Paralyzed Into Action: The Men Of 'Murderball'

"I did a lot of stupid [stuff]," says Mark Zupan, this summer's unconventional action hero. "A lot of us did a lot of stupid [stuff]. That's how we ended up like this."

"Like this" is in a wheelchair, a quadriplegic, never walking again. Zupan got dead drunk one night when he was 18, crawled into the flatbed of a buddy's pickup to sleep it off, and was catapulted into a canal when the buddy, also drunk, ran off the road. He woke up when he hit the water and cried when his legs wouldn't move. His neck: broken.

"Like this" is also on the top-ranked U.S. quadriplegic rugby team, a maniacally ferocious athlete, barreling his souped-up, reinforced wheelchair full speed into a competitor to send him sprawling to the floor and knocking the ball free.

Now 30, Zupan captains the team and stars in the documentary "Murderball," which follows the players from the world championships in 2002 to the Paralympics in Athens last summer. The movie opened here yesterday.

Zupan and his teammates never l istened when their mothers told them to stop or they'd break their necks. The crazy recklessness and boundary-trampling they had before their accidents make them driven champions, refusing to acknowledge any limitations of the body or spirit.

They have groupies. They drink hard. They act like yahoos, insulting each other nonstop, playing outrageous pranks on the "ABs," the able-bodied. They relish the total violence of their sport and brag about their busted ribs and concussions.

"Where else can you hit somebody as hard as you possibly can or want to?" asks Zupan during a recent interview at a Washington hotel. "It sounds so sick and twisted and demented, but it's so much [expletive] fun." He grins.

Taut, intense, captivating and covered with tattoos, Zupan enjoys shocking and enlightening people "who think all quads are like Christopher Reeve." Technically, quadriplegia indicates some impairment in three or four limbs, so there is a broad range of function.

Zupan's cervical injury left his legs immobile and his right arm weaker than his left, his right hand crooked. When asked whether he has sensation below the waist, Zupan says, "I can feel" -- he pauses and smirks -- " everything ."

Not only can he have sex, the wheelchair can be good for picking up women, he says. "They always have a place to sit," and, going through life at rear-end level, "the view's not bad."

"Of all the ways these guys challenged our preconceived notions, and made us confront what we thought about masculinity," says Henry-Alex Rubin, 31, one of the movie's co-directors. "The hardest was when we recognized they get hotter girlfriends than we do."

Zupan's blunt, profane acceptance of his life began only when he recognized he would never walk again. He put in two very bad years, angry and depressed.