Take His Legs

I got into a long and fruitless Twitter debate last night. It was my own fault as these things often are. I had to make my point. I couldn’t leave it, even though I know that through this platform I can have as much say as I like and people are far less likely to come back at me. Maybe I like the conflict of the more instant Twitter slanging match exchange. Freud would know.

Most of all though the argument raged because I believed what I was saying. I still do. I was responding to a number of tweets about Adam Hills’ Channel 4 documentary about Physical Disability Rugby League (PDRL), the brilliantly if a little obviously titled Take His Legs. At this point I hadn’t watched the programme. Now I have and we’ll talk about that later. But had I seen these tweets after seeing the programme I would have felt the same way and got into the same fruitless debate.

The film follows Hills as he attempts to set up one of the UK’s first PDRL teams in Warrington. They claim to be the first and they may be, but to be the first to play you have to have somebody to play against. So Leeds, a team which included Hills’ Last Leg co-presenter Alex Brookes, must have at least a share in that honour. From that first meeting with the rhinos, a defeat, the Wolves PDRL team are followed on a journey which takes them on a three-game tour of England and to Sydney, Australia to take on Hills’ boyhood heroes, the South Sydney Rabbitohs.

All of which sounds like compelling sport mixed in with an opportunity to get to know the players off the field woven together by a superb comic talent. And it is. We get to meet several members of the squad. Seven-year-old Leon was almost written off at birth, given weeks to live and then developed cerebral palsy at two years of age. Another has a visual impairment, another a problem with his hands which doctors can’t really explain beyond calling it a ‘phenomenon’. If Hills is the star off the field then Tony, who suffers very severe anxiety and depression, is the star on it. He’s rapid, to the point where it is said that Super League players talk about his pace.

I wish some of those commenting on the film on Twitter had talked about Tony’s pace. He is a prolific try-scorer for the Wolves, describing his running style with a self-effacing humour as ‘a bit like Forrest Gump’. Unfortunately this was not the focus of the Twitter chat. Nor was anything else these people do on a rugby league field. The focus was on how ‘inspirational’ Tony and his team-mates are and how they have ‘overcome’ their disabilities to do something they say they never thought they would be able to. One female Twitter user was moved to admit that the whole thing made her cry.

Here’s the problem. To focus on these things is inspiration porn. Inspiration porn is the portrayal of disabled people as inspirational merely for existing and doing everyday things. Including playing sport. At one point Brooker tells us that his involvement in PDRL was the first time his disability had failed to get him out of sport. He’s joking of course. He’s a comedian. That’s what he does, but you can tell from the awed reactions of the Twitterati that they believe him.

The narrative here is that you don’t play sport if you are disabled. But that’s bollocks. I played wheelchair basketball from the age of 13 until my early 30s. There was nothing inspirational about it. My mum didn’t worry any more than she would have done had I played football, rugby or cricket with my able bodied friends at that age. It was totally unremarkable. If you had told any of those kids who trained with me on a Thursday night at Fazakerkey that they were inspirational they would have looked at you with deep suspicion. We weren’t trying to inspire anyone. We were trying to win and have fun like any kids in competitive sport do.

Back to Warrington and Twitter, were noted rugby league journalist Trevor Hunt reacted to the film by suggesting that the Wolves PDRL team should have won BBC Sports Personality Of The Year Team Of The Year because.....spoiler alert.....they did go down under and beat the Rabbitohs to claim the first PDRL World Club Challenge title. This is a magnificent achievement in a sporting context but if we’re viewing this as sport alone can we really argue that it belongs in the same stratosphere as England winning the men’s cricket World Cup? No. To put it up alongside that is to view it through the prism of overcoming adversity or obstacles. That framing of disability as an obstacle to be overcome, a burden, is textbook inspiration porn and I won’t have it in the house.

You could argue that some of the participants play along with the narrative. One, Jason, talks of PDRL helping him ‘come out’ about disability as if it were something about which he should be socially ashamed. Others in the group talk about a trip to play away at Wakefield being the first time they have been on a bus ride, or the flight to Sydney their first time on a plane. That’s great for them if that is the case but the trouble is that it paints a picture to the didn’t-they-do-well-ers watching on of disability that is patently false in most cases. By the time I was 15 I had been to Wakefield more times than is reasonable in any sane person’s lifetime. Disabled people do stuff, and they don’t want praise for it. They’re just trying to live, like you.

But I don’t blame them for participating in it. What rugby league player worth his salt would turn down an opportunity to fly to Sydney to take on the Rabbitohs for a world title which is then celebrated with Rabbitohs owner Russell Crowe? Of course they’re going to do it, and if that means serving up some good old fashioned inspiration porn as an indirect consequence then so be it. That is several steps up on the morality ladder from the absolute whoppers who take part in the Undateables to sate the public’s appetite for ‘ah....isn’t lovely?’ voyeurism.

I know most of you reading this are one of them so apologies for the generalisation, but it seems to me that the able bodied always have to have someone to feel superior to. It’s almost like we should exist to shake them out of whatever rut they have got themselves into. ‘Well if Jeff With No Head can become a Go-Go dancer in LA I can bloody well motivate myself to mow the lawn on Sunday afternoon.’. But we’re not here for that. We are here as equals, human beings who are just as filthy about having to get up for work in the morning as you are.

Do watch Take His Legs. It’s available to download on whatever Channel 4’s catch-up service is calling itself this week. For all the flaws I have pointed out it is a great sports documentary in its own right, with a liberal sprinkling of the kind of predictable but no less successful humour that we all carry with us as a defence mechanism. But if you do watch it, watch it for these reasons and not because you want to be inspired by people just getting on with their lives.