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Urschel knows no obstacles

Wednesday, June 29, 2005
BUD POLIQUIN
POST-STANDARD COLUMNIST

She's been working now for the better part of the month in the heart of downtown at Personal Fitness, Inc., where her fingers have become agents of change. You got issues with your muscles, your joints, your various and sundry body parts? Kathy Urschel, licensed massage therapist, awaits you with her oils and ointments - and powerful wrists - right there on South Salina Street.

As she's a long-time athlete, Kathy knows all about aching. And as she's a committed professional, Kathy knows all about soothing those barking necks and shoulders and arms and legs, too. But as she's also a stitch, Kathy knows all about having a hoot ... and she has been doing just that since walking in the door.

"My trainer has been coming over to me for a couple of weeks now," Kathy declared Tuesday morning, "and saying to me, 'All these people keep asking, "She's blind, isn't she? How come she's wearing glasses?" It's getting kind of funny.' I just throw my head back and laugh, and say, 'Well, how do I look?' You know, I just want to look nice. I want to set a new image."

Oh, Kathy is setting a new image, all right. She's setting a new image because she is blind, and has been for two decades - or since she lost the sight in her right eye at the age of 21, 11 years after having had the curtain drawn on her left one. Something called "a vasculitis of an unknown etiology" plunged her into darkness, and along the way the strange virus claimed her hearing, as well.

So, blind and deaf, Kathy Urschel - born of healthy parents into a Baldwinsville family that would include four other healthy children - is in a bad way.

Except that she's not.

"My eyes and earsdon't bug me at all," said Kathy, who couldn't see a moose if it wandered into her bathroom and can hear only with the help of a microphone plugged into a gizmo implanted in her head. "I don't consider any of that an obstacle or a limitation. Everybody has got situations, you know. It's up to all of us to work through them. Life's too short to worry about things."

Get the picture here? This woman - educated at Syracuse University (where she earned both a bachelor's degree in education and a master's degree in counseling after having gone blind, a two-time tandem cycling Paralympian (Atlanta in 1996, when she won silver; and Sydney in 2000, when she finished 11th out of 21 entries) and her high school's homecoming queen - is a wonder. An unequivocal wonder.

And because Kathy is all of that, she'll be properly inducted on Oct. 17 into the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame, which will distinguish itself in grand fashion by anointing its first-ever physically-challenged athlete during its 19th annual dinner at Drumlins.

You see, it's like this: Dolph Schayes and Carmen Basilio and Madge Wells and Manny Breland and Vic Hanson and Jen Rhines and Dave Giusti and Dennis DuVal and Vicki Fleckenstein and Walt Patulski and Jim Boeheim and Felicia Legette-Jack and Frank DiPino and Jimmy Collins and Ginny Allen and Tim Green and Oren Lyons and Willetta Spease and virtually all of those other men and women deserve their places in our Hall. Only a fool, a helpless one, would suggest otherwise.

But if you've got the talent and the will and a fully functioning body, it's relatively easy to rebound or jab or pitch or tackle or run or ski or coach or putt or cradle. Imagine, though, cycling in a velodrome at more than 40 miles an hour ... or cycling, as part of an eight-person team, from western California to eastern Georgia in a record six days and 21 hours ... or cycling (and swimming and running) in a 3,400-mile transcontinental triathlon lasting 91/2weeks.

Imagine doing that - against able-bodied, predominantly-male opposition, by the way - while blind and deaf, and you've imagined Kathy Urschel.

That is, you've imagined Kathy Urschel, who will become - absolutely, indisputably, unquestionably - the most remarkable of the Hall's 149 entrants when she steps to that microphone in the fall and amazes her Drumlins audience that will respond to her words with smiles and shaking heads.

"As a cyclist and a woman, all I can say is, 'Wow'," Kathy confessed on Tuesday when her six-member induction class was announced during a sunny morning ceremony beneath that 24-Second Clock in Armory Square. "I'm hearing that it's a black-tie affair and we all have to give speeches. Believe me, I'm honored. I'm very, very honored. I'm in awe. I really am."

She'll be joinedat the front table on that autumn evening by fellow electees Dave Lemanczyk (baseball), Roy Neal (basketball) and Joe Papaleo (soccer), in addition to the posthumous duo of Dutch Dotterer (baseball) and Frank Randall (athletic administration). And each of those fellows, so very worthy, will deserve the applause that the announcement of his name will inspire.

But the five of them will accept their thin slice of sporting immortality in the happy shadow cast by Kathy Urschel, our civic treasure who was buying none of that hocus-pocus on Tuesday morning.

"I'm telling you, I'm no different than anybody else," she said ... although how many of us won 37-mile tandem cycling races as Kathy did in Binghamton just last summer? "If I didn't have this dumb little limp on my right side, I wouldn't have a complaint in the world.

"I'm serious. I really don't see any problems. I just have a passion to pedal. And I want to help people, if I can. I want people to get up and do something. I don't want them to sit back. Don't limit yourself. I mean, you don't know what you can do unless you try it."

Kathy spoke with her eyeglasses sitting on the bridge of her nose. And, sure, it made for a nice image. A very nice image. The whole of our town will get the chance to see it in October.