This coming-of-age story of grit, luck, and first love begins in 1942. Seven-year-old Pat has just returned home after a nineteen-month hospital stay recovering from polio. His ex-prizefighter dad teaches him to stand up to bullies after being attacked. Pat earns a "don't f--k with the crip" reputation in his neighborhood and later at his tough Manhattan trade school, Chelsea Vocational, attended after unfortunate stints at two academic high schools. After Chelsea, Pat can't find work in his electrician trade "due to a physical deformity," as one rejection put it. Helped by his Chelsea adviser, he becomes a mechanical-electrical draftsman, finds employment, buys a '39 Chevy, and attracts Peggy despite his limp and stick-like leg. Pat falls madly in love.
Meanwhile, Pat joins a YMCA gymnastics team and labors to adapt his feeble leg to the sport. He also hangs out in the notorious Hell's Kitchen with two teammates. It's great fun, like being on the set of Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront," but it leads to his drunken theft of a prize trumpet and the instrument's humiliating return. Pat's team wins the 1956 YMCA Nation Championship. The team's top gymnast accepts an athletic scholarship at a Midwest university. At a Florida gymnasts' clinic, the university coach casually invites Pat to join his team, but without a scholarship. When told of the invitation, Peggy gleefully responds, "Go, Paddy!" while he longs for "Stay. Oh, Paddy, I'd miss you so!" His dad thinks he'd be a fool to give up his good job. After much agonizing, Pat leaves his beloved NYC.
The university rejects him as "academically unqualified." Pat plans to escape to New Orleans to save face. The coach convinces him to stay and take a high school equivalency exam. He enrolls at the university high school to prepare, lives with the coach's mother, and supports himself by teaching gymnastics and bussing dishes at the Moose Lodge for a warm-hearted waitress. The high school experience is at first humiliating but ultimately enjoyable and beneficial. He is admitted to the university with a "work assistance scholarship."
Pat is on top of the world. Peggy then visits. It's a sexual disaster. She jilts him. Thinking Peggy connects his dysfunction to the polio torments Pat. Next, he is hospitalized with mononucleosis and then slammed by his coach in the school paper for "...not living up to expectations." Pat's world had imploded. He seeks counseling very reluctantly. That and a torrid affair with his waitress, whose warm heart goes passionate, restores his shattered ego but ironically costs the team an undefeated season.
Over the next four years, Pat's team won four Big Ten and two NCAA championships and exhibited with the Finish and Russian Olympic Teams on Cold War "goodwill tours." Pat achieved significant personal athletic success by being selected as the team's Most Valuable Player in one season and Captain in the next. But he falls short of his major athletic goal. Coupled with his college life are sad and beautiful summers working and partying in NYC while painfully pinning for Peggy.
Pat's final colligate competition is not as a gymnast but swimming in the 1961 National Wheelchair Games as a Gizz Kids, physically disabled university students. Through this experience, he learns important life lessons about disability, his own and those more severe. After graduating, Pat is thrilled to be named the university's assistant gymnastics coach and then acting head coach. Coaching, however, leaves him questioning that as a career. After earning an M.S. in Exercise Science, he focuses on getting a Ph.D. Then, out of the blue, Pat is asked to coach and study at another university. He and Peggy head off in their 1962 V.W. Yes, after ardent love and heartbreaking loss, Pat woos and wins his childhood sweetheart.
