Preparing to serve, a good 10 feet behind the baseline, Nick Taylor pins the ball between the heel of one Adidas-clad foot and the toe of the other. He lofts the ball into the air with a quick kick of his left foot and whips an underhand topspin serve deep into the service box. It jumps high, and the return comes back short. Taylor scoots wide in his motorized wheelchair and flattens out a forehand down the line for a winner.
Taylor, the second seed in the inaugural Quad (quadriplegic) division of the 2007 Wheelchair Competition at the US Open, serves underhanded because he essentially has no biceps and cannot lift the racquet above his head. He was born with Arthrogryposis, a congenital disorder characterized by muscle weakness and fibrosis, and which affects three of every 1,000 people.
According to the 27-year-old Taylor, the disease left him with every other nerve on his spinal column and prohibited certain muscles from developing. His biceps, among other muscles, atrophied. “That’s why my shoulders are so sloopy looking,” he says.
Taylor, who has been playing tennis since he was 14, when he made the high school tennis squad in his native Wichita, Kansas, has a powerful, left-handed forehand. He executes the shot with torque rather than strength, generating racquet speed across his body to propel the ball with high-bouncing topspin.
Unlike other quad players — who by regulation must have disability in three limbs — Taylor uses a motorized chair to get around the court. With a video game-like joy stick in one hand, he drives the chair, swinging the racquet with the other.
But it’s his unique service motion — talk about a kick serve — that makes Taylor “kind of a one-man circus sideshow.”
“It’s okay, I said it,” he quips. “You can repeat it.”
No. 1 vs. No. 3
Taylor’s opponent across the net is David Wagner, with whom he forms the top quad doubles team in the world. Wagner is also the world's No. 1-ranked quad singles player. Only minutes before taking the court, the two friends were having lunch together upstairs in Player Dining. “We’re on good terms,” says Taylor, “except that we want to kick the crap out of each other.”
In the opening game of their match, Wagner quickly earns two break points as he forces Taylor deep behind the baseline. At 15-40, he takes a short ball, rolls to net and knocks off a volley to take the early lead.
Wagner, an athletic-looking guy with massive shoulders from Portland, Oregon, wheels about the court in a conventional but specially equipped wheelchair with racing wheels. In 1995, he broke his neck playing Frisbee in the ocean in Redondo Beach, California. Paralyzed, and with about 30 percent functionality in his hands, he plays with his racquet taped tightly to his wrist.
Wagner, 33, zips around the court, hunting down would-be winners with “excellent pushing technique,” says Taylor. “He’s got monkey arms,” Taylor adds. “When you’re playing him they seem like they’re 12 feet long.”
This first US Open quad competition is a round-robin format and consists of four players. Besides Talor and Wagner, the other players in the field are Peter Norfolk of Great Britain and Sarah Hunter of Canada. Norfolk is ranked second in the world, Hunter fourth.
Challenges On and Off the Court
Taylor’s racquet is strapped to his hand with a cord-like device, and he spends every changeover working furiously to towel off his playing hand. It’s evident that he works extremely hard to play the game he loves.
Yet Taylor struggles less with a forehand in his strike zone than he does with a garden salad, his lunch the day before competition began.
Wagner races to a 5-1 lead in the first set of his opening match against Taylor, finding fierce angles and half-volleying net approaches, and depriving Taylor of the advantage he gains from his high-arching shots. Wagner repeatedly drives the ball to Taylor’s weaker wing, the backhand.
Until recently, Taylor owned his doubles partner in head-to-heads, but Wagner has won the last three encounters. Looking strong in the mid-afternoon sun, Wagner takes the first set, 6-3.
In the second, Taylor succeeds in wheeling around his backhand to strike his preferred topspin forehands, which he sends bouncing high above Wagner’s head at the baseline. The tactic is similar to Rafael Nadal’s strategy when playing Roger Federer on the clay at Roland Garros: hit deep, high balls that force the opponent to return shots from above his shoulder.
Taylor storms back in the second set, jumping out to a 4-0 lead by mixing it up in rallies and keeping Wagner off-guard with nasty underspin drop shots. At 4-1, Taylor hits a short lob, and after the bounce, it looks like Wagner is about to hit an overhead into the open court. But at the last second he allows it to bounce again — two bounces are allowed in wheelchair tennis, the single exception to standard rules — and holds the ball on his racquet, like Federer often does on short forehands, and aims it down the line, completely faking out Taylor, who is pinned in his chair on the baseline.
Taylor and Wagner share a good laugh across the net.
Although Wagner roars back to tie the set 5-5, Taylor closes it out with a confident forehand drive to knot the match at one set-all. The Kansan’s game is definitely more unorthodox than Wagner’s, but it is equally effective.
Unlike the Champions Invitational (senior) players, Pat Cash and Jimmy Arias, who preceded the wheelchair competition on Court 7, Wagner and Taylor don’t play a Super Tiebreak after splitting sets. It’s best two out of three in wheelchair competition, and the third set goes down to the wire.
At 4-5, with Taylor serving, Wagner secures two match points. On the second, he rushes the net, but Taylor arches a lob over his opponent’s backhand. Wagner can barely get his racquet on the ball. Finally, on Wagner’s third match point in the game, Taylor commits one of his only double faults of the afternoon to hand the match to Wagner, 6-3, 5-7, 6-4.
As Taylor zooms away from the court, disappointed from the loss, Wagner spends several minutes unwrapping the mounds of white athletic tape that had bind the racquet to his right hand, producing a ball of tape bigger than a tennis ball.
Both Taylor, who recently earned an MA in Sport Administration from Wichita State, and Wagner, an elementary school teacher by training, are looking forward to competing in the 2008 Paralympics Games in Beijing. Taylor was a 2004 Athens Paralympics gold medalists in doubles. Wagner earned gold and silver medals in Athens.
Nick Taylor, the man with the motorized chair and special kick serve, is sponsored by the clothing company Adidas, which recently rolled out an “Impossible is Nothing” TV ad campaign focusing on athletes’ inspirational stories. Soccer superstar David Beckham, the Australian Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe, and others describe the obstacles they’ve overcome to compete in their sports.
But so far they’ve overlooked one in their stable. Hello, Adidas? Call me. I’ve got the guy for you.
