Not handicapped

Fulton County man sees no disadvantage with chair

By Eric Moore

LITTLE ROCK — Tennis takes good reflexes and great hand-eye coordination, but when you add a wheelchair to the equation, the sport becomes a lot tougher.

For Fulton County resident Victor Vaughn, the nation’s eighth-ranked wheelchair tennis player, it is just another day out on the courts. Vaughn lost the full use of his legs at the age of 5 when he contracted polio. For years he was able to walk with the aid of braces, but a recent fall has left him confined, in a way, to his chair.

Despite the limited use of his legs, Vaughn has never stopped doing the things he loves. From working cattle on his 800-acre farm north of Ash Flat to weeding his blueberry garden (he crawls on his stomach through the garden picking weeds and then crawls back to the golf cart he uses to get around his farm) to driving his truck, he has made sure his wheelchair did not define who he is.

Even when he meets a friend for lunch in Ash Flat, Vaughn tends to avoid using a handicapped parking spot because he “saves places for people that need them more than I do.”

“I’m in a chair, it’s not hard to roll another 20 feet,” Vaughn said.

Vaughn picked up the sport of tennis in 1999 when his doctor recommended it to him. Now, just nine years later, he is one of thebest in the country. And he does it while being old enough to be some of his competitor’s fathers. At 60, Vaughn routinely beats players less than half his age.

“I’m the oldest there,” Vaughn said. “It’s a young man’s game, but I really enjoy it.”

He attributes his ability to play into his 60s to his high energy level. After a recent tournament at Nashville, Tenn., Vaughn returned home at 7:30 p.m. and immediately got on his lawn mower to take care of the grass. He continued working on it for the next three hours, all of this after a grueling set of singles and doubles matches.

While he has become an inspiration for scores of wheelchairbound athletes, Vaughn said his biggest inspiration was a teacher he had when he was a child - Bessie Martin. He did not go to public school for the first couple of years, so Martin would devote her Saturdays to driving out to Vaughn’s family’s land to give his mother the lessons for the week.

Once he started going to Ash Flat schools, he found that all of the people around him were accepting of him. Part of it had to do with him getting to spend time with the students when they would come to his family’s land, and the other part came with the friendships he was able to forge with his refusal to be treated any differently.

“They used to take me in a wheelbarrow when my bracesbroke,” Vaughn said. “It was almost kind of fun to ride around. I never felt discriminated.”

Vaughn wants to spread the feeling of goodwill that he was shown as a child. He wants to be able to help others get into the sport that he has grown to love and dominate.

“I would really like to find other wheelchair players; there’s not a lot of people to play with around here,” Vaughn said. “I want to help more people get into it. It’s a great thing to do, and it is a great feeling to be competitive.”

Vaughn is not sure how much longer he will stay active on the tennis circuit. He does have some goals to accomplish before he gives up the competitive side of the game, such as a top-five ranking and a win at the U.S. Open. He has made it as far as the quarterfinals before, but the championship has eluded him.

But after he is done with the game, he would like to get a wheelchair league going in Arkansas, or maybe even some camps around the state to raise awareness of the sport.

More information about the U.S Tennis Association wheelchair league is available by calling Vaughn at (870) 847-0282.

“[Wheelchair tennis] takes a lot of hand-eye coordination and a lot of practice,” Vaughn said. “The sooner you get into it, the better.” - emoore@ arkansasonline.com

Three Rivers, Pages 110 on 07/06/2008