’s hospital, where he was taught to live in a wheelchair. His wife at the time was pregnant, but divorced him after she gave birth.

With partial custody of his son, and living with his grandparents, Davis stayed wheelchair-bound, loathing his life and frequently trying to drown his grief in alcohol.

But after watching his son take his first steps one night, he said a prayer to God, asking for forgiveness and “I asked him for my legs back.” The next day he stepped out of the wheelchair and began a painful journey.

What Davis didn’t know was that trying to walk when paralyzed would result in searing pain in the nerves that still worked.

“I experienced pain that I didn’t know people could experience,” said Davis. “But I feel like it made me stronger.”

The pain continues. Everyday. But Davis has a goal and he has learned to accept.

“The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is experience pain, and I have to make a decision of whether I want to put my feet on the ground and try to walk to the bathroom, walk to the kitchen, and walk out of the house which will cause me more pain, or just lay in bed and let the pain stay how it is,” he said.

“I just have to deal with it and tell myself this is how you are going to feel for the rest of your life. You’re not going to feel good and this is how your body is going to feel and you just have to learn to live with it. Once I got past that, I got a lot better.”

Learning to row also helped. Davis tried a number of sports including snowboarding and sled hockey. Through the veterans administration, he attended a sports camp for disabled veterans in Aspen, Colorado.

There was a rowing machine at the camp, above which was hung a shirt and a challenge – the fastest time for 500 meters wins the shirt.

“I wanted the shirt,” said Davis. “So I got on and just started pulling. I got two minutes flat and they told me I won.”

He not only won the shirt, but he caught the attention of a Paralympic coach who arranged for Davis to attend another camp which included rowing.

“I went to the camp about a month later and that’s when they got me on the water for the first time.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said, “but when I was rowing I felt like I could fly and I felt like I could run again. I decided that this was what I wanted to do. They got me a coach out of Vancouver, Wash., with the Vancouver Lake Crew. I went there and learned how to row in a regular boat, and just didn’t use my legs.”

Davis began rowing in adaptive races and word finally got to U.S. Adaptive National Team head coach Karen Lewis, who arranged for Davis to go to the USRowing Training Center in Oklahoma City. He has been training there with Kapinowski since April, with their sights on the trials at Lake Mercer and worlds in Slovenia.

“My goal is to be the best in the world at whatever I do, because I can walk. I went from being in a wheelchair and being a paraplegic, to walking. I chose rowing to achieve this because rowing makes me feel like I’m flying. I used to fly when I was in the Navy and rowing makes me feel like I’m flying again.”

Ed Moran

Adaptive Features