Basketball
Wheelchair Basketball
Wheelchair basketball at Stoke Mandeville in the 1960s
Wheelpower
Watch archive film footage of wheelchair basketball in the 1960s including clips from the 1964 Tokyo games and earlier National Games at Stoke Mandeville here
Terry Willett, played basketball in the 1960s and early 70s
"Of course it's supposed to be a sport of 'no contact'. Well that always amuses us all because there's a lot goes on, goes on 'off the ball'... But it has to be very subtle nowadays, where in my day you could actually decide if someone was roughing you up, you could return the compliment and rough them up, and it sometimes got quite physical..."
Watch Terry Willett describing the on-court mayhem of the England-Australia final of the Commonwealth Games in 1970 here
Terry was GB team captain at the 1973 IWBF games
photo: Terry Willett
The GB team that beat the Dutch in the IWBF final
photo: Terry Willett
"Look at the chairs we played in! The backs are so low and there are no side guards. In the team photo [second left] you can see I am sitting on a big thick cushion and I have got blocks on my footrests to raise my height and get my reach up. You couldn't change the height of the footrest then; it had to be a standard 10cm clearance from the ground so you got round it with footblocks and cushions." Terry Willett
Sir Philip Craven played from the late 1960s until 1984
"Maybe it was because of his [Sir Ludwig Guttmann's] age, or maybe he didn't understand where wheelchair sport and Paralympic sport was moving to... It had to get more competent (I hate that word "professional") more competent..." Sir Philip Craven
Watch Sir Philip Craven describing the battle within wheelchair basketball to change the system of player classification that began in the late 1970s and culminated in 1982-3
here
Philip Craven playing in 1984
photo: IPC
The 1984 GB team at Stoke Mandeville; Philip Craven was the captain and Martin McElhatton played.
photo Wheelpower
Martin McElhatton played in the 1984 GB team
"Then our club went into the first division which was the National League, so we were travelling all over the country; we'd go up to Scotland for the weekend to play matches, or up to the North West - all over the place- but each year the big competition was the National Games here at Stoke Mandeville."
Watch Martin talking about the growth of wheelchair basketball in the 1980s and the transforming effect of using lightweight sports wheelchairs here
This page was added on 13/11/2013.