After taking a star turn in a documentary, quad rugby player
Mark Zupan decided it was time for a tell-all book. By Jenna
Schnuer
Phone interviews rarely jack up my nerves. But as my interview with
first-time author Mark Zupan - the heavily tattooed, slightly
devilish-looking (his beard is straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch
painting) quad rugby player - approached, I got a bit of a funny
feeling. After all, as was made quite clear in Murderball,
the 2005 documentary about Zupan's sport of choice, the guy slams
his custom-made wheelchair into other people's chairs for fun.
Turns out the devil has a softer side. I interrupted Zupan's day
job (he's a civil engineer) for a conversation about his new book,
Gimp (HarperCollins, $25), which he wrote with Premiere's
Tim Swanson. Though Murderball introduced Zupan and quad
rugby to the world - he took up the sport after a drunken night
ended up with his getting tossed from the flatbed of a friend's
truck - there's a lot more to him than the movie offers up.
Can you describe quad rugby? It's pretty much a full-contact
wheelchair smashup derby. The chairs look like something out of a
Mad Max film. It's played indoors on a basketball court, and
it's full-contact chair-on-chair, so if you want to hit somebody as
hard as you possibly can, you hit 'em. It's not for the faint of
heart.
You're a slightly different person in the book and on the phone
than I was expecting you to be. Yeah, the book is raw. I'm a
different person on the court than off the court. I'm kind of seen
in the movie as this tough guy. In actuality, maybe I'm a [jerk],
but I have a brain. It's really kind of fun to break people's
perceptions.