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No mountain too tall

For Ralph Green, who lost his leg to a bullet at 15, the Paralympics highlights a life meeting challenges.

By DAVE SCHEIBER
Published March 10, 2006

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[Getty Images]

Ralph Green heads down a slope in Winter Park, Colo. Green had several false starts before mastering skiing and now is a consistent top-15 finisher.

	Ralph Green is the first African-American man to make the U.S. Alpine Disabled team. He'll compete at all four Alpine events.
	[Getty Images (2005)]
	Ralph Green prepares to head downhill before an eighth-place finish at a giant slalom in Vail, Colo. In addition to his athletic achievements, Green speaks at schools and tries to encourage the disabled to take up skiing.

At 15, Ralph Green never pictured himself one day barreling downhill for the United States in search of Alpine glory.

He was too busy excelling as a quarterback, point guard and track athlete at Boys & Girls High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., even finding time to play in a junior tennis league.

But it all changed one night in 1992 on the mean streets of his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

"I was walking my friend to see his girlfriend, who was my cousin, and we didn't know we were being followed," Green said. "I turned around and heard the gunshots go off."

He awoke from a coma three months later in Kings County Hospital, only to learn the devastation caused by the assailant's bullet. His left leg had been amputated at the hip, and his world was suddenly shattered. Yet instead of that moment being the end of a dream, it was the start of a new one.

"To this day, I still don't know why I was shot," he said. "But if there was one thing it instilled in me, it was that I'm going to make something out of my life."

Green, 28, has done just that by learning to traverse challenging slopes: the ones stemming from a random act of violence, and the ones he faces now as a member of the U.S. Disabled Alpine team.

When the 30th Paralympics Winter Games begin today in Turin, Italy, he will be among 60 U.S. athletes hoping to bring home a medal in the same venues of the recently completed Winter Olympics.

For the next 10 days, disabled competitors from around the world will go head to head in four main disciplines: Alpine skiing, Nordic skiing (including biathlon), sled hockey and wheelchair curling.

For Green, competing in the 2006 Paralympics is a landmark. He is the first African-American man to make the U.S. Alpine Disabled team, and he will participate in all four Alpine events in Turin. Racing on one leg, with stabilizer poles fitted with small ski tips for balance, he enters the Games with four top 15 finishes in 2005 and a pair of top 10s in 2004.

But for Green, simply reaching the Games represents a profound personal triumph.

After leaving the hospital, buoyed by the love and encouragement of his large family, he joined a support organization, ASPIRE, and took up disabled track and field. Then someone with the group invited him to try skiing. His answer was no.

"Well, I'm from Brooklyn, N.Y., and we just don't ski there," he said, smiling.

He remembered watching a ski event once on TV as a kid and thinking, "These guys are crazy." But Green changed his mind and traveled to the Poconos to give the sport a try. The trip was a bomb, though, and Green turned his attention to college, attending Long Island University for three years.

Still, he was restless. "I came to a point in my life where I was lost and really didn't know what I wanted to do," he said. "So skiing clicked in my head."

Green packed his things and moved to Winter Park, Colo., to train at the National Sports Center for the Disabled. His goal was to master the sport and make a point. "I wanted to defy expectations," he said. "And ultimately, I wanted to be a liaison between the ski world and the inner-city world."

But again, Green struggled on the slopes. "My first time trying to ski in Winter Park was a disaster," he said. "The coach was really frustrated because it took me an hour and a half to get down the hill."

After three months he went home, only to return to Winter Park to give the sport one more try. This time it stuck. Green attacked the slopes with abandon, eventually making it down the same hill in a minute. He thrived on a sense of fearlessness, which grew from overcoming so many challenges.

"When you're hospitalized for eight or nine months with a bill of more than a million and a half bucks, you get a different outlook on life," he said. "The other thing is that I was sedated in the hospital. But my mom went through it. My sister quit two jobs to see me every day. I have to let them know that everything was worth them being supportive of me."

Green says that his family treated him the same after he lost his leg as it did before, "and that's one of the things that helped build my confidence." One of five siblings, he remembers his mother saying, "I will not let my son be a forgotten one."

Indeed, Green has made people take notice. He began at 16. At the request Jocelyn Elders, former U.S. surgeon general, he testified before Congress to support gun control, speaking out about the enormous cost of his medical care to taxpayers caused by the shooting.

More recently, backed by multiple sponsors, he speaks frequently to middle and high school students. And he is a gung-ho Paralympics ambassador who hopes to inspire inner-city youths to take up skiing as a way to enrich their lives.

Green talks without a hint of anger over his past:

"Growing up and living life to the fullest, you learn to be forgetful. I've traveled the world. And I would have a totally different reality had I not been shot."

He also holds no ill will toward the young shooter.

"You get an understanding that there are 6-billion souls on Earth and everybody can't be perfect," he said. "Some people do good things. Some people do bad things. I'm not the one to judge him. I'm just happy to still be alive."

[Last modified March 10, 2006, 02:00:16]

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