This Life, This Body, These Cards

Suburban Nebraska. Fifth grade has been a hard year. But now it’s summertime.

I’m shooting at the end of the driveway with my twin brother, Wes. You can hear birds singing. There’s this tree in the front yard that hangs right over the driveway, so it’s half-shaded. 

By four o’clock the sun’s in your face and you’re shooting totally blind. But if you’re out there early enough, at least you’ve got shade to work with. 

The ball would get stuck on the corner of the rim sometimes. I’d have to go shake the pole to get it down. But if Wes was rebounding for me, he liked it when it got stuck. He’d leap and try to dislodge it or, if I shook it loose, he’d try to bat it out of the air before it hit the ground. 

He was always working on his jumping.

We’d be out there for hours. You start making shots, and you picture yourself playing in the NBA, playing college ball, playing for your high school team, people lifting you up on their shoulders after a game-winning performance — and you forget about everything else. 

We’ve got this ball given to us by our neighbor and it was all bald and peeling from where we’d shot so many times. I just never wanted to stop. Because when I was out there shooting hoops, I wasn’t the guy with cerebral palsy. I wasn’t the one with all the medical conditions. I was just a basketball player. That’s all I wanted to be known as.

If I work hard enough, if I get enough shots off, then I can keep up. 

That was my goal.

When I was born, I could not breathe on my own. I was 32 weeks. My umbilical cord was barely hanging on — like a third of the size it should’ve been. I’m a minute older than Wes, but he was always kind of the big brother. 

We come from a sporting family, and I guess my parents knew he had all this stuff ahead of him: select teams, training camps, letterman jackets.... 

But me, I was just trying to survive.

By the time I was seven months old, I’d been through 13 surgeries. My esophagus and my stomach weren’t connected. There was one night, where they had to call my parents every time they gave me CPR. I’m just this little baby in a hospital room and they had to try to bring me back, again and again and again. I was hanging on by a thread.

We lived in a pretty nice house at the time. I think it was elementary school when my parents had their basement renovated and me and Wes had these swivel chairs down there. And we would spin and spin and spin in them. And I remember being in that chair, spinning around, and thinking: 

Man, if it wasn’t for me, maybe we’d live in a really nice house.

I was always getting sick. Always in and out of the hospital. I didn’t even realize what it cost my parents. I missed huge chunks of the school year. But at least I had Wes. And I had basketball. 

In the driveway, it didn’t matter if I was small or fragile. Nobody was checking if you’re fast enough or strong enough or safe enough to play. It’s just you and the hoop. Back then, I didn’t want to be the best at anything. I just wanted to be the same. The same as Wes. The same as my best friend Kenny, who lived just up the street.

It didn’t matter that my shot percentages were lower than Wes’ or Kenny’s — although we always kept score. “Good” for Wes meant making 60-to-70% of his shots. For me, it was closer to 40-or-50%.

Wes would kill me one-on-one and start teasing me: “Wyatt, if you shoot 35% in your Special Olympics game, that’s really good — in my league, it’s terrible…. But trust me, for you, it’s good.”

I’d just say, “Congratulations, Wes, you beat the disabled kid.”

When you have a disability, you develop a dark sense of humor. You have to. But I think that’s the real reason I never wanted to come inside. 

Out there, on the driveway, no matter what the percentages said, I wasn’t behind anybody. 

I was just even.

I figured if I worked hard enough, the rest of the world would eventually catch up to what I already knew was true on that driveway. 

If we’re making the movie of Wyatt Spalding’s life, this is the moment when the music goes quiet and everything changes.

It’s nighttime. My dad’s in his office at home. I’d go in to watch TV sometimes, when he wasn’t working. I always felt comfortable there.

When I think back to that moment, I don’t remember him saying, “Hey, we need to talk.”

It’s just this memory of me standing there, in the dark, my dad on the green couch, waiting for me, and I’m not even in front of him — he’s sitting there, and I’m kind of off to the side, at an angle, and he just comes right out with it: 

Wyatt, you can’t play on the team with Wes anymore.

It’s just … your reaction time isn’t quick enough.

You could really get hurt.

And my whole world split in two. 

I’d only just got pulled out of baseball because I couldn’t even play baseball with my own age group anymore. It was too dangerous. I had to go play with the younger kids that were like two or three years younger than me … for “safety reasons.”

But I thought: At least basketball is the one sport I could still play. The ball is big enough, I can catch it. It’s not like football where someone’s trying to tackle you.

Then…. 

“You can’t play anymore, Wyatt. You can still play at the Y with your brother and friends, because you know they’re not gonna try to hurt you. 

But when you’re playing in a competitive game in middle school or high school…. 

Everyone’s trying to win, buddy, and no one’s gonna care that you have a disability.”

Maybe my parents couldn’t understand, but that’s all I wanted. For nobody to care that I had a disability. But it was that same wish that made it too dangerous to play anymore. 

At that time, for the first time ever, I really hated my parents. I wouldn’t talk to my dad. My mom was nice about it, but it was her too. My relationship with them was really tough that whole stretch of middle school.

I remember one time shooting in the driveway and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, thinking about it all, hating everyone and everything, and I took the basketball and started throwing it against the garage. 

Boom.

Get the ball back. 

Throw it again.

Boom.

My dad came out like, “What the heck are you doing Wyatt? You need to grow up.”

But I just didn't want to at the time. I was lost.

I only found out years later that my mom was actually the one who made the decision to pull me out of sports.

She was a stay‑at‑home mom for the first 13 years of my life, looking after me during all those medical issues and procedures. She’d given too much to see me get hurt again. They all had. I can see that now. 

But at 12, all I heard was: 

Stay home. Your dream is over.

I dealt with it in the only way I knew how. I went right back to the driveway. 

I used basketball to cope with everything. I wouldn’t even know what time it was. I’d shoot for two hours, not even a workout, just running around shooting, thinking about everything. Or maybe not even thinking about anything, just shooting. 

I remember this one day, my dad and brother and sisters were at some baseball tournament, and my mom’s working in the yard and I’m just shooting and shooting and shooting. The sun is high and beating down on me.

And then I’d see the time and be like, F***. I’ve been at this for two and a half hours. 

Having Cerebral Palsy means you use like ten times more energy. I burn calories just by standing around. I’d have this pounding pain in my legs, in my hamstrings, but when I started shooting it all just melted away. 

My legs would hurt at the start, and then it would all melt away. And I realized something: It hurts more when I’m just standing around, you know? 

But if I’m doing what I love — shooting from the corner, then the wing, then the elbow, then to the top of the key, doing that on both sides, again and again, 20 shots at each spot — then, for a while at least, it would stop hurting so much.

So I just kept going. I kept moving. It was too painful to stop.

---

---

When the doors to school sports shut to me, Special Olympics gave me an opportunity through tennis.

If I’m honest, despite coming from a tennis family, tennis was really just a fallback for me after failing at baseball. I picked it up just after my dad gave me the news and maybe I channeled my frustration. I quickly dominated and ended up winning States five years in a row. 

If that sounds like the climax of my story — some glory, finally — it didn’t feel that way.

Tennis always felt like business to me. I played it because it was my best shot at being “the best” at something, not because I loved it. Not like I loved basketball.

Tennis was the thing I did because I was good. Basketball was the thing I did because I couldn’t stop.

Still, tennis gave me something that driveway ball never could: proof I was enough.

My life basically turned into this 80‑day cycle. I’d get up at 5, run to the Y, lift weights for half an hour, play tennis for three or four hours, and then another two or three hours of basketball — either in the gym alone or back in the driveway with Wes.

Our driveway one-on-ones got more and more intense — we played with no fouls and he had to wear leg weights, just so his legs felt as heavy as mine did. He’d kill me every game but we’d still fight over every single ball. Every single point mattered.

That night on the couch, my dad said I’d need to work ten times harder than everyone else just to be average. I took that literally. But as I pushed myself to prove everybody wrong, it was my body that was pushing back.

My scoliosis kept getting worse. My spine had this 80% curve that was wrapping over one lung. I couldn’t breathe. My head had basically been tilted to one side my whole childhood. My ear could touch my shoulder. I was in constant pain and had all this  weird nerve stuff. Standing still hurt more than running, but now I had no choice. I was getting sick more and more.

Eventually the doctors sat us down and laid it out: 

If we don’t fuse your spine, this curve is only going to get worse. It’s already crushing one lung. One day, it will probably kill you.

Ever since I was young, I’ve thought a lot about death. I was so sick that I thought: Maybe I’ll be the kid who dies at 12. 

And then there was this time I almost choked to death on a sausage from McDonald’s while we were driving down the interstate on the way back from a tournament somewhere. That was a lot.

You know how you have muscles in your esophagus to help you swallow? Well mine are dead. I just have to use gravity. And that day, gravity didn’t work and the sausage got stuck and everyone in the car started screaming. I’m kicking the back of my dad’s seat, unable to breathe, and we can’t pull over because we’re on the damn interstate. 

And I just had this moment of … weird calm? I was like, Wow, I guess this is how I die.

When you’ve been as ill as I have, as often as I have, you think a lot about your funeral.

Who would be there? What would people say? The music was obviously very important to me. We’d always be out there shooting hoops to “Till I Collapse” by Eminem…. 

Maybe that song could play at my funeral? Would my mom be mad?

Luckily we got off the interstate just in time for a Heimlich to save me from the sausage and, fast-forwarding a few years, as I kept fiddling with the funeral playlist in my head, they told me the risks for back surgery:

You’ll be on your face for about 10 hours.

There’s a chance you could lose a lot of blood.

There’s a chance you could end up paralyzed…. 

And there’s even a small chance you could go blind because of the pressure.

Nobody had said anything about going blind before. That was a fun surprise.

So they gave us two options: A less aggressive surgery closer to home that might only get the curve down part‑way — and might have to be done again. Or there was this guy in St. Louis who traveled the world doing these big fusions — higher risk, but if it worked, it would be one and done.

I remember going home after that appointment, walking up to my room, grabbing my basketball and going straight out to the half‑court we’d begged our parents to build in the backyard. 

I didn’t want to talk, I just wanted to shoot. My dad went inside and told Wes what the doctors had said. I could see them from the corner of my eye. Wes came out, stepped onto the court and didn’t say a word. He just started rebounding for me, passing the ball back for me to shoot.

I don’t know how long we were out there but, at some point, I walked back into the kitchen. My parents were at the table, going back and forth about the two options, about the risks. I still had the ball in my hands when I said, “I’m going to St. Louis.”

They were like, “Wyatt, let’s sit and talk about it…”

And I said: “No. I’m going to St. Louis. If I have to do this, I’m only doing it once.”

My attitude was pretty simple: I’d already gone through so f***ing much before I was even one year old. The nights doctors had to bring me back again and again with CPR. If I could survive that as a baby, I could survive this at 18. 

I didn’t want to do it. I was scared. But I was more scared of spending the rest of my life being slowly crushed by my own body.

So I took the same logic I had in the driveway and on the tennis court — Suck it up, Wyatt, and make it happen — and pointed it at the operating table.

---

---

After surgery, everything was just off. My nerves were shot. I had to learn to walk again. I’d spent all this time moving but now I had no choice but to slow down.

But the thing about missing your senior year is the season doesn’t stop just because you’re in a hospital bed. 

The first game I missed after surgery ended up being the best Wes ever played. He scored 23 points. Twenty‑three. The student section stormed the floor, rushed him, and lifted him up on their shoulders.

It was the key scene of my movie. They just cast the wrong twin.

When I finally got out of the hospital, my parents sent me to college, which I absolutely did not want to do. I hated school. I’d missed so much of it that I always felt behind, and now, after this huge back surgery, I was supposed to just sit in class like nothing had happened?

Freshman year was probably the weakest I’ve ever been, mentally. I was pissed at my parents for making me go. Pissed at my body. Pissed at everything. I’d sit in some of those classes and just think: This is so stupid. This isn’t going to help me.

The one thing that kept me connected was basketball.

There was this side gym at Midland — weird courts made of the same material as the running track around its edges — and I’d go in there and shoot. I couldn’t jump because of the surgery. I’d just stand there with my hand in the air and shoot without really moving.

One day these two guys come over from the weight room. One of them, Marcus, was a senior on the basketball team. He’s like, “You should come to practice sometime.”

I didn’t really believe him at first. But a couple of days later I’m in the library taking a test and the door opens and it’s Marcus again. 

“Conditioning tonight at seven. You should come.”

So I went. And loved it.

I didn’t play in games. But I had a locker, I was in practice, I was in film study. I loved Coach Eisner. One time in film, after we’d been on a run of losses, he goes: 

“Does anybody here think they should be playing more?” 

Pin-drop silence. Everyone’s looking at each other. Nobody knows what to say. 

And I’m sitting in the back, and I just put my hand up.

"How come I don't play, Coach?"

Everyone loses it. 

He’s like, “Wyatt, I saw you play in high school — you shot 30 shots and didn’t make one of them.”

I was like, “But my back’s better now, man! I’m good!”

But then Marcus graduated. And a few others moved on. It unravelled. I made some friends, but I still hated class and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. 

So I did what I’d always kind of known I was going to do.

I left.

I knew I wasn’t going to graduate in four years. So I got my minor and went home.

---

---

The only job I could get was bagging groceries, and I hated every second of it. About a week in I just lost it with my dad.

“F*** groceries! I don’t want to do this. This isn’t what I went through all of that for.”

He was like, “You need a job. You’ve got to grow up.”

He wasn’t wrong. But it wasn’t really about the groceries. It was everything. I didn’t want to live at home. I didn’t want to be back in the same town after everything I’d been through. 

I felt stuck.

The thing I really wanted was to work at Nebraska Sports, the local sporting goods store. I knew sports. I knew Nebraska. I knew I could do that job. So I just kept showing up at their door, every six to nine months: “Hey, you guys hiring yet? You guys hiring yet?”

I applied five, six, seven times. Eventually they hired me.

Nebraska Sports was the first job that felt like a career, not just a shift. I felt a weight lift. 

It wasn’t the life 12-year-old me had pictured. But it was mine. 

And Special Olympics was back on my radar.

In 2018, I qualified for the USA Games in tennis. That’s the thing I always wanted: to compete for Nebraska on the biggest stage.

But about a month before I was supposed to go, my stomach shut down. I couldn’t eat or drink without gasping for air. I choked on water and my mom had to give me the Heimlich. I lost 10 pounds in two days.

I still went. I still played. But it sucked. 

I just had to do whatever I could with the body I had that week.

Luckily, around the same time, I had something else to take my mind off it. 

I got back into radio with my friend, Jake Burnside.

Jake had his own story. In 2013 he’d been in a bad car accident — he was the only survivor. His best friend died. Another kid in the car was a twin. That one hit me and Wes hard.

We weren’t the kind of friends who sat around talking about how much we’d been through. It was more like Is this ref trash? Are the Huskers going to suck again? But underneath, we both knew what the other guy had been through.

At some point we decided to do something to channel our experiences. We started a podcast called Be Unexpected — asking people who’d had their lives flipped upside down how they found their way back.

For me, our podcast was the turning point.

I’d spent so long trying to live my own story. Now I was sitting there with a mic going, “Tell me about the hardest thing you ever went through.”

It made me realize I wasn’t the only one. I wasn’t some kind of anomaly. And I think something in me finally softened. I wasn’t just living inside my head anymore.

Sometimes I have a weird relationship with the word “special.”

If I didn’t have a disability, nobody would care that I made eight shots in a row at the Y. People are afraid to say “disability” or “disabled” — they say “a person who lives with a disability” or “has different abilities,” like that’s somehow better. 

I’m just like: Whatever, man. I know I have a disability. It’s fine. Just say it.

But Special Olympics itself? That’s different. That changed my life. 

It gave me a stage to compete — to be an athlete instead of just a walking medical record. 

Now I work for Special Olympics Nebraska. And out of more than 100 athletes who applied globally to become a Global Messenger, 10 were selected. I’m the only one from the United States. Now my job is to travel the world giving speeches about what I’ve learned.

But Special Olympics isn’t just where I work. It’s where I had my moment.

And this time, it really was my moment.

In 2022, I went back to the USA Games, this time for basketball in Orlando. Wes was on the team too, on a Unified team — where players with and without disabilities play alongside each other. We played in the top division. Some people thought we should’ve been in an easier one, but my brother and I were like…. 

No way. We’d rather lose in the top division than blow people out in the lower one.

And, sure enough, we didn’t medal.

We ended up in the third-place game. And we lost that too.

But late in that game, we needed something….

I’m on the right side — not even my strong side — and I’m way out. Really deep. There’s this huge dude in my face. My brother passes me the ball.

I don’t think about it. I don’t look at where the line is. I just catch it and shoot.

I didn’t even realize until after — until someone told me — just how deep I had shot from. I just look up, I can’t even see the basket. I’m shooting blind, but I shoot anyway. I didn’t even care if I missed….

And I bank it in. We take the lead.

And we never scored again!!!

When I was younger, losing that game would’ve sent me straight back to that place.

You suck. Dad was right.

In Orlando, we lost … but I felt something. That was my shot. I took it my way. If it rims out, it rims out. 

My first thought wasn’t even about what it meant. It was just: That was my shot. And I made it.

I’ve shot anywhere from 250 to 500 shots a day since high school. Ten years of that. I’d played tennis against guys with no disabilities, gone three sets in 95-degree heat, did these crazy 80-day workout plans, ran because I couldn’t stand still, worn people down until they stopped underestimating me. 

The kid in the driveway wanted to hit the winner and get carried off on his teammates’ shoulders. At the USA Games in 2022, nobody stormed the court. Nobody lifted me up. We didn’t even win the game. 

But at that moment, with the huge dude in my face and the ball in my hands, my attitude was simple: 

I’m the best guy to take this. And I’m not afraid to miss.

---

---

Not a bad end to the movie, right?

But after Orlando, life didn’t suddenly get easy. I still get sick. I still have scopes down my throat every few weeks. I still have days where my stomach or my lungs or my back decides to act up for no good reason.

That’s just my life.

And I realized I couldn’t wait for any of that to change before I started actually living it. That’s where “suck it up, make it happen” became my thing. Not “pretend everything’s fine.” But, instead ….

You have this life, this body, these cards. Play that hand anyway.

When I finally moved out of my parents’ house at 29, into my own place, paying my own rent, that felt like a bigger win than any medal.

People might read that and be like: 

Is that it? This whole story and your goal … was to pay rent?

But for me, after everything — the surgeries, the hospital nights, the Hy‑Vee shifts, choking in the car on the interstate, struggling in college, having no idea what I was doing with my life — that was huge. 

I wasn’t just surviving anymore. I was living on my own. 

In my apartment, I’ve even got my dad’s old green couch — the one from his office, the one I was standing right next to the night he told me I couldn’t play hoops  anymore. It’s mine now.

I’m 31 years old, I’m in Special Olympics Nebraska’s Hall of Fame, about to go and talk into a mic as a reporter for the USA Games with ESPN, the host of four podcasts, traveling the world telling my story as a man who pays his own bills and is finally ready for what comes next.

But if anyone ever asks me for a résumé again, I’ll just lift my shirt up and show them all my scars:

This is what I learned from. I minored in failure and majored in figuring it out.

Because really, I know the only person I’m answering to at this point. Not the people who cut me from the team or the people who talk to me like I’m five or the people who tell me I’m “special” because I made a three pointer.

I do it for Baby Wyatt. The kid who fought to still be here.

I’ve seen the pictures. The tubes. The machines. I’ve heard my parents talk about the nights when the doctors would call and say, “Mr. and Mrs. Spalding, we’ve got your son back — for now.”

That kid went through hell before he was even one year old.

So if we’re still talking about the movie of Wyatt, I don’t think it ends on that three in Orlando. I think it ends back in the driveway.

Not the old driveway — not me at 12, dreaming about being the hero. My parents sold that house. So it’s a different one, anyway. This time it’s my brother’s driveway. 

And me and Wes are out there with his as-yet-unborn son. Me, the bill-paying uncle, strapping ankle weights on the kid “to make it fair,” throwing him bad passes so he learns to adjust, playing to 21 with no fouls so he figures out how to finish through whatever comes his way. 

Maybe one day that kid has his own 23‑point game. Maybe he tips in his buzzer‑beater. Maybe he gets carried off on someone’s shoulders. Maybe the moment I dreamed about skips a generation and lands on him instead. 

If I’m out there in that driveway, rebounding for him, teaching him the same drills me and Wes ran, talking a little bit of shit, laughing when he beats me and saying:

If I help him have his chance at a moment — whatever that moment may be, big or small — then I’ll have done my job. 

And if baby Wyatt could see that, I think he’d call that a win.