Petaluma Argus-Courier from Petaluma, California • Page 7

8A ARGUS-COURIER. P.talumo, Friday, October 30, 1987 Mike Jones, Sports Editor The amazing story of Brad Parks wmimmmmm piiBiiiis So John McEnroe has won four U.S. Opens, three Wimbledons and assorted other tournaments in his grand, fine career. Big deal. I mean, he's got two legs and two arms and all his eyes and ears, hasn't he? What's the problem? What if he had to play sitting down? Brad Parks has never played tennis any other way.

Boris Becker doesn't like to play on clay. Slows down his booming game. What if it slowed down his wheelchair? Ten years ago, Bradley Alan Parks was your typical California teenager. Blond and bronzed, brought up on the ocean, all he wanted out of life was the perfect wave, 12 inches of new powder and maybe Led Zeppelin or Fleetwood Mac on the stereo. Life was a beach, all right.

Or, maybe a slope. jim murray Petaluma's defense, seen here waiting for a signal stop Casa Grande's vaunted running game, which from head coach Steve Ellison, will be looking to the PHS coach says is the best in the Casa, PHS renew rivalry tonight cross-town contest that always seems to bring out the best, and sometimes the worst, in both teams. On a performance level, the teams have waged some top-notch wars, but last year's game ended in a bench-clearing brawl (Sound which both coaches, Petaluma's Steve Ellison and Casa's Dave Poteracke, felt marred an otherwise, well-played, clean ballgame. Considering Casa Grande is coming off of a bench-clearer with Analy last week, is Ellison concerned that some of their anger from last week may spill into tonight's 7:30 p.m. battle at Durst By MIKE JONES Sports Editor Rivalries are the life blood of football.

The one week that seems to make every team's season is that one against the closest rival, the one opponent that must be beaten if it is to be considered a good year. No matter what the records, USC-UCLA, Cal-Stanford, Harvard-Yale and Michigan-Michigan State games are always hard-fought exciting contests played before raucous crowds. On a smaller level, yet no less interesting, is Petaluma's biggest rivalry the battle between Pet-aluma High and Casa Grande, a Field? "No, I'm really not," said Ellison. "I know both Dave and I are spending some extra time talking to our players making sure nothing like that happens again. What happened last year was an altercation between two players who shoved each other and then it got out of hand." Poteracke, a former assistant at PHS, agreed with his counterpart.

"That fight did really change a good game into an ugly thing, and that's the biggest shame. In fact, just before it happened one of the referees complimented me on the way both teams had played. And that ru- Dickerson won't play vs. 49ers He has USt turned IS mat mmmmmmtm day when he entered the freestyle skiing competition at Park City, Utah. Trick skiing was a blast.

He had this stunt where he went off the ramp and up and over in a spectacular back flip. Only this time, he went around once too many times. Instead of landing on his skis, he landed on his back. In an instant, he had turned from superb young athlete into a paraplegic. He had gone from "California Dreamin" to, "Where's the rest of me?" "It was a funny thing but I knew it right away," he says.

"I had seen this movie, 'The Other Side of the Mountain, the Jill Kinmont story, and I knew what had happened to her had happened to me. I was really afraid to reach down and touch my legs because I knew I wouldn't be able to feel it." One of nature's little ironies is that catastrophic accidents so often occur to the fittest, most active among us. The people least able to countenance life in a sedentary, trapped position frequently find themselves having to. The risk takers suddenly can't take any. When life deals you a busted straight like that, you can do one of two things.

You can go sit in a corner and become crabbed and cynical and make yourself and everyone around you miserable. Or, you can play the cards you're dealt and keep smelling the roses. Brad Parks' first question was: "Will I be able to ski again?" The answer to that one was easy: How can you ski when you can't walk? Being an athlete is a mind-set. Brad Parks got off surfboards and skis and onto wheels but he still wanted to go around beating somebody at his own game. At UC Santa Barbara, he began to experiment with his wheelchair, competing with the campus' bicycles in races.

He soon graduated to wheelchair track meets and began setting world records at distances from 100 meters to 10 kilometers. He tried wheelchair basketball and then, one day, he saw a couple of wheelchair athletes batting a tennis ball across a net. A light flashed. Tennis is a position sport. There is the power game and then there is the game where you figure out where the ball is going and get there before it.

Parks quickly knew that this was the kind of game he had to play. But first, the old standard hospital wheelchairs, which had not changed much since President Roosevelt governed from one, had to be made more maneuverable for backcourt play. Everest Jennings, the world's largest manufacturer of wheelchairs, delivered a 19-pound machine from which Parks could hit tennis balls back the way Bitsy Grant or Chrissie Evert could. Once an athlete finds a game, he wants a league. The National Foundation of Wheelchair Tennis was founded by Brad, 100 years after Wimbledon, in January of 1980.

You won't see Ivan Lendl, McEnroe, Boris Becker or Martina Navratilova at the eighth annual Everest Jennings U.S. Wheelchair Tennis Championships at the Racquet Club in Irvine, this week. You won't see a lot of people screaming at umpires in most of the matches, there aren't any. But you'll see a lot of athletes from all over the world who, if it weren't for a turn in the road, an S-curve on a rainy night, a rock in the snow, a blowout, a war, or just a bad break, could be in a real open tennis tournament. One of them, Rick Slaughtert, was a tennis champion of Tennessee before he was disabled.

You won't see the serves the ball is permitted to bounce twice but you'll still see a lot of people who could beat you sitting down. Brad Parks is as glowing with health as Pat Cash or any Swedish Davis Cup star. Head, heart and lungs are perfect, temperature normal, blood pressure in limits, pulse steady. It's just his spinal column, the switchboard of the body, that is disconnected. Anybody can pounce on a forehand down the line if his legs work.

It's when you have to shift the racket and spin two wheels, than grab the racket and swing, that it becomes a test of will and determination. The wheelchair players have determination in abundance. They're a lot more inspiration to us than any set of Wimbledon quarter-finalists I've ever seen. McEnroe would really have something to complain about if he had to play the way these guys and gals do. They not only don't complain but Brad Parks says, sincerely, "It's not the worst thing in the world.

People think being in a wheelchair is the worst thing in the world but I find myself very happy. I think anybody who is able to go out and play three sets of tennis is very lucky." It's that stand-up tennis that makes you feel sorry for yourself. 1987, Los Angeles Times Syndicate fellow running back Charles White said it's probably for the best. "I don't know if this is good for Eric, but it's probably good for the team not to have these negative forces around," White said. Coach John Robinson said Dickerson, 27, will be reinstated "when he is 100 percent physically and mentally ready to play and we are assured that he is ready to resume his role on our team." But Robinson's prepared statement did not deal with Dicker-son's desire to be traded.

He has expressed interest in going to Washington, Denver or Chicago. "Presently, we are not contemplating any other action," Robinson said. Dickerson, a five-year veteran, has said he may not play as well since he's preoccupied with his salary. ANAHEIM (AP) The Los Angeles Rams say All-Pro running back Eric Dickerson is "physically and mentally unable to play," and Sunday will find him on the inactive list rather than the playing field against the San Francisco 49ers. Dickerson, unhappy with a contract that pays him more than $680,000 per year through 1989, was not available for comment on the club's action Thursday, but ined it all.

We've spent a lot of times talking to our kids to make sure nothing dumb like that happens again." Brawls aside and rivalries aside, this game should be an interesting one simply because it pits two teams from the same town that go about things much the same way. Each team has a strong offensive line, a necessary ingredient for the wishbone and veer attacks, and while Petaluma uses a six- or eight-back offense, Casa depends on halfback Marcel Law-son and fullbacks Todd Thompson (See Rivalry, page 9A) Trojan tennis team still in front of SCL By MIKE JONES Sports Editor Petaluma's girls tennis team took a big step towards the Sonoma County League championship when they belted Analy 6-1 in yet another impressive match. The 7-1 Trojans are now poised for the most important match of 1987, next week's battle with El Molino, also 7-1. "We played really well. It was another team effort," said Chris Oakes, the Trojan head coach.

"Now we have to play our best match against El Molino, and we can be all alone in first. I think we can do it if we continue to play as well as we have been." Although number one singles player Alberta Straub was the only Trojan who lost yesterday, Oakes couldn't say enough good things about her. One of the toughest jobs in prep sports is to be the number one player at a school that is not a big tennis school filled with club players. In other words, by being the best player at Petaluma High, Straub has to face players who are some of the best in the area, and wins are hard to come by. "Alberta has made so much improvement since the first half of the season," Oakes said.

"I'm really proud of her. She has it real tough, facing all these excellent players every match while our other players get an occasional break. But she really hangs in there, and she is very important to our team." Oakes also lauded the play of Genene Pedrotti and Nancy Hei-nessen, the number one doubles team who won 6-4, 6-3. "They've won all of their matches and are really coming on," he said. Oakes also mentioned the play of the second doubles team of Joanne Krakora and Samara Davies, who easily defeated their opponents, 6-4, 6-2.

Other winners for Petaluma were: Patricia Gonzales, Melissa Gonzales, Kerri Barlas and Audry Heinessen. Casa Grande lost a flose one yesterday, 4-3, to Healdsburg. Alex Ense (6-1, 6-0), Robyn Thurman (7-5, 6-0) and the doubles team of Rose Ring and Sharon Krutz (4-6, 6-4, 6-3) were winners while Nikki Sarno, Evonne Thayer, Zandra Zamora and doubles tandem Chris Smith and Jennifer Borruso fell to defeat to the Greyhounds. 49ers think about stopping Charles White don't play with the proper intensity. Also, with Jim Everett at quarterback and with their wide receivers we'll still have our hands full," the 49ers' assistant coach said.

In previous years, Seifert has always made a special effort to curtail Dickerson sometimes with success and sometimes without success. "It's always been a priority for us, but interestingly the last couple of years they've come out throwing the ball on us," said Seifert. "The thing that concerns me as much as anything is that maybe his absence will make the other guys play that much REDWOOD CITY (AP) -George Seifert, the San Francisco 49ers' defensive coordinator, wasn't about to ease off on his players Thursday just because the Los Angeles Rams said running back Eric Dickerson has been scratched from Sunday's NFC West game at Ar.a.im. "Right now 1 have immediately become concerned with the toughness and ability of Charlie White," said Seifert, referring to the Rams' scheduled, starter at tailback. "There's no question that Dickerson 's a great football player, but they have another guy that's a No.l draft choice and has the toughness to embarrass us if we Scott Manchester Casa wins, PHS falls Casa Grande's volleyball team, in white, played its best game of the year last night, beating Healdsburg 15-3, 15-17, 15-3, 17-15 for its first league victory.

Petaluma lost to Analy, 15-7, 15-10, 15-4, ending the Trojans' impressive 20-game winning streak. PHS is now tied for first with the Tigers at 6-1.