JAMES ADAMS
Age: 23
Home: Acworth
Team: Shepherd Stealers
Schooling: Furtah Preparatory School (Acworth), Atlanta Institute of Music
Awards: 2010 Yes I Can Award (Council for Exceptional Children)
There’s a story in every chair.
You’ll find cerebral palsy cases on the Shepherd Stealers roster, paraplegics injured in car wrecks, amputees from train accidents. Then there is James Adams, who not only is the most interesting athlete competing for the Shepherd Center’s wheelchair basketball team. There may not be a more compelling player anywhere.
A quadruple-amputee stemming from a massive infection when he was an infant, Adams averages around 12 points per game, cans the occasional 3-pointer and always is one of the swiftest scooters in the gym. He wears Michael Jordan’s No. 23 and will take his wheelchair into yours as hard as the rules allow.
He does so without hands, his arms ending just below the elbows. And when you ask him how he does it, he sends the game a valentine.
“Basketball means everything to me,” he said. “I’ve grown up in it. I love it.”
“He never ceases to amaze me,” said Gavin Cloy, a former U.S. Paralympian and the Stealers’ star. “I’ve played a lot of basketball in my career and played at the highest level, and he is my basketball idol. I have yet to find anything he doesn’t do and not only doesn’t do, but doesn’t do real well.”
The Stealers (9-12) close their season this weekend with a tournament in Philadelphia, but after finishing in the top five nationally in two of the past three years, they will not qualify for the National Wheelchair Basketball Association playoffs. Their loss. Adams left the tournament howling last winter.
“The last game last year when we won the fifth-place game, he had 23,” said Fred Black, a long-time local high school coach who oversees the Stealers in his retirement. “There wasn’t another game going on, so all of a sudden, everybody who was there in the gym came over to see James play. The fourth quarter, he shot a 3 and it rimmed and rimmed and rimmed and fell out. The crowd had gotten so big by that time, there was this huge, collective ‘Arrrgggh!’ It was great.”
The wheelchair game is not for the faint of heart. Every player has already overcome some form of catastrophe just to get out on the floor. Collisions mark every possession and when a chair flips, play usually continues. But often when the opponents roll out for the opening tip, Adams senses the double-takes as they try to size him up. With … what? Disbelief? Inspiration?
“Oh, yeah. I definitely see it,” Adams said. “I’ve had guys come up to me after a good game and go, ‘I’ve thought about just stopping doing everything. They had me play wheelchair basketball, and I been thinking about stopping this, too. And now I just saw you, and I actually want to keep playing. I want to change my life.’
“I’ve had people come up and cry. I had a mom come up to me — it was a game when I scored 36 — a mom from the other team came up to me and started crying and hugged me for a long, long time. I’m thinking, ‘Shouldn’t you be mad? We won, right?’”
Adams, 23, was five months old when he was stricken by meningococcal meningitis — his heart temporarily stopped on the way to the hospital — and surgeons later had to remove parts of all four limbs when the infection threatened to kill him. Though he was fitted with prosthetic legs, he has learned to navigate life without hands, a self-taught process reinforced by his mother Lamona Adams, who stressed that no hardship couldn’t be overcome with commitment and a little ingenuity.
“I raised him up pretty much like a regular kid,” she said. “He got into trouble, got his spankings as he got older. I figured the more he was treated like a regular kid, the less he’d get treated as ‘special.’ Of course, we addressed some of his limitations, but that ‘special’ babying type of treatment? He didn’t get that.”
Which is how Adams learned to eat his breakfast biscuit with his elbows.
“As I was growing up, that was a constant conversation: You’re different,” he said. “But there was never really a moment where I had to get over it, so to say. She taught me a lot of things. You have to be able do it yourself. That was the main thing. I think she was always so worried about when I was very young, making sure I can take care of myself.
“As I grew up, there was really nothing where I thought, ‘Aw, I can’t do this.’ No, because my mom, when I was younger, had me doing all these things on my own.”
Basketball was a harder case. Like a generation of kids, he grew up loving the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 1990s. His favorite movie was “Space Jam,” his favorite player the transcendent Jordan. There is no instructional guide for mastering handless basketball. But he nevertheless was drawn to the game.
“I even went to go out for my elementary-school team,” he said. “Didn’t play much. So I went out for track.”
It was around this time that his stepfather, Eric Hicks, discovered BlazeSports, a legacy program stemming from the 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games that, among other offerings, runs summer sports camps for kids with physical disabilities in Warm Springs.
It was there that Adams, then 10, taught himself to shoot, parking his wheelchair at the foot of the basket while he experimented alone with ball-handling, releases and angles. It took two years before he made one.
“I could actually get it there,” he said. “I just needed to figure out how to do it over and over again.”
As well as to learn to handle his chair in traffic and dribbling and passing. Black, his coach, estimates it requires two or three years just to master maneuvering a wheelchair at competition level. He expanded his shooting range, developing a customized delivery system, hoisting the ball between his arms and releasing the shot with the requisite spin. It soon became apparent this was not a case of basketball toughening up the kid.
“He was a tough kid who mastered the basketball,” Lamona Adams said. “The basketball was something that brought out a lot of the characteristics that he had and his ambitions. He had the zeal to do and to participate.”
By his junior year at Murtah Prep, he scored 36 in a junior national tournament in Denver for the Blaze team. By his senior year, he was offered a scholarship to play at Alabama, one of a dozen or so universities that field wheelchair teams for intercollegiate competition. He registered to major in mechanical engineering.
He also quickly recognized he was far too slow for the college game — “If you can’t get down the court to score, what’s the point of being able to score?” — so he revamped all over how he propelled himself. In order to make longer and stronger arm contact with his wheels, he dropped his seat from 21 inches high to 15 inches. He increased the chair’s forward pitch, to better utilize his core strength as he pushed.
Weight-lifting and hill training increased his strength. Whereas most players push off their wheels with both hands simultaneously, Adams devised a cross-handed method not unlike a speed skater’s motion to make up for missing hand strength. Although his arms would often bleed from the added exertion, he soon became a two-wheeled fast break.
“Nobody’s taught me to push like that,” he said. “I’ve never had any coach say this is a good idea. But I know one thing: I’m fast.”
His stay in Tuscaloosa lasted one year, the course load and longer practice schedules causing him to re-evaluate what he was after. He returned home, enrolled in Atlanta Institute of Music to study production and has since opened his own recording studio (Midtown Experience) in Kennesaw.
“Any genre,” he said. “If you make it, I’ll mix it.”
And he also returned to the Shepherd Stealers, where they still marvel at him.
“Anyone who needs to make excuses, just look at him,” teammate Raffy Rodriguez said. “He’s got every excuse in the world. And he’s out there.”
There may be a story in every chair out there, but not like this one. Basketball is no easy game. Wheelchair basketball is more grueling. The game James Adams plays is something else.
“Twelve points a game is a lot,” Black said, “for guy who has no hands.”
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