It’s hard to say whether Scott Hogsett’s story begins in the backseat of a brand-new ‘92 Mazda MX-6 careening down a 176-foot cliff or at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Maybe it starts with an Academy Award nomination, or with the baseball bats and tire irons that tore the face off his best friend.

No, Scott Hogsett’s story begins on a night he describes as the highlight of his entire life. It starts at the New Year’s bash where Shawn, a drunk, angry friend, threw him off a 10-foot deck and into the 25-degree Washington snow.

Marky Mark’s “Good Vibrations” was throbbing from the stereo speakers as the team benchwarmer tossed Hogsett, a tough-guy star baseball pitcher, off the deck.

Everyone at the lake cabin was drunk. They didn’t know Hogsett’s brawny neck had snapped when he hit the ground, and when Shawn ran down the stairs to continue the pummeling, no one thought to stand up for Hogsett, now laying helpless in the snow.

Continuing his rage, Shawn began punching Hogsett in the head, having no idea that his blows were ripping Hogsett’s spinal cord and changing his life forever.

Hogsett, voted most-likely to die before age 20 by his senior class, was known for regular fights with guys much bigger than Shawn. So Shawn, the guy standing in Hogsett’s shadow in both his baseball and football yearbook photos, continued unleashing his blows, their impact cementing a future that would confine Hogsett to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

No Pity Please

Today, sitting at Oregano’s in Tempe in his 12th wheelchair, Scott Hogsett, 33, does not want pity. He’ll tell you this in a profanity-laden lashing you might not expect from a helpless guy in a wheelchair, and that’s his point. He’s a professional athlete, a husband, a normal guy who likes beer and baseball, simply living life in the locked and upright position.

He’s quite certain that his life is more fulfilling than the majority of able-bodies sitting gorging on Italian in our midst. He doesn’t covet the career of the salesmen two tables away, eating a quick lunch with nametags dangling from their necks.

Hogsett is eating pasta because he needs to load up on carbs. He’s pumped his hand bike 20 miles this morning, and he’ll train for another three hours before sunset. Since the release of the documentary Murderball onto DVD, Hogsett’s been turning down more interviews. No pity pieces, thanks.

Murderball was nominated for an Academy Award, but March of the Penguins edged it out, or in Hogsett’s words, “we lost to the f***ing penguins.”

Hogsett has no desire for pathetic smiles from empathetic bystanders. He would also like you to know that he and other wheelchair rugby athletes are nothing like the wheelchair basketball softies. For starters, wheelchair basketball is for paraplegics, as in they still have full upper-body function and only broke their backs, not their necks.

Hogsett and his counterparts, who flip each other’s demolition chairs in the roughest, fastest paralytic sport on earth, have one thing in common: they’re quadriplegics with limited use of their arms. Some, with hands hockey-taped and coated with sticky glue, can’t move their fingers at all. Others have more movement, but are still medically classified as quadriplegics.

Known for years as “murderball,” what wheelchair rugby lacks in limb mobility, it more than makes up for in brutality, testosterone and raw competition. Here, crippled motocross riders and jocks rediscover their athleticism and their identities. For Hogsett, the sport has become his life, his career and the impetus behind his closest friendships.

He’s landed more surgeries from full-contact wheelchair battles than from the result of his broken neck. He’s had enough stitches to sew up a rugby jersey, and his limp fingers have been crushed and broken between rugby chairs while competing all over the world.

Off Season Training, Tomorrow’s Stars

At a fan-cooled gym buried in the industrial grid of Mesa, Hogsett wheels out of his silver Chrysler Town and Country van and scoops up a wheel for his metal-clad rugby chair. The demolition-style chairs cost about $3,500, and Hogsett’s are usually smashed beyond repair by the end of a season.

It’s the off-season now, and three younger rugby paralytics have also come to train. Inside, the wives of the newbie players play pit crew, pumping tires, changing wheels and distributing Gatorade between laps and drills. Wife Tammy Smith has been renamed “support staff.” When a player gets flipped, metal chair pressing his face into the wooden basketball court, Tammy runs out and stands the chair back up.

Tammy’s husband, Brad, is pushing a mile of laps around the basketball court. A professional mountain biker, Brad took a tumble during a high-speed downhill run. He’ll never walk again. Today he’s training with Josh Johnson, a former Moon Valley tight end who flipped his Toyota 4x4, crushing his neck.

“It’s the most violent sport you can get into in a wheelchair,” Johnson says between drills.

He’s got his eyes on the 2012 Olympics, and he’s here to learn from the best. Hogsett, an Athens 2004 Paralympics medalist, is the first player-coach to lead a U.S. team to a national championship.

Hogsett, who wouldn’t claim a nurturing bone in his body or even admit to the screws holding it together, finds these broken men in homes and hospital wards and drags them onto the court. Increasingly popular and extremely fast-paced, quad rugby takes years to master, physically and mentally. One practice at a time, Hogsett watches paralyzed men rediscover their pride, personality and identity as they refine their chair-smashing, rugby tossing skills.

About 600 quadriplegics play quad rugby for 40 club teams across the U.S. Every two years, 11 of those 600 are selected for Team USA. Hogsett will leave next week for tryouts, an event in the quad rugby world not unlike Michael Jordon showing up for the last round of Team USA basketball tryouts.

Red Hot Chili Peppers is echoing through the Mesa gym now as Brad Smith and Josh Johnson zero in on new wheelchair recruit Eli Juan. Juan hasn’t been strapped, velcroed and duct-taped into his rugby chair for more than a minute when they corner him. Now the Smith-Johnson battering ram is wheeling straight for him, teeth clenched, heads down, every working muscle bracing for impact. A disturbed look reveals itself upon Juan’s face.

Like an aluminum baseball bat swung into a brick wall, the metal chairs collide, the sound reverberating and rattling their paralyzed backsides. Juan’s chair ejects from the collision, wheels lifting about 10 inches off the ground. He winces. The chariot tilts and lands wheels-down without flipping.

Juan smiles. He’s still paralyzed, but alive.

They are arm-taped, tattooed soldiers, buckled into their machinery, and they are all alive. Hogsett, strong and wide-shouldered, scoops the ball up. His blue eyes find a course between the three, and the next assault is on. Hogsett weaves through the attacking demolition chairs like they are sitting construction cones.

Broken Bonds

Two years after Hogsett broke his neck and three states south of the lake cabin where the course of his life took on wheels, 16-year-old Andy Cohn, a Brophy linebacker, was riding home from school in a friend’s car. No one knows exactly why the car veered off the northbound 51.

When Andy awoke in the hospital, he couldn’t move his fingers. “You’re a 16- year-old boy. You’re doing everything to become a man and declare your independence, and then you find yourself unable to scratch your nose,” Cohn says.

Like many quadriplegics, Cohn figured he’d walk again someday. “I spent about two years in hiding. I just kind of thought I’d hide and reappear walking again,” Cohn says. He never thought that 12 years later his hands would still be what he describes as “spatulas.”

That’s when Hogsett found Cohn, much the way he found the three newbies practicing in the Mesa gym. It wasn’t strictly sympathy that pushed Hogsett to reach out to Cohn. Frankly, he needed to fill a roster or lose his Phoenix murderball team.

“I went out and recruited five or six guys,” Hogsett says. “The problem is that Andy was a basket case. He wouldn’t come out of his house. He was sitting in his bedroom looking at a hole in the wall, contemplating if he wanted to continue life.”

The first time Hogsett picked Cohn up for a party, Cohn didn’t say a word or even make eye contact, his long hair draped over his forehead. At the party, Cohn was so nervous he puked and then asked Hogsett to take him back home. “That was my first experience with Andy,” Hogsett says.

Brotherhood

Hogsett took Cohn home and then dragged him to rugby practices and then to bars to get drinks and meet girls. After two years in near seclusion, Cohn’s personality started reemerging, dusty, but alive.

Cohn continued to get better and better at rugby, eventually becoming one of the best quad rugby players in the world. “If you ask him, he’d say rugby saved his life,” Hogsett says. “I had no idea he would be one of the top athletes in the wheelchair world.”

Today, Paralympics medalist and international quad rugby champion Andy Cohn is known as one of the best quad rugby players in the world. “He had a lot going on mentally besides dealing with his disability,” Hogsett says of the early days.

“About a year and a half into it, something triggered. The game hit him. He went from playing, to better. Now he’s just amazing.”

Could It Get Any Better?

In separate interviews, Cohn and Hogsett, both knock each other with friendly low-blow stories and details about one another’s lives.

Cohn points out that Hogsett didn’t make the 2002 Team USA. “You can throw this in there. Scott got cut early on, and I made it to the very end,” Cohn says. Hogsett likewise bashes his best friend for being a weak-willed wimp before they met.

Both agree they’d never have been good friends if not for their common bond. “I think I would have thought he was too much of a Scottsdale frat boy to be honest,” Cohn says.

“Now our relationship is far beyond even a friend. It’s kind of like one of the roots of my life, that relationship,” Cohn says. “Scott and I are always there. It started with rugby, but it spread to everything in life.”

Hogsett’s wife, Michelle, agrees that he and Cohn’s personalities have fused to make each of them who they are today. “Getting into rugby and helping people like Andy come out of their shells has definitely helped Scott,” Michelle says.

“Andy was pretty shelled up, as you can tell from the movie, very introverted. He’s very confident and outgoing now. That’s from both rugby and Scott. Scott also leans on Andy. He’ll call Andy to vent or to ask him for guidance or support.”

Even tough-skinned Hogsett says Cohn has made him who he is today, sort of. “I don’t know before how caring I was. I was always out for myself,” adding that the Andy Cohn he met 10 years ago was a completely different person.

New Zealand, World Championship 2006

In two weeks, Cohn will be back with Hogsett at the final cut of tryouts for Team USA 2006. Eleven players will fly to New Zealand to play in the World Championships. “With the movie now, you have to be serious about it to be really good,” Cohn says of quad rugby training. “There are 500 or 600 players. They only take 11 on a national team. You have to be dedicated and on it. The sport just gets more intense. The level of play just keeps getting better.”

As Cohn speeds down the San Diego boardwalk in his chair, Hogsett is hand biking across the town of Maricopa, where he owns a comfortable home. He’ll soon wheel his armored rugby chair through practice drills on the basketball court of the planned community where he lives.

“A small percentage of fortunate and lucky and gifted people may be this fulfilled,” Hogsett says. “It’s just one of those things. I’ve had the perfect life so far. I owe it all to rugby. I’ve traveled the world. I won a bronze medal in Athens. I’m a sponsored athlete by the Hartford Group. I’ve got the perfect wife. I couldn’t have scripted it better. Sometimes it takes a bad thing to create a good thing.”

After meeting Cohn in Alabama, Hogsett and wife Michelle will summer in Idaho. Then, assuming they make the USA World Championship Team, it’s off to New Zealand. They’d better make the team: Hogsett and Cohn already have two weeks of reservations for scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef.