Injured Athlete Has Met New Challenge : Crowley Opens Innovative Fitness Club Equipped to Provide for the Handicapped

It was a warm summer day in 1980. David Crowley, a varsity football player at Reseda High School in the San Fernando Valley, was with his grandmother and other family members at the beach in Malibu.

Crowley dived off the rocks into the surf, breaking his neck. There were two operations but they worsened his condition, leaving him a quadriplegic. There was a medical malpractice lawsuit in which Crowley got a financial settlement.

He prefers not to talk about the lawsuit but happily talks about the gym he has opened in Woodland Hills with the resulting money. He calls it the Physically Challenged Fitness Club. It’s a gym geared to the needs of the handicapped. It is a gym where he can once again lead the athletic life style he had before his accident.

“I was always very gifted athletically,” Crowley said during an interview at the high-tech gym he designed himself. “I never realized it until my paralysis.

“Thinking about it all the time in the hospital, I realized I probably had the potential to play pro football. And even if I didn’t play pro, I was going to college with my ability. That’s what I was really thinking about doing when I got hurt. My mind the day it happened was football, football.”

Crowley, now 21 and married, could not move his arms and had low blood pressure after his two operations. Some of his major organs became weak.

“The doctors thought I would drive a wheelchair with my mouth,” he said.

According to Crowley, the doctors’ attitude was: “We’ve done all we can do for you and you’re on your own now.” They told Crowley he would be unable to lift weights or work out again.

He took them at their word and his body deteriorated.

“For three years, I was floating in between what I used to be and what I was, a quadriplegic,” Crowley said. “I finally said, ‘Go for everything or just forget about it. There’s no in between.’

“Praying constantly seemed to be the only thing that gave me happiness because as soon as I stopped my praying and talking to God, it seemed like all my problems started up again and my body got weak.

“I had $40,000 in the bank sitting there for quite a while and that didn’t give me any feeling of satisfaction. Now I don’t have any money in the bank but I do have a club and I’m doing something for people. That’s what makes me happy. Money doesn’t make me feel better.”

Physically Challenged opened in June and so far has 10 members. It looks much like any other modern gym--mirrored walls, a juice bar, tanning booth. Music plays over loudspeakers.

The equipment, however, is different. Crowley was introduced to gym equipment for the handicapped at the Abilities Unlimited Expo held earlier this year in Los Angeles.

Included are several Rich Life Flexacisers, motorized pedal machines users strap their paralyzed legs into.

There are two Hydrafitness machines similar to those used by NASA in preparing astronauts for space missions. Hydrafitness operates on a theory of weight resistance in a weightless environment. An electric transport carriage mounted on the ceiling lifts members from their wheelchairs onto the machines.

There is also the Freedom Machine, a four-station unit developed at Arizona State University. It utilizes weights as light as .05 pounds and has been designed to allow wheelchair users to work the upper body. Padded wrist cuffs allow quadriplegics to clip into eyelets on the rings and bars.

Jim Butler has been Crowley’s friend since their childhood days in Chicago. He works at the club as both an administrator and instructor.

“David told me he was opening this club and offered me the job of running the place,” Butler said. “I said, ‘No problem. I’ll help you out. That’s cool.’ I’ve been working my buns off for this guy the last couple months.

“I like it here. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

Butler helped Crowley make contact again with the outside world more than two years ago, on New Year’s Eve. He took Crowley bar-hopping, lifting him from the car and into his wheelchair.

Other such outings followed. During one at a disco, Crowley met Etsuko Wakabayashi, an exchange student from Japan. They fell in love, married, and are expecting their first child in late August.

The club is expanding to include people who are blind, who have cerebral palsy and amputees.

“This is by popular demand,” Crowley said. “It would be ridiculous to turn them away.”

Crowley intends to add new equipment, including stationary bicycles and free weights to accommodate these new members.

He is also hiring an aerobics instructor to train a paraplegic who will then lead classes at the club.

“The people who come here are just the type of people I like to be around,” Crowley said. “I don’t like to be around the type of handicapped person who has given up. They make it hard for the ones not giving up. They’ve been convinced by doctors and therapists that they’re very limited. I don’t have those people coming here.

“We want everyone here to show off. We need them here to participate and inspire other people.

“Nobody likes to work out alone, especially physically challenged people. They want people in their same position doing it and reassuring them this is what they should be doing.”

Michael Just, 30, a writer and student at Cal State Northridge, was one of the club’s first members. Just is a quadriplegic, the result of a traffic accident three years ago.

“My girlfriend kept urging me to get in shape, so this is great,” Just said.

Crowley, flexing his biceps, pointed out the progress he has made since he began lifting weights.

“I’m getting stronger,” he said. “Every three months there is a noticeable improvement.

“I’ve tried medication, drugs and just about everything but there is nothing like exercise. I’ve got rid of the pain in my neck, which I was told I would have to deal with the rest of my life. My back used to ache me constantly.”

“When I push my limit, even by a normal man’s--I hate to use that word, normal-- but by an ambulatory person’s standards, my limit would not be much of a workout,” Crowley said.

“But for me it’s the equivalent to a professional body builder’s workout, even if my weights are 20 pounds and a pro’s are 220 pounds. To my heart, my arms and my muscles, it’s the same thing. That’s just the way I like it.”

Crowley believes now that he was injured for a reason and that the reason is finally evident after five years of inactivity and loneliness.

“People who have this kind of accident wonder why it happened,” he said. “I have an answer to myself personally--it was to open Physically Challenged Fitness Club and to allow people in my similar condition to come in, to have a place to work out. They learn here that the only limitations are the ones they set for themselves.

“If the accident didn’t happen to me, obviously, this club would not be here and a lot of people who need help would not get it.

“Life is so short and nobody should spend any time suffering or being unhealthy. We all should be as healthy as we can be. If you are not doing everything that you can to be healthy, then you have nobody to blame but yourself. You have to take responsibility for your own condition and your own circumstances. This club has given me the opportunity to learn this.”