A more immediate dream, he said, was “How do you impress a girl? Or get her to go on a date with you? Or take a girl to a dance or the prom.
“I wasn’t worried about what I was gonna be or making money or stuff like that.
“It was purely … the ladies,” he says with a hearty laugh in the short documentary, Rising Up: The Story of Nick Scott.
And then there was his car.
It was a 1984 Buick Skylark. White, with a rebuilt transmission. He paid $1,000 for it.
“I had a furry steering wheel, (oversized) dice hanging from the mirror and I had a hula girl on my dash,” he said. “I always played the radio so loud with the subwoofers that the hula girl would dance for me. Her name was Jasmine.”
Scott will likely share some of those details — and so much more — when he speaks at Sinclair Community College’s Smith Auditorium (Building 12) Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. in an event that’s free and open to the public.
He’ll certainly focus on Aug. 17, 1998.
That’s the day Jasmine stopped dancing.
Scott, a junior in high school in Ottawa, Kansas, was on his way to football practice when the Skylark’s left front tire blew. The car started to veer to the right, and he wrestled it back to the left.
“I saw a vehicle and it was right in front of me,” he says in Rising Up. “It was coming toward me, and I saw the woman in the driver’s side. I didn’t want to hit her, so I just pulled to the right.”
The car slid sideways, hit a shallow ditch that bordered a field and started to roll.
Amid the violent impacts, shattering glass and disintegrating metal, Scott said he had a final thought: “Lord, I’m in your hands now!”
He said the car rolled 5 ½ times and ejected him through the driver’s side window.
“In midair my own car hit me in the back,” he said. " The next thing I know, I opened my eyes and I’m looking at the sky.”
He just lay there and soon people began gathering at his feet. A police officer came to his side. Paramedics eventually fitted him with neck and chest braces, and he was placed on a backboard and rushed to the hospital.
It was there the pain hit — “It was torture,” he said in the video — but that wasn’t the worst of it.
He said a doctor came in his room and gave him the unvarnished diagnosis.
He had an incomplete T-12, L-1 injury. His spinal cord wasn’t completely severed, but he was told his football days were over.
He would never walk again.
He was a paraplegic.
He said as he lay in bed, he wished the accident would have taken his life.
Night after night, he cried himself to sleep. Depression set in.
“There were times I thought suicide was the answer because I hated who I was.,” he said.
His weight ballooned to 300 pounds and yet he felt small and fearful and lost.
He returned to school in a wheelchair, but everywhere he looked he was reminded of what he thought he could no longer do.
Going through the cafeteria food line for the first time, he was constantly asked “Can I help you?”
He felt so self-conscious, he said, “I felt like a freak.”
From then on, he took his meals to his coach’s office.
Eventually, he made it to the weight room, a familiar haunt in his football days, but said, “I realized I couldn’t do squats, dead lifts, power cleans… All that stuff was gone.”
And then came a bolt of heavenly realization.
He might not be able to feel from the waist down, but he still could do a bench press and that fostered a new fantasy: He could be stronger than everybody else.
“That’s when I realized it was time for a change,” he said. “We all have disabilities, except one of mine...is visible.
“You need to realize life is a choice. You may live your life in fear and thinking you’re going to be judged by others, but the reality is someone else’s opinion doesn’t have to be your reality. It took me many years to accept who I was and be OK with who I am.”
And who Nick Scott’s become is amazing:
- He’s a disabled professional bodybuilder who’s won numerous tournaments and titles and set several world records.
- He’s a wheelchair ballroom dancer who, with partner Aubree Marchione, has competed around the world; appeared on Dancing with the Stars; and even performed the tango for Pope Francis.
- He’s also a motivational speaker who has given over 2,000 presentations to high schools, colleges, corporate gatherings, civic groups and non-profit organizations.
His Sinclair talk, according to the school’s Diversity Office which is presenting him, is meant “to help others awaken the beast within themselves and achieve their personal goals.”
‘It can be done’
A year after his accident — after having dedicated himself to the bench press and dropping his weight from 300 to 197 pounds — he entered his first high school powerlifting competition.
The top competitor in his class maxed out at 265 pounds.
“When he was done, I wasn’t trying to be cocky or anything like that, I was just confident,” he said in the video.
“I told them ‘Just leave that weight (265 pounds) on the bar. I need to warm up.’
“I ended up pushing up 350 pounds. I broke the school record by 75 pounds!”
From 2001 to 2002, he said he won 39 competitions, was second twice and third once:
“I realized it wasn’t about the winning. It was about making a statement that ‘It can be done,’” he said.
As his upper body became more and more sculpted, he wondered if there were wheelchair bodybuilding competitions. He found one and though he knew nothing about the sport, he decided to enter it.
Although he lost, he won something more important.
He discovered another means to express and define himself.
“I was so amazed with the sport,” he said. “I saw all these guys worse off than me who were completely shredded, and my perspective changed.”
He started a website — wheelchairbodybuilding.com — and eventually pushed to launch a pro show which he said had never been done before.
He got two sanctioning bodies to approve it and then Bodybuilding.com not only became the title sponsor, but it signed him as one of its representative athletes.
Soon Scott was travelling to shows and expos across the nation and in 2016 the IFBB Pro Wheelchair Division was added to the famed Arnold Classic in Columbus.
Today, Scott is the founder, CEO and chairman of Wheelchair Bodybuilding Inc.
Finding perspective
It was at the Arnold that he met Marchione, who was a choreographer and artistic director of the American DanceWheels Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to wheelchair dancing.
She thought Scott’s fitness, athleticism, charm and shaved-dome good looks would make him a perfect dance partner and she was right.
They eventually became the No. 1 wheelchair dance couple in the nation.
A film of Scott’s odyssey called Perspective, won the Best Overall Film award at the Arnold Sports Film Festival in 2011.
And one of the most touching scenes from the Rising Up documentary came from his college graduation when he wheeled his chair to the edge of the stage and, wearing his cap and gown, slowly rose up, steadied himself and walked in herky-jerky steps to get his diploma as the crowd cheered.
As he was making his way to the far side of the stage, he stopped, turned toward the audience and with a grin, pointed out into the audience.
He said he was telling his mom thanks for her support, that this was for her.
But it was more than that. It was for all the rest of us and for himself, too.
“What’s the one thing you gain from losing everything?” he asks in the video. “It’s perspective.
“It’s not about whether the glass is half empty or half full. I’m just grateful I have a glass.
“The biggest question people ask me is ‘If you could, would take it all back and not be in a wheelchair?’
“And my answer is simple: ‘No, I wouldn’t take it back because since the day I had my accident, I realize I was given a gift. I got a second chance at life and I’m trying to make the most of it now.
“When you do that, great things will happen. Things you never imagined.”
Jasmine may have stopped her dashboard dance.
But Nick Scott is now moving to the music just fine.
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