by SARAH ROWLAND

Twelve years ago, Mark Zupan stumbled out of a bar and passed out in the back of his best friend’s pick-up. That’s the last thing he remembers before hitting the water. “When I came to, I was thinking, ‘Ah, this is kind of strange.’ I immediately grabbed onto to the nearest branch. And when I looked at my legs, they just didn’t look normal. So I tried to walk away and I was like, ‘Fuck, something’s not right.’”

It would take another 14 hours of holding onto that branch in the chilly ravine before the all-American jock was rescued, only to learn that he would never walk again. His is one of many harrowing stories told in Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro’s Murderball, an award-winning documentary that chronicles the intense rivalry between the U.S. and Canadian paraplegic rugby teams as they compete for gold at the 2004 Paralympic Games. But the international rock ’em sock’ em showdowns are just a minor part of what makes this film such a blast to watch. The New York-based filmmakers spent two-and-a-half years not only shooting the behind-the-scenes politics, but the personal dramas of several key players, and it paid off.

“The first time I saw the movie, I was blown away,” says Zupan. “I might be kind of biased but in my eyes, there’s nothing they could have done better. They just nailed it—it’s not a sports film or a woe’s-me gimp film, it’s a film about life. It also answers a lot of questions that people don’t want to ask.”

Wheelchair whoopee

One of the mysteries Murderball solves is how men in wheelchairs get it on. In one of the film’s lighter moments, we learn from the inventive athletes that you don’t need feeling in your legs to do it doggy-style.

“The sex thing was sort of the elephant in the room at the beginning,” says Shapiro. “But it turned out they were perfectly willing to discuss it. They were just waiting for us to get the balls to ask about it.”

With that out of the way, the film continues to focus on the bad blood between Zupan and Joe Soares, a former U.S. champ who was eventually put out to pasture when he got too old. Taking his dismissal as a personal affront, Soares applied for the job as head coach for the Canadian team. He got the job, something Zupan can’t accept: “We recently did an interview in L.A. together and he said, ‘I don’t hold grudges.’ And I said, ‘Joe, I don’t hold grudges either. I just don’t like you.’’’’

At times, it is hard to like Soares, especially the way he treats his 14-year-old bookworm son like a second-class citizen because he’s not into sports. But after the ageing coach suffers a heart attack, we see him go through a personal metamorphosis—most of us do anyway.

“I don’t think he changed,” insists Zupan. “He’s still the same person.”

Emotional mother lode

In between scenes that capture the gritty tension between Zupan and Soares, Murderball weaves several subplots that are equally interesting.

“I think we hit the emotional mother lode when we met Keith,” says Rubin. Keith Cavill is not a player. He’s introduced about halfway through the film four months after he’s broken his neck. Through his eyes, we see the challenges of accepting life in a wheelchair, and this is never truer than the scene where Cavill goes home for the first time after intensive rehab. Seeing the ramp and specialized toilet facilities his parents installed is too much for the soft-spoken punk rocker in the CBGB T-shirt, and he temporarily loses it.

“It was one of those intimate vulnerable moments that filmmakers wait around months for and sometimes never get,” says Rubin.

It’s pretty touching stuff, but without the highly anticipated match in the third act, the film would spiral into schmaltzy crap. And no one knows this better than Rubin and Shapiro.

“We were really holding our breath throughout this entire production,” says Rubin. “I mean, can you imagine if we made this whole movie and then U.S. and Canada didn’t even meet in the end? I can safely say that only when we found out that they were going to face each other, which was the second to last shoot, did we jump for joy because we knew that, ‘Okay, yes, we got a movie here.’”

Murderball opens Friday, July 15

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