Parks, who had originally given himself a year to see if wheelchair tennis was feasible, is proud but modest about his own role 50 years on.<\/p>\n
“I was the head of the organisation, I was the first player to really play the game but it’s hard for me to say Brad, you invented wheelchair tennis, but you know I was part of it,” he said, pointing to others like Minnebraker.<\/p>\n
Today’s players, though, do not hold back.<\/p>\n
“I think I’m in awe. Absolute awe,” said Britain’s 34-time Grand Slam champion Alfie Hewett.<\/p>\n
“It [wheelchair tennis] is not about accolades and the external things. It’s actually just the life it’s given me and the purpose that it’s given me.”<\/p>\n
And Gordon Reid, who has won 30 Grand Slam titles, added: “It’s an incredible story and that little idea that he had 50 years ago has turned into a huge worldwide sport now. So yeah, [I’m] very thankful that he had that idea back in the day.”<\/p>\n
So much has changed since the early days, not least the chairs which are much lighter and often feature a moulded seat that is more energy efficient for turning.<\/p>\n
And the sport continues to grow – the wheelchair event at Wimbledon, which begins on Tuesday, offers a prize pot of more than \u00a31m, with the winners of the men’s and women’s singles earning \u00a382,000.<\/p>\n
Its profile is also rising and the finals are now played on the 12,345-capacity Court One, compared to the 276-seat Court 17 that hosted the first wheelchair singles final 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
Parks says he is “very happy to see where we’re at”.<\/p>\n
“I’m jealous in a way but in a good way because I would have loved to have been able to play in [tournaments like Wimbledon],” he said.<\/p>\n
But that was never what his dream was about when he set out.<\/p>\n
“I just loved to hit tennis balls, and I wanted to share the feeling of hitting a tennis ball from a wheelchair,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The thing that I feel really, really good about is that I really wanted other people to be tennis players.<\/p>\n
“I used to get disappointed when I thought that everybody was wheelchair basketball players. Tennis was not their main thing. And today I feel like tennis really stands on its own and they’re tennis players. They just happen to be in a wheelchair.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Parks, who had originally given himself a year to see if wheelchair tennis was feasible, is proud but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":748230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-748229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}