Pauline Vu  Vu is the 2000-01 sports
editor, and you can e-mail her at [email protected]. To learn more
about SCORE, visit www.scorefund.org. Â
I’ve written at least 100 articles for the Daily Bruin,
featured people currently in Sydney and covered athletes
who’ve won national championships.
And one thing I’ve learned is that it’s not always
the biggest, best or brand-name athletes who have the stories to
tell.
Sometimes you can learn a lot from the ones who love the sport
so much they’d pay for the honor of playing it.
A year ago I wrote a story about Sean Gjos, a UCLA club hockey
player who had slammed into the boards during a game and crushed a
part of his spine. He was rendered paraplegic.
Before the interview we talked on the phone first and agreed to
meet at The Anderson School, where Gjos was taking classes. I
described myself so that he’d know what to look for.
“I’m 5-foot-6 and I’ll be carrying a small
notebook,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m 6-feet tall and
I’ll be in a wheelchair.”
On March 3, 1999, while playing in the club national
championship tournament, Gjos (pronounced “Joss”),
playing the game he adored, took a routine body check that changed
his life forever.
On the ice and in pain, he was taken to the hospital where he
found out that he had less than a 5 percent chance of ever walking
again. But he didn’t let this discourage him.
As I learned over the phone, he could make fun of his condition.
His friend Jimmy Young remembered one time he asked Sean,
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Nothing,” Gjos replied. “I woke up this
morning and still couldn’t walk.”
He didn’t just joke about it. He found strength and
rebounded. He turned what could have been misery into an
opportunity.
Gjos helped set up the Spinal Cord Opportunities for
Rehabilitation Endowment, also known as SCORE, an organization that
both raises money to fund research about paraplegia and seeks
people living with paraplegia to help them financially.
When the accident first happened his friends wanted to set up
SCORE just to help him, but Gjos refused until the scope of the
organization was widened. Now SCORE helps anyone who has paraplegia
and got it while playing athletics. Only a year old, it currently
finances four people.
“He has been the leader and the visionary in turning SCORE
into a budding, important nonprofit that supports the cure and
helps care,” said Ralph Vogel, Gjos’ friend and a
co-founder of SCORE.
Sure, insurance pays the medical bills, but there are a lot of
things insurance doesn’t pay for. Things you don’t ever
imagine being a problem until you can’t walk.
“When someone succumbs to a spinal cord injury there are a
lot of expenses,” Gjos said. “Some of those are
revamping a home to widen doorways and alter bathrooms.
There’s outfitting vehicles and even just insurance
co-payments.
“That could easily amount to $10,000. Our philosophy is,
when you suffer an injury, you should be focused on trying to get
better. You shouldn’t be worrying about financial issues, so
we try and lessen that burden.”
SCORE, which has had a number of fund-raisers, has also given
$75,000 to the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation and the Miami
Project to help them in their search for a cure for spinal cord
injuries.
For Gjos personally, the diagnosis hasn’t changed much in
the past year.
But he hasn’t given up.
“Unfortunately, his condition has stagnated,” Vogel
said. “But he continues to do rehabilitation. He is on his
handbike a lot. He’s keeping himself in great shape and
physical condition in order for him to have the best chances when a
cure does come around.”
A year ago Gjos said that the mornings were the worst part
““ the waking up and having to deal with reality all over
again.
“The mornings have gotten better. You just adjust,”
he said. A few seconds passed and he amended, “Yeah, from
time to time, definitely, it still hurts. I think that’s just
natural, given how active I was before and the limitations I have
to deal with.”
But when he does feel bad, he laughs about it. On the SCORE Web
site, Gjos jokes that in his free time he’s on the Santa
Monica boardwalk “terrorizing joggers with his
handcycle.”
“I’m getting on with my life,” he said
recently.
Gjos has graduated from UCLA’s Anderson School and is the
Director of Business Development for a startup fiber optics
company, exactly what he said he wanted to do before he graduated a
year ago.
“In a startup you do a little bit of everything. You help
out wherever you can,” he said.
Gjos is moving on, and he’s not blaming anything, least of
all hockey, for his condition.
“My love for the sport has not faded,” Gjos said.
“I still follow it. The Stanley Cup games were pretty good. I
was just disappointed that Colorado didn’t make it. I’m
a big fan of Ray Bourque.”
As he said, most days you can find him hanging out on Santa
Monica terrorizing joggers, so if you happen to be jogging there,
watch out for him.
He’s 6-feet tall and he’ll be the one on the
handbike.