Mark Wiedmer
Blake Leeper, right, runs a heat during 100-meter dash competition at the 2016 U.S. Paralympics team trials in Charlotte, N.C. Leeper will speak Friday at McCallie as part of the school's Dr Pepper TEN Classic weekend.The hour was growing late inside the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's Maclellan Gym that humid June night in 2007.
Another day of his instructional camp almost complete, John Shulman - UTC's men's basketball coach at the time - was getting ready to head home for a wee bit of sleep when assistant Dave Conrady excitedly approached him.
"Dave comes over to me, and it's probably 11 o'clock at night, and says, 'John, you've got to see this kid with no legs running wind sprints,'" Shulman recalled last week. "I thought it was a joke or something. Then I saw Blake Leeper running with the rest of the Dobyns-Bennett (High School) team. I couldn't believe it. I had to meet this kid."
Leeper, currently the fastest Paralympic athlete in the world, remembers that night almost as vividly as Shulman.
"Here's this major college basketball coach, a guy who's coached in the NCAA tournament, and he tells me he wants me to come to UTC and be a manager on his basketball team," Leeper said last week from Los Angeles, where he currently trains.
"He says I'm a special person with a special story and he wants his players to be around me. It's one of those moments that changed my life, just to think that someone like that would see something special in me."
It's been almost 12 years since then, and a lot has changed for all parties. Not only is Shulman no longer the coach of the Mocs, he also has moved on from McCallie School, with the Blue Tornado basketball team in its first season with Conrady as head coach.
Then there's Leeper, who has not only broken the Paralympic world record of 45.39 seconds in the 400 meters that was set by Oscar Pistorius, he has also broken his own record with a time of 44.42 this past summer. His new goal is to run fast enough against his able-bodied counterparts to qualify for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
To aid that dream - which is currently being blocked by those who believe the length of Leeper's running blades give him an unfair advantage - he's being coached by Willie Gault, the former NFL receiver/returner who was an all-time great in football as well as track and field at the University of Tennessee.
"In the history of the world, no double amputee has ever run as fast as Blake," Gault said in a phone interview Friday. "This is a guy who was told he'd never walk normally, much less run. And now there are people telling him he can't compete for a spot in the Olympics.
"He's not trying to beat the system. He's a guy with no legs. People need to start talking about this. People need to protest this."
Come Friday, the 29-year-old Leeper will be doing the talking at McCallie's fourth annual Dr Pepper TEN Classic-Mountain View Auto Group Luncheon.
He'll share how someone who was born without legs might run in the 2020 Summer Games. He'll likely discuss his fight to overcome alcoholism and a positive test for cocaine that got him banned from competition for a year.
"I told Blake when I agreed to work with him that he had to turn his life around," Gault said. "He's quit hanging out with some people who were bad for him. He's been a model person during the time I've known him."
Leeper may also talk about playing in the 2015 NBA Celebrity All-Star Game in Madison Square Garden, where he hit a 3-pointer, grabbed two rebounds, handed out three assists and made off with three steals in 14 minutes of court action.
He's almost certain to discuss the single athletic moment that changed his life when he was playing T-ball in Kingsport. How he thought he was about to hit an inside-the-park home run as he raced around the bases as fast as he could on artificial legs, only to have one of the legs fall off as he approached third.
As it might be for any 6-year-old, his first thought was "Why me?"
But he soon reversed that to "Why not me?" From then on, Leeper embraced his disability, emboldened by his mother Edith's advice that "life is 10 percent of what you are dealt with and 90 percent of how you deal with it."
A single story to point out how wonderfully he has dealt with it: During his years as a backup point guard for Dobyns-Bennett and legendary coach Charlie Morgan, the Indians found themselves short of a post player one night.
Said Leeper to Morgan: "I can make my legs longer if you need a center."
How long his odds are to make the Olympics hinges on two things. One, if he will be allowed to compete. Two, if he can deliver a time good enough to make the team.
As Gault noted, "I don't think there is a ceiling on what Blake can achieve, but to get below 44 (seconds) is a lot more pain."
Yet when you've gone through all Leeper has gone through already, the pain is clearly worth it, so much so that he put his other dream of becoming a pediatric orthopedic surgeon on hold after 3 1/2 years of premed courses at Tennessee to chase his athletic dreams.
"I work out six days a week," he said. "Willie does everything I do. He's always said he'll never ask me to do anything he wouldn't do. So I'm out there every day training with one of my all-time UT heroes."
Anyone interested in attending Friday's luncheon can go online to mccallie.org/dpten or call McCallie director of events Audrey Smith at 423-493-5722. The deadline to purchase tickets is 2 p.m. Wednesday.
"I'm excited to come to Chattanooga," Leeper said last week. "As time has gone on, I've become thankful that I was born with no legs. I truly believe I was put here for a purpose. I'm here to represent all those folks in wheelchairs or without limbs who've always been considered 'less than.'"
Which is the biggest reason why - whether he ever wins his appeal to compete for a chance to run in the 2020 Tokyo Games - we should all be, in the words of Gault, "celebrating Blake Leeper."
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.
Paralympic athlete Blake Leeper arrives at the Kids' Choice Sports Awards at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion in July 2017.