NEWPORT BEACH The moment Bonner Paddock enters a room, his eyes search for the 90-degree angles in doorways, pillars, table legs and standing people. The angles signal up from down for a man born without a sense of balance.

Turn out the lights and a dizzying tornado tears through him. He loses his compass. He sometimes falls, trips over his gimpy left leg, maybe skins a knee the way he did thousands of clumsy times as a child.

Paddock, the Honda Center's director of corporate sponsorship, has had 32 years to adjust, to find the angles, to fall, to rise and to catch himself before he tumbles.

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He has groped his way through sports. He stumbled through a marathon, becoming an inspiration for a family with a son who couldn't walk.

He staggered around the rugged hiking terrain of Crystal Cove on a recent afternoon to train for his next I-told-you-so challenge, proving there's a life to live outside the limits of cerebral palsy.

Paddock wants to climb a mountain now, the 19,341-foot tall Mount Kilimanjaro.

"Just to show that I can," he says.

But his desire to get to the top is rooted in all times he fell. If Paddock had believed what doctors told him, he should have been in a wheelchair at age 15, dead at 20. He wouldn't be near the bend of a Crystal Cove trail, panting, sweating, digging his hiking boots into the dusty earth and climbing. ... To continue reading, click on Page 2.

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