This overlooked 'March Madness' also boasts heroes

Lost in our annual March Madness basketball tourney (OK, and gambling spectacle), we barely have time to lament our NCAA bracket, let alone stay apprised of the Blackhawks, Bulls and baseball's spring training. So American hero Alexi Salamone's sports story didn't get much coverage.

But it is so much more than a sports story that it needs to be told.

In the gold-medal game Saturday, the hockey puck was lost in a scrum in front of the Japanese goalie. While some athletes might have been content to relax and listen for the expected referee's whistle, Salamone waited and watched.

"I didn't even think about the whistle. I was watching the play, staying patient and waiting for the puck to squeak out," Salamone would tell a reporter from the international AFP news.

When the puck squirted out onto the ice in front of the Japan crease, Salamone instantly picked it up with his stick and backhanded it past the stunned Japanese goalie for the 1-0 lead that would prove enough for the United States team that added a late goal and won the gold medal.

It was a nice reward for a 22-year-old player whose official hockey bio notes that his parents, Joseph and Susan, taught him the philosophy "to give, and one day you will receive."

Salamone was adopted by his U.S. parents and moved to New York when he was 6. He was born to poor parents in Briansk, a small hamlet in the Ukraine not too far from Chernobyl, where a nuclear power plant accident sent radioactive fallout into the atmosphere 14 months before he was born.

That, no doubt, is why he was born with shriveled, gnarled legs that were no help at all as he dragged them around the floors of the orphanage where he was left. It was decided to amputate both his legs when he was 4. His new parents in America were the ones who broke the news that his legs weren't going to grow back.

Yet Salamone was flying around the ice on his custom hockey sled at the Paralympic Games in Vancouver last week. The team's general manager, J.J. O'Connor of Mount Prospect, has done everything he can to promote the sport. O'Connor, 31, broke his neck playing hockey as a teen and suffered paralysis. He can stand and has slight movement in his right arm, not enough to play sled hockey. But his passion for hockey and bringing the game to athletes with disabilities earned him an ice rink in West Dundee named in his honor and the leadership role for the Paralympic team.

Seeing a Chernobyl victim emerge as the leading scorer for O'Connor's 5-0 and unscored-upon Paralympic sledge hockey team seems a better Cinderella story than Northern Iowa's basketball victory over Kansas. But the Paralympics just don't get much attention in the United States. While our athletes dominated the Winter Olympics, the sledge hockey gold was one of only 13 medals (four gold) won in the Paralympic Games by the United States, which sent only 50 athletes. Russia led in medals with 38, while Germany (24), Canada (19) and the Ukraine (19) all won more than the U.S.

But that is going to change, Charlie Huebner, chief of Paralympics for the U.S. Olympic Committee, said Monday by phone from Vancouver. The U.S. Olympic Committee didn't put a focus on the Paralympics until 2004.

"We're seeing more and more awareness," Huebner says, noting that USA Hockey, the national governing body of hockey, has led the way by promoting sledge hockey and recruiting athletes with disabilities. "That's a great example of what we're trying to do overall. In three years, hockey has transformed our program."

Since 2008, 114 communities have started Paralympic programs, Huebner says. The local effort (www.worldsportchicago.org) involves special recreation associations in the suburbs.

As the youngest team in the Paralympics, the hockey team should again be the gold-medal favorite in 2014, when the games move to Sochi, which is in the former Soviet Union, the birthplace of American hero Alexi Salamone.