By Cora Hilts

His story is about a young man losing it all and slowly gaining his life back, imparting his experience to disprove misconceptions surrounding the disabled or, as he says, “gimps.”

Mark Zupan has directed an award-winning documentary, toured the college circuit as a speaker and competed in wheelchair rugby.

Monday night, the Lecturer Committee of the Council for University Programs (CUP) brought Zupan to Blackman Auditorium where he gave a speech that Jenna Stecker, a senior physical therapy major, called “inspirational.”

Zupan’s story began when he was an 18-year-old student at Florida Atlantic University and a soccer player on the varsity team. It was the night of his first soccer game at FAU that Zupan became handicapped. Through a series of memories, some fuzzy and some very vivid, Zupan told the story of how he got drunk, got in the back of his friend Chris Igoe’s pickup and was thrown into a deep canal when Igoe got into a relatively minor accident.

Not knowing his best friend had been in the back of the truck, Igoe left the scene as Zupan woke up in water, hanging onto a branch with no feeling in his legs. Nearly 14 hours later, he was found.

Just a few years later, Zupan has become a celebrity.

After a bout of mild depression and a bit of self-analysis, he said he decided the best thing he could do was play the hand that had been dealt to him, and spend his time laughing and making a positive impression on everyone he could.

In 1996 at Georgia Tech, Zupan discovered wheelchair rugby, a sport colloquially known as “murderball.” He started working out, stopped drinking and played until he made the United States Paraplegic Rugby Team. He has been with them ever since, and it has changed his life.

“Sport helps in life,” Zupan said.

In 2002, Henry Rubin and Dan Shapiro approached Zupan with the idea of creating “Murderball” the movie, a documentary that would seek to portray the lives of the players with an in-depth candidness. For two years, Rubin and Shapiro followed the men of the United States Paraplegic Rugby Team on their quest for the gold medal at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens.

Putting themselves in wheelchairs as well, they recorded everything they could. From the seldom-shed tears to the homes of the players, they captured emotions and jokes, loves and losses. They even did a major portion of the movie on an instructional video all of the handicapped men were forced to watch on returning to sex after being handicapped, focusing on the way these men were able to make light of their conditions.

The end result was a movie that won the 2005 Sundance Film Festival’s Best Documentary award.

Zupan has now embarked on a college tour, speaking to students at different universities about his personal experiences, trying to change people’s perceptions of those we see in wheelchairs. He is also a civil engineer for the C. Faulkner Company in Austin, Texas, and has a longtime girlfriend.

“It was good to come out and see him, just to hear his story. It makes you feel grateful and causes you to appreciate the little things,” said Brian Schatz, a freshman business major.

As the talk was finishing up, there was an opportunity for questions. A young woman asked Mark whether or not he would change his situation if he could. She asked if he would desert his wheelchair if he could go back and do it all over again. But he said he wouldn’t.

“Being in this wheelchair is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I wouldn’t change a thing,” Zupan said.

Since being disabled, Zupan said he has traveled all over the world, met some incredible people, played a joke on David Schwimmer, been a guest on Larry King Live and appeared on Jackass with Johnny Knoxville.

“Who would want to change that?” he said.