The Side Effect

                Picture and cover from Tony's book Amazon.Com

THE SIDE EFFECT
By Coach Larry Weber

Sometimes the most important thing you do isn't the thing you set out to do.

Buckminster Fuller, one of the great minds of the twentieth century, used to tell a story about a honeybee.

The bee, Fuller would explain, goes about its life with a single mission: gather nectar, make honey. It is relentlessly focused, biologically wired, completely committed to that one purpose. And it succeeds. Day after day, season after season, the honey gets made.

But here is what the bee never knows.

While it moves from flower to flower, lost in its own small purpose, it carries pollen on its legs. Accidentally. Without intention or awareness. And that pollen cross-pollinates hundreds of crops — apples, almonds, blueberries, cucumbers — crops that feed billions of people across every continent on earth. Remove the honeybee from the equation, and the global food supply collapses.

The honey was never the point.

The bee's greatest contribution to the world happens in the margins of its mission, in the invisible work it does without ever knowing it's doing it. The side effect is the main event.

I've thought about that story hundreds of times since the fall of 1995, when a phone call changed the direction of my life.

A PHONE CALL THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

Bryan Hoddle has never been a man who wastes words. In forty plus years of knowing him, I've never heard him soften a truth to make it easier to swallow. What he told me that day was honest, clear, and without pretense — which is precisely why I listened.

He told me that a Texas billionaire named Ross Perot had hired him to prepare a young man named Tony Volpentest for the 1996 Paralympic Games in Atlanta. Tony was already the defending Paralympic sprint champion, a double amputee born without hands or feet who ran on carbon-fiber prosthetics and balanced himself at the starting line on paint cans. Bryan was assembling a team, and he wanted to know if I was in.

I said yes before he finished the sentence.

What Bryan didn't tell me — what none of us could have known — was that we were stepping into something that would ripple outward for decades, touching veterans in rehabilitation hospitals,  a family adopting a child, coaches rebuilding their entire life mission, and eventually seeing the organizational structure change of the United States Olympic Committee itself, adding the Paralympics.

We thought we were preparing a sprinter for a race.

We were actually participating in cross-pollinating new frontiers.

THE WEIGHT OF WHAT WE WERE CARRYING

The Paralympic Movement in 1995 occupied the outermost margins of American sports culture. There were no significant sponsorships, no major media contracts, no roadmap for what a professional disabled athlete even looked like. The word "Paralympic" drew blank stares at most dinner tables.

Bryan and I didn't have a blueprint. We built one.

I formed a company called Physically Able Sports — the first company in history dedicated solely to representing and promoting Paralympic athletes — and got to work on a strategic plan while Bryan threw himself into Tony's training. Albert Einstein once said that nothing happens until something moves. We moved fast, with the 1996 Games in Atlanta coming at us like a freight train.

Ross Perot was our anchor through all of it. The man who had twice run for President of the United States showed up to our partnership with his checkbook open and his ego nowhere in the room. He funded Tony's training. He mentored Bryan and me with the kind of clarity that only comes from someone who has built and lost and rebuilt things on a grand scale. He cared deeply about two things: Tony Volpentest's success, and the welfare of American veterans. In Ross Perot, those two passions would soon become one.

ATLANTA, 1996

I picked up Mr. Perot and his daughter from the airport myself.

The drive to Olympic Stadium buzzed with energy — Tony, Bryan's training plan, the Paralympic Movement, what all of this could mean. Mr. Perot was running for President, but he made something crystal clear before we ever reached the venue: this day was about Tony. At the press conference, with cameras rolling and reporters angling for political angles, he held the line. Every question redirected back to the greatest Paralympic in the world from Washington State who had been born with no hands and no feet.

That was the kind of man Ross Perot was.

When Tony crouched at the starting line of the 100 meters that afternoon, steadying himself against the paint cans he used for balance, the four of us — Bryan, Mr. Perot, his daughter, and I — sat together in the stands. What happened next is burned into me permanently.

Tony won the gold medal and broke the world record.

The stadium erupted. Mr. Perot was out of his seat. You could see in his face, in that unguarded moment, exactly what this meant to him — not as a political calculation, not as a philanthropic investment, but as a man who had just watched someone he believed in become the best in the world.

We were all just a little excited.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT NO ONE PLANNED

This is where the honeybee story stops being a metaphor and starts being lived history.

In the days and weeks after Atlanta, Ross Perot began sending copies of the CBS tape — Tony crossing the finish line, the world record flashing on the scoreboard — to disabled veterans across the country. He paired the video with information about the prosthetic technology that Bryan and Tony had helped develop through months of biomechanical testing in Oklahoma City, where prosthetists had refined and improved their designs based on direct feedback from coaching a world-class sprinter.

Those improvements were shared freely. Just one man's belief that if something helped Tony Volpentest run faster, it might also help a twenty-two-year-old Marine walk again.

That is a side effect. That is the honeybee's pollen.

THE SOLDIERS' COACH

After Atlanta, Bryan Hoddle became head coach of the USA Paralympic Track and Field team, taking athletes to Athens and performing brilliantly. But the moment that truly redirected his life came later, when he walked into a room full of veterans who had lost limbs defending their country.

Bryan Hoddle is not a man who cries easily.

He left that room to cry.

He came back changed. Not in the dramatic, overnight way stories sometimes romanticize — but in the slow, tectonic way that reshapes everything quietly and permanently. The veterans had undone something in him. His life mission shifted on its axis that day, and it has never shifted back.

Runner's World would eventually name Bryan one of the top influencers in the world in his specialty. He became nationally known as "The Soldiers' Coach."

None of that starts without Tony Volpentest running a world record in Atlanta.

None of that starts without a phone call in 1995.

THE BABY NO ONE KNEW ABOUT

There is one more side effect I want to tell you about, because it's the kind of story that stops you cold.

When Ross Perot hired Bryan to coach Tony, he paid Bryan a salary. Bryan and his wife Sherri quietly used that money to adopt an infant son named Steven.

Mr. Perot didn't know this until Sherri mentioned it to his daughter, who told her father.

When he found out, Ross Perot — presidential candidate, Texas billionaire, one of the most powerful men in America — was thrilled.

A salary paid to prepare a sprinter had built a family. The honeybee had no idea what it was carrying.

TORONTO, AND THE MOMENT EVERYTHING SHIFTED

In 1997, my wife Julie and I helped secure Tony and his Australian rival Neil Fuller a spot in one of the most hyped sporting events of the year — the One-to-One Challenge at the SkyDome in Toronto, where Olympic champions Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey would settle once and for all who was the fastest man on earth.

Tony and Neil were the undercard. The sideshow. The warm-up act.

The crowd didn't get the memo.

When Tony barely outleaned Neil at the finish line, the SkyDome erupted. Not polite applause — a roar. A standing ovation that, by the end of the day, would be the loudest crowd response of the entire event. This in a building that had come to watch two Olympic gold medalists race for a million dollars and the title of fastest human alive in a millionaire dollar race, winner take all. Michael Johnson pulled a hamstring fifty meters in. The main event fizzled.

The undercard stole the show.

I've tried many times to describe what it felt like in that building during Tony and Neil's race. The hair standing up on your arms. The sense that something was shifting in the culture, that a wall was quietly coming down, and you were close enough to hear it falling. The mainstream sports world was waking up to what disabled athletes could do, what their stories meant, what the crowd was hungry for.

THE RIPPLES ARE STILL MOVING

The United States Olympic Committee is now the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. That name change didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened because of a movement of many people,  and that movement had names and faces and specific moments attached to it.

NBC broadcast roughly 1,200 hours of Paralympic coverage during the Tokyo Games in 2021. Paralympic medalists now receive the similar financial recognition as their Olympic counterparts. These are not small things. These are cultural tectonic shifts.

I don't claim that Tony Volpentest caused all of this. History is always more complicated than any single story. But I was there in Atlanta. I was there in Toronto. I watched the walls start to come down, one race at a time, one standing ovation at a time, one CBS tape mailed to a veterans' hospital at a time.

The side effects of that era are still moving through the world.

THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE FIRST CHOICE

If I'm being completely honest about where the real heroism lives in this story, it doesn't live with any of us on that team.

It lives with Tony's parents.

They were handed a child born with no hands and no feet, and they made a choice — daily, quietly, without any guarantee of outcome — to raise him toward greatness. That is not a small thing. That is an act of faith so foundational that everything else in this story rests on top of it.

I remember introducing Tony at a government leadership event after the Games. He thanked his parents from the stage. The room, filled with seasoned, unsentimental professionals, went quiet in a specific way — the way rooms go quiet when something true is being said. Then they stood and applauded.

I saw that happen many times. Standing ovations before he said a word, just from watching the tape. People undone by a man who balanced himself on paint cans and ran faster than almost any human being alive.

God had a plan for Tony Volpentest. I believe that without reservation. But a plan requires people willing to say yes at every step along the way — his parents first, then Ross Perot, Bryan Hoddle, a prosthetist in Oklahoma City, a race director in Toronto who answered her phone and understood the vision on the very first call.

Every one of them chose to carry the pollen forward.

ONE FINAL WORD

The honeybee never knows.

It doesn't know about the apple orchards and the almond groves and the cucumber fields. It doesn't know about the billion people eating food that exists because of something it did without awareness or intention. It just moves from flower to flower, faithful to its design, and the world is fed.

When you step into your own calling — the thing you were made to do, the gift that is uniquely yours — the most important work you'll do might be the work you never see. The veteran who stands up straighter. The family that is built. The child who watches a man with no feet cross a finish line first and decides, for the first time, that their own life has no fixed ceiling.

Those are the side effects.

And sometimes, if you're paying attention, you begin to realize that the side effects were the main event all along.

God works all things together for good.

— Coach Weber
Philippians 4:13

Tony Volpentest's record-breaking gold medal run at the 1996 Paralympic Games:

https://youtu.be/ZaSWjKMhNfY

Copyright Larry Weber. All rights reserved worldwide.

Ross Perot served as a mentor to all of us in the mid to late 1990's. Mr. Perot's leadership enabled Tony's story to unfold through his generous business and financial support. 

Bryan Hoddle  coached Tony to two gold medals and a world record at the Atlanta Games in 1996. His greatest legacy however is likely his work as  "The Soldiers Coach".

Ross Perot and Larry Weber are  speaking at a press conference at the 1996 Paralympic Games in Atlanta. Mr. Perot helped us fulfill the strategic goals we set at the outset of our team partnership in 1995. Working directly with Mr. Perot is one of the highlights of my life.

Also, I was able to coach Tony after Bryan move onto other ventures. I was blessed to coach Tony to two gold medals and a world record in the 200 meters at the world Paralympic Championships in Barcelona, Spain.

Our company, Physically Able Sports was the first sports marketing firm is history to work exclusively with Paralympic Athletes. From day one our goal was to break down barriers that stood in the way of disabled athletes becomming full-time professional athletes.

    Tony winning the 100 Meters at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games

I will end our story where it all started. Tony Volpentest, Ross Perot, Bryan Hoddle, and Larry Weber made one great team.  We started out with a blank piece of paper and filled it with dreams. I am so grateful to have worked with some amazing people in the Paralympic Movement. It was quite the journey.