Empowerment Therapy

AN UPHILL BATTLE IN THE DOWNHILL

Blind Skier Brian Hubbard Makes a Run at the 1988 Olympics

By Andrew Miga

The puck kept disappearing. Brian Hubbard would be stick handling near the blue line cradling a pass from one of his Lynn English teammates-and suddenly the puck would dribble away, lost somewhere down between his skates.

“I couldn’t find it,” recalls Hubbard, a strong,smooth skating forward. “The puck was always gone-just plain gone.”

Botched plays like that happened a lot to Hubbard as the 1961-62 hockey season unfolded. Elusive pucks weren’t the only problem. Hubbard would often careen wildly into the boards for no apparent reason. And he almost never scrambled to avoid the rugged body checks thrown by opposing defenseman.

“I just couldn’t anticipate when someone was going to check me,” he says. “I never saw them.”

With tongue firmly planted in cheek teammates took to calling Hubbard “Radar”. The irony wasn’t lost on Hubbard.

“I really had a lot of head injuries,” he says,. “I kept getting crunched.”

The final blow came during a practice when Hubbard lay motionless on the ice-unconscious after crashing violently into the boards.

“He took a physical beating,” says former teammate Leland Hussey, now a Swampscott contractor. “He really knocked himself out.”

Hubbard was furious. Hubbard was frustrated. For a time, Hubbard even thought he was going crazy. He wasn’t.

Sixteen-year old Brian Hubbard of East Lynn was going blind. Doctors told him to hang up his skates and forget hockey. Contact sports were out of the question for someone suffering from retinitis pigmentosa-a degenerative eye disease that has narrowed Hubbard’s field of vision from a normal 180 degrees to just five degrees. Where others see smiling faces Hubbard can make out only vague shadows.

But the story doesn’t end there. The end of Hubbard’s hockey career was the beginning of the rest of his life.

And today Hubbard, legally blind and profoundly deaf, is more worried about a fractured ankle that keeps him off the ski slopes than his eye sight.

“This ankle thing has been driving me crazy,” says Hubbard, a husky 38-year-old with broad fleshy features and straight dark hair that rides just over his shirt collar. “It has set me back two months.”

The broken ankle is the latest twist of fate along a road that Hubbard hopes will lead to the Winter Olympics at Calgary in 1988. Hubbard’s goal is to ski with the US Demonstration Team for disabled athletes that will compete in Calgary.

“It’s out there if I work hard enough,” he says.

But Hubbard’s dreams won’t end at the bottom of an Olympic ski trail. “That would simply be an exercise in self-indulgence,” says Hubbard. Instead, Hubbard is planting his dreams in broader strokes. Hubbard wants to work as an advocate for the disabled.

“I’m the kind of person who can build a bridge between the disabled and everyone else,” he says. “That’s my work.”

Says Hussey, “ he is outgoing, the kind of guy who makes you feel like a brother the first time you meet him.”

Hubbard says an Olympic appearance will give him added credibility as a fund raiser and an organizer for programs geared to disabled athletes.

“I’m not really in this for me, “ he says. “I’m looking to what I can do for other people down the road. I want to speak out for disabled people. My voice will be stronger if I have the experience of skiing in the Olympics behind me.”

Toward the end, Hubbard has spent the last seven years skiing in Winter Park, Colorado, and competing in dozens of national and international competition. On the slopes, Hubbard follows a guide, who skis in front of him.

“I follow what the guide does,” Hubbard says. “Actually making the turn isn’t the hardest part for me. The hardest part is anticipating when to begin the turn.”

Last February, Hubbard skied well enough to earn a gold medal at the US Disabled Nationals in Duluth, Minnesota.

“This is a critical year for me,” he says. “This is a turning point.”

The International Olympic Committee, with input from the United States Association for Blind Athletes and the National Handicapped Recreation and Sports Association, will choose the US Demonstration Team that will appear in Calgary.

“So it all comes down to making a good showing in competition,” says Hubbard, who plans to compete at national events in California and Wyoming this winter as well as the World Games for the Disabled to be held in Sweden in April. Only a fractured ankle stands between Hubbard and the World Games in Sweden.

“I’ll be back on the slopes in Colorado in a couple of weeks,” Hubbard says, “I’m impatient to get back.”

Hubbard training regimen was interrupted December 2^nd when he took a spill at Vail in Colorado. Hubbard had been chosen as a pacesetter by NASTAR, a national sanctioning body for ski racers. Pacesetters race ski courses.

“I got too low on a turn,” Hubbard says. “I caught the outside gate with the tip of my ski.”

The ski went to the left, his foot went to the right-and Hubbard was went to the hospital. But not before he had cursed quietly to himself a few times and put his ski back on to complete his run down the mountain.

“I didn’t really think I was hurt,” Hubbard says. “It felt a little stiff. I thought it was just a sprain, so I skied the rest of the way down the hill.”

His childhood friends say stories like that are vintage Hubbard. They’ll tell you Hubbard, outgoing and quick-witted, displayed the same stubborn streak playing pond hockey with neighborhood kids like Ray and Donny Bastarache at Cedar Brook Pond.

“Even back then he wouldn’t admit that something was wrong with his eyes,” says Ray Bastarache, a sports correspondent.

Bastarache remembers Hubbard, who suffered from night blindness, using the streetlights of Lynnfield Street as a guide to walk home alone. He also remembers the time Hubbard lost his eyeglasses while they were walking home through the woods at dark after a day of pond hockey.

“We searched and searched a long time,” Bastarache says. “Brian actually found the glasses. He picked them up, but tossed them away. He thought they were just a stick. He couldn’t tell. About forty minutes later we checked the so-called stick. Sure enough, there was his glasses.”

Hubbard started skiing when he was seven years old.

“I saw a pair of skis in my back yard,” he says. “I went up to what was then Happy Valley Golf Course. I looked up to the rope tow and went right up."

But skiing a back seat to hockey until doctors told Hubbard to drop contact sports in the eleventh grade.

“Skiing was fun, but I still missed hockey,” Hubbard says. “I missed being part of a team.”

Hubbard eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Umass/Amherst and a master’s degree in clinical social work from Virginia Commonwealth University. He moved to Newport, Rhode Island and established a family counseling practice. But he never stopped worrying.

“I kept skiing, but my vision was getting worse,” he says. “I had trouble seeing things like moguls. I was worried that the same thing would happen to my skiing that happened to my hockey.”

By 1981, Hubbard was ready to give up skiing until he picked up a magazine article about a man named Paul DiBello who had lost both legs below the knees in 1974 skiing accident. After ten months in the hospital, DiBello had learned to ski with prosthetic legs and began winning gold medals in the World Disabled Championships.

“I called him,” Hubbard says. “It took me a long time to track him down. I went through four or five other people. I finally found him working as a mechanic at a garage in Conway, New Hampshire.”

DiBello agreed to meet Hubbard at Mount Sunapee in New Hampshire. Hubbard’s life hasn’t been the same since the meeting.

“He turned me around, ”Hubbard says. “He was a so open, so down to earth. He taught me a lot about coping. He gave me a unique sense of self-confidence. He’s my mentor.”

DiBello told Hubbard that learning to cope is the with the fears stirred by disability were critical.

“The underlying emotion is fear,” Hubbard says. “Fear of the unknown. Fear of how people will treat you. You tend to look back at it in a negative light at first. But then you realize that the human mind and body have a tremendous ability to adapt. You acquire other abilities and strengths in place of sight.”

But adapting to any physical disability takes time. For Hubbard, the toughest part was admitting to the rest of the world that he had a disability.

“The hardest part was putting on a ski bib that said I was a blind skier,” he says. “That was the scariest thing I have ever done.”

Fortunately, Hubbard didn’t encounter many of the open mouth stares he anticipated.

“Sure, people got out of my way on the slopes,” he says. “But basically people accepted me. I was just another skier doing what he had to do to get down the mountain.”

Hubbard would like to see attitudes about the disabled in general , of disabled athletes in particular, change.

“There are still so many misconceptions floating around out there,” Hubbard says.

Most stories about disabled athletes in the media have underlying themes of condescension , according to Hubbard.“It is not a negative thing,” he says. “It’s a reflection of the lack of understanding. The stories have an ‘isn’t this amazing’ quality. There’s still a bit too much sensationalism. We need to go a step beyond.”

The next step is realizing that a disabled person who overcomes a disability is not all that exceptional.

“Those ‘isn’t that amazing’ stories are valid in one sense,” Hubbard says. “But it reinforces a stereotype that someone who overcomes a disability is rare, exceptional. I don’t believe that. Those ‘isn’t that amazing’ stories are just another exercise in life to me.” “What the disabled need is a more relaxed acceptance from the public, so they can concentrate on the practical, day to day steps that can make their lives better.”

Hubbard is well acquainted with practical concerns. Training for the 1988 Olympics will cost about $60,000.“I’ve been a professional clinical social worker for twelve years,” he says. “But I have to put that aside to ski competitively.”

Friends have stepped forward to help. Long time East Lynn neighborhood chums like Ray Bastarache and his wife Mackie, Gary Bogart, Lee Hussey, Frank and Judy Cause, Hal and Karen McGaughey and Larry and Wendy Pleau organized a fundraiser at the Hibernian Hall in Lynn last November.

"The place was jammed with over 300 people,” says Mackie Bastarache, an instructional specialist at the North Shore Community College. “Mostly old friends who used to hang out at Cedar Brook Pond. We wanted to do something for Brian.” The event raised $2500.

“It wasn’t the money that was important,” Hubbard says. “It was the energy of all the people. It really blew me away.”

Hubbard, who can still portions of faces a few feet away if the room isn’t too dark or there isn’t any glare [Note: this was the case in 1986; Hubbard has been totally blind since 1990], responded to the energy he felt in the room with a moving speech.

“He knocked them dead,” Hussey says. “The audience was enthralled. He talked about what he’s doing with his skiing.” “You know, at one point I thought maybe what he was doing was a bit self-indulgent. But it’s not. That’s the beauty of it. He’s doing it to help other people; to raise money and set up programs for others. Brian is special. He’s someone who can be a bridge between the disabled and the non-disabled.”

Some of Hubbard’s UMASS fraternity buddies are raffling off a Chevy 810 Blazer worth $15,000 to benefit Hubbard. The drawing will be held at Duca’s Restaurant in Framingham.

“Checks are dribbling in every day,” says Andrea Kane of Framingham, whose Jess was a Sigma Phi Epsilon member. “We’re hoping to raise $30,000. That’s $15,000 to pay for the truck and another $15,000 for Brian. Brian’s the type of guy who would always do anything for anyone. I think that’s why people are helping him now.”

For the next week or so, Hubbard will along in his Newport home with a cast on his left foot. But when the cast comes off, Hubbard will head to Winter Park, Colorado to train alongside BiBello and other ski racers.

“The training will be intensive,” Hubbard says. “The real challenge of racing is to synchronize your movements with your guide . . . it’s so finely tuned. I get all my information about what to do from how he moves. It’s all give and take between me and the guide.”

While Hubbard preps for his Colorado training regime, some of his friends worry that his hearing may be deteriorating. Hubbard is profoundly hearing impaired as a result of retinitis pigmentosa, medically referred to as Usher’s Syndrome.

“It seems to be getting worse,” Mackie Bastarache. “He also trouble hearing things when there’s a lot of background noise.”

Typically, Hubbard says he’s more concerned with his ankle and getting back on the slopes of Colorado.

“You know, (former Green Bay Packer football coach) Vince Lombardi had a saying I’ll never forget,” Hubbard says. “ ‘the only handicap in life is a bad attitude.’ “