Casey Martin

Casey Martin: The Accidental Advocate


By Josie Byzek and Tim Gilmer

When Casey Martin sued the PGA Tour in 1997, he hesitantly stepped over a line that defined him as disabled. Then came a four-year battle in which Martin–enduring insults, lack of understanding, unwanted public scrutiny and more than a little hoopla–distinguished himself with tenacity and grace all the way to the Supreme Court. He aimed high, set an example of resolute conviction and ultimately won a legal victory that will benefit people with disabilities–in a range of public accommodations–for years to come. New Mobility is proud to honor him as our 2001 Person of the Year.

Casey Martin
Casey Martin

Martin was born with a rare blood disorder–Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome–meaning blood pours into his right leg and can’t be pumped back out. Full-length gradient pressure stockings help minimize swelling, but his leg is severely atrophied. If he steps on it the wrong way, his tibia might snap. “If you look at the X-ray of his tibia,” said his doctor, Don Jones, in USA Today, “it looks like Swiss cheese.” Weight-bearing exacts a toll and amputation is a possibility, especially if the leg continues to deteriorate.

Raised in Eugene, Ore., in a sports-minded family, Martin wanted to be an athlete, bad leg and all. Prior to high school he tried other sports, like basketball. Jumping was exhilarating, but landing was excruciating. “It was kind of hard growing up because I wanted to do other things, but [the pain] forced me into golf. I mean, I love golf, but I might be doing some other sport had it not been for my leg.”

Martin’s parents managed a delicate balancing act in raising their two boys. Rather than go skiing or do rugged outdoor sports, they often chose less demanding activities because of Casey’s leg. Perhaps that’s why his mother, Melinda, persuaded him to take piano lessons. “But he drew the line at classical studies,” she says. “He only wanted to play for enjoyment.”

What he really wanted was to excel at sports, like his older brother Cameron. “We wanted to say no to basketball,” says King Martin, Casey’s father, “but we also wanted him to find his own limitations.” Even though they acknowledged that he was different, no one in the family ever considered him disabled. “We find some irony in that now,” says King.

Every year at spring break the family–King, Melinda, Cameron and Casey–escaped to a sunny location for a vacation: Phoenix, Tucson, Santa Barbara, Hawaii. The boys would dust off their clubs and use the vacation to get ready for the coming golf season.

Golf in the Blood
Casey excelled at golf from the start. He won 17 Oregon Golf Association junior events by the time he was 14, was named first-team all-state for three years in high school and won the state championship as a senior. Cameron, two years older, had blazed a trail for Casey, winning the state high school golf championship and the state amateur championship as well. But living up to his brother’s sports prowess was not Casey’s sole aim. In high school he was a straight-A student and went on to Stanford University, where he studied economics and was an academic All-American.

At Stanford he captained the team that won the 1994 National Collegiate Athletic Association championship. The following year, Martin won the U.S. Intercollegiate Golf Championship, and when his team again reached the NCAA finals in 1995, he shared a room on the road with a freshman named Tiger Woods.

Although he occasionally used a golf cart in high school competition, Martin tried to go it alone in college. He wanted to be “just one of the guys” rather than be labeled as “the handicapped boy.”

“My biggest struggle in this is that I’ve never felt like I was disabled. Yeah, my leg’s messed up … but … it’s hard to embrace being disabled because it separates you and puts you in this box. But I am disabled, obviously. There are times in my life that my leg is in severe pain, but,” he adds, downplaying his condition, “it’s not like I’m shooting morphine every five minutes.”

But pain itself is a major limitation. And his passion for golf has not been kind to his leg. He first began to realize that one day he might have to face amputation and a prosthesis when he was competing for Stanford. So obvious was his pain at one college match that the opposing coach from Arizona State University told him, “Man, you’ve got to take a cart.” But Martin refused. Eventually, though, he gave in, his coach requested an accommodation from the NCAA, they said “no problem,” and Martin competed with considerably less pain. It was the first time a disabled golfer had asked to use a cart during NCAA competition.

Turning Pro
In 1995, with funding from four individual sponsors, Martin set out to turn pro. He participated in the PGA Tour’s qualifying tournament–commonly called tour school–where thousands of outstanding golfers hope to earn a shot at the big time, but only 35 qualify each year. In that first year, Martin gritted his teeth and limped around courses, ignoring his doctor’s warning that he was irreparably damaging his leg. As a rookie, he didn’t want to make waves. He wanted to abide by the tour’s “if you don’t walk, you don’t golf” rule for as long as he was physically able, even though the qualifying tournament allowed carts.

The tour takes walking seriously–and not just because walking is considered by many to be integral to the game. Here, as in the culture-at-large, image is everything. Back in the ’80s, after heavy lobbying by, among others, Senior PGA Tour board member and golf great Arnold Palmer, golf carts were outlawed on the senior tour as well-the senior tour is governed by the PGA Tour. Palmer thought it would hurt the sport’s image for the general public to see golfers who could not walk from hole to hole. But the prohibition was dropped after only two tournaments when a groundswell of complaints came from oldster golfers demanding their carts back.

Martin failed to qualify for the tour in ’95 and ’96–instead playing on the NGA Hooters Tour. When the qualifying tournament rolled around once more in the fall of ’97, he was feeling low. His dad knew he was playing poorly and his leg was bothering him. The pain–especially in his shin–had grown worse, and he used a cart all the time now. “I thought he had come to the end of it,” says his father. “He had gone as far as he could go. So I wrote him a note telling him how proud I was of everything he had accomplished. He went out that day and shot the day’s low score–69–on a really tough course.” That round vaulted him into the top 15 for the final stage of the qualifying tournament and assured him of a chance to play either in the PGA Tour or the Nike Tour, the next best thing.

But that year, for the first time, the PGA Tour decided not to allow carts on the final stage of the qualifying tournament. “I think they changed it seeing Casey coming,” says his father.

All About Heart
Now Martin had 10 days to decide what to do. He could no longer walk courses, and the tour would not let him ride. The choice was clear: either give up his quest to be a professional golfer or somehow persuade the tour to allow him to ride a cart. A year earlier a family friend, Eugene lawyer Bill Wiswall, had told Martin that he could sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But he considered this a last resort.

He mulled over his doctor’s advice and prayed over the decision. Martin, then 25, had reached a turning point that–looking back at his life–now seemed inevitable. Since he first picked up a golf club two decades earlier, he had been moving inexorably toward this moment. Martin’s father, whose Christian faith is shared by the whole family, felt his son’s dilemma was part of a larger plan. “God made sure we didn’t have another option,” he says. Martin asked the tour to allow him to use a cart during competition. Deep down, he didn’t think he’d be denied the tool he needed to achieve his dream–he’d always gotten an accommodation in the past. But the tour turned thumbs down.

“I sent records of my leg, a video of my leg, and tried to let them see what I’m going through so they could make a decision, and they didn’t even open it. They didn’t even consider the decision. In a sense, they brought it on themselves. I pretty much got a form letter back that said, ‘We don’t consider these things, sorry, you’re going to have to walk.'”

Martin considered dropping the request and accepting the pat rejection. But Wiswall advised using the ADA. “He’s a golfer and watched my career go up and didn’t want to see me stop playing,” says Martin. “He said, ‘You don’t have to just stop.'”

Martin authorized Wiswall to write a letter officially requesting that he be allowed to use a golf cart during competitions as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA.

He was denied a second time.

This denial came in the form of a fax–not a letter or a personal phone call. “I remember Wiswall taking the fax and reading it–and it was cold,” says Martin. “I still expected the tour to say, ‘We’re really sorry about what’s going on. We need to think about this, ask some of our members and see what we can do and in the meantime we’ll help you out.'”

But instead the tour said, in effect: “‘How dare you threaten us. We make the rules. Get lost,'” says Martin. If he truly wanted to carve out a golf career, he had only one option now–sue–and his ire had been aroused. “So I told Bill, ‘all right, let’s do it.'”

At about the same time, Martin’s father was meeting with Nike founder and president Phil Knight. “I went to him with two videos in hand and just asked him to take a look. If he would talk with me afterward, fine, if not, that was OK, too.” The videos documented his son’s two best-known qualities: his ability and his disability. After seeing the videos, Knight agreed to support Martin by talking with tour commissioner Tim Finchem, making a public statement of support, and asking his board to consider making Martin one of Nike’s athletes.

“Phil Knight isn’t bound by traditional thinking,” says King Martin. “He’s a different kind of bird. He saw a quality in Casey–what Nike has always stood for. It’s all about heart.”

The tour, stubborn to the end, chose tradition. They would go the distance legally, and they clearly thought they would prevail. For one thing, they had deep pockets.

To the High Court
Martin filed his ADA lawsuit on Nov. 26, 1997, in an Oregon federal court and U.S. Magistrate Thomas Coffin quickly granted an injunction allowing him to use a cart during the qualifying tournament’s final stage. Martin missed making the PGA Tour by two strokes but qualified for the Nike Tour.

In the trial, golf greats Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer testified the tour’s party line: Golf isn’t golf if the golfers don’t walk. Walking tests the golfer’s stamina and a golfer using a cart would have an unfair advantage.

Then Martin took the stand. Declared one headline: “Martin Cries on Stand as he Describes the Pain of Walking the Course.” In the courtroom, spectators gasped when watching a video of Martin stripping off his support stocking–his withered leg rapidly swelled with blood. In that moment he must have felt–perhaps for the first time–the dual humiliation of being made an object of pity as well as a victim of discrimination. “I had concealed it up to that point. It wasn’t something I looked forward to doing,” he says. His testimony dramatically personalized the issue: “If I could trade my leg and a cart for a good leg, I would do it anytime, anywhere.”

Coffin ruled in favor of Martin on Feb. 11, 1998, and the tour quickly appealed, but the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the tour on March 6, 2000. In a last ditch effort to deny Martin a cart, the tour appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court heard the case on Sept. 26 and voted 7-2 in favor of Martin. The tour had tried to convince the justices that the nature of the professional game of golf was fundamentally altered if walking was not a requirement. In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote: “It would not fundamentally alter the nature of the PGA Tour games to accommodate him with a cart.”

The disability community has the tour’s arrogance–and Martin’s resolute character-to thank for one of the strongest ADA victories yet. “Had they handled it differently I might have been more hesitant to go through with it,” says Martin. “I don’t think of it as outright discrimination, more like institutional discrimination, an act of ignorance, I suppose–but I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on that.”

Even though the legal battle took four years to come to a resolution, Martin doesn’t feel he’s earned the right to call himself a role model for the disability community. “You could say I’m an accidental advocate,” he says. “But I’m grateful for it–that people can be helped and doors opened.”

Court of Public Opinion
Until Martin filed suit, most sports fans probably thought the ADA was the American Dental Association. As the case progressed, so did their education: They had to think about why people with disabilities would need a civil rights law and–even harder–figure out what side they were on. In time the high profile case crossed over from sports into the public domain, and Martin, with his open smile and charming cowlick, came across as everyone’s favorite nephew.

“This case got more attention than any other ADA case before or after,” says Mary Johnson, editor of the disability rights magazine Ragged Edge. “That’s because of the celebrity angle and the sports angle. Golf more than any other sport is an everyman’s game.” That is, it appeals to people of all ages and abilities, unlike other more physically demanding sports. Martin, says Johnson, is America’s disabled Everyman. And even though he’s not the first athlete with a disability to play pro sports, he’s recognized as a true competitor who broke through a longstanding barrier, a Jackie Robinson of sorts.

And because of that, a lot of people got it. The ADA is designed to apply to qualified individuals with disabilities on a case-by-case basis, to search for the fairness in each unique situation. Maybe the disability community already knew that, but it took a humble golfer from Eugene, Ore., to demonstrate the principles of the ADA to the nation. That’s what the law is supposed to do–open doors.

“And I think it has, no doubt,” says Martin. “It has for me.”

As much as Martin appreciates the public’s support of his case, he’s not a fan of the limelight and is still feeling his way with regard to a lasting public role. For now, he downplays his efforts at advocacy. “I’ve done a little bit of that,” he says. “But I think the best thing I can do for now is just be the best I can be–the best golfer–and set a good example that way.”

Aiming High
The road to success has not been easy. On the Nike Tour in 1998, Martin finished 29th in overall earnings. The following year he returned to the Nike Tour, improving to 14th in earnings, which qualified him for the PGA Tour in 2000. He didn’t play well enough to return to the PGA Tour in 2001, so he competed instead on the BUY.COM Tour–formerly the Nike Tour. At the time of this writing, in late fall of 2001, unencumbered by legal stress for the first time in years, he is preparing to play in the qualifying tournament again, hoping to make it back to the PGA Tour.

There have been high points along the way, like winning the Lakeland Classic, paying off his sponsors and getting lucrative endorsements from The Hartford and Nike. But money and memories have a way of fading, unlike something more substantial like say, a baby grand piano–the first purchase Martin made as a pro. It was a gift to himself that he’d started earning at the age of 6, when he lined up his first putt.

Two new honors were recently added to his sizeable collection. On Nov. 14 he appeared, along with former senator Bob Dole, at the Nike campus in Beaverton, Ore., to present Nike’s first annual Casey Martin Award to Paralympian soccer player and disability sports researcher/ advocate Eli Wolff. The $25,000 award money will be donated to a nonprofit organization–chosen by the awardee–that supports people with disabilities. A week later, on Nov. 20, Martin was the recipient of a Disability Rights Advocates Eagle Award in recognition of his commitment to promoting the ADA.

Whatever he does, one thing is for certain. He will give it everything he has, as always. He will aim high. His dad has seen to that. “When I was a young father,” recalls King Martin, “I was fond of motivating the boys with a quote I had read somewhere: ‘Not failure, but low aim, is a crime.'”

Now that Casey Martin has prevailed in the highest court in the land, his father–always proud–is aglow with respect. “I could preach it,” he says, “but he lived it.”

PGA Tour v. Martin: What it Means
In a year when the ADA has taken its lumps, the Martin case shows the law is alive and well and working as intended.Larry Paradis, president of Disability Rights Advocates in Oakland, Calif., points out how broad yet demanding the ruling is. “The Martin decision,” he says, “sets a very high burden of proof on the defendant” regarding Title III policies and practices. “We have already begun citing this case” in new lawsuits, he notes. The principle that applies is this: A public entity must show that if it denies full use of its facilities–for instance, by denying the legality of assist animals or the need to keep pathways clear for wheelchair use–it must show that it is absolutely essential to the business to do so. “No longer can they say, ‘this is the way we’ve always done it,'” says Paradis.But not everyone is equally impressed.

Steve Gold, a nationally-known disability rights attorney from Philadelphia, doesn’t think the Supeme Court’s decision has any real impact on the disability community. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Gold characterized the reaction of some disability advocates: “They’re laughing at it, totally laughing.” He went on to say that beyond the comfy confines of golf, thousands of people with disabilities face true oppression–for example many must still live in nursing homes. He also points to an employment rate which is still abysmally low 11 years post-ADA. No one can minimize the importance of employment, health care and living choices, but many disagree with Gold’s opinion that the Martin victory is mainly about golf.

“Martin is a guy who went to the mat on behalf of his civil rights and the rights of people with disabilities,” says Bobby Silverstein, chief counsel for the U.S. Senate committee that drafted the ADA over 10 years ago. Now he directs the Center for the Study and Advancement of Disability Policy in Washington, D.C. He knows ADA case law like he knows his own zip code. To him Martin’s case is one of the most important ADA victories yet: “The Supreme Court sustained and reaffirmed this prong of civil rights [Title III]. If we had lost this prong, think about the ramifications. It could have impacted getting ramps, other reasonable accommodations. … All of those core elements would have been down the tubes.”

Dennis Steinman, an ADA attorney in Portland, Ore., agrees with Paradis and Silverstein. He has cited the Martin decision in a Title III national class action suit in behalf of several million people with hearing disabilities seeking what Steinman considers a reasonable accommodation: inclusion of a small number of individualized closed-caption systems in Cinemark movie theaters. The systems would in no way interfere with hearing patrons’ viewing. The language in the Martin Supreme Court case, Steinman says, is critical. “It allows an ADA attorney to say to a federal judge, ‘Look, here are the parameters.'”

The Martin decision is expected to play a critical role in a wide range of Title III ADA cases. Title I, dealing with employment, and Title II, which covers governmental entities, may be considered the meat-and-potatoes of the ADA, but Title III completes the full meal deal. Full participation in the broad sweep of American culture will not be possible until private businesses that cater to the public–called public accommodations–modify the many practices and policies which have historically excluded people with disabilities.


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