He's got the world on a string

Scott Weider ranks among the world's best kite flyers, inside and out

BROOKLINE - The scene has all the trappings of an idyllic day at the beach. A little boy

keeping a white kite aloft darts among older and taller kite flyers maneuvering strings of their own to keep their diamonds and birds afloat in the air. The setting, however, is the hockey rink turned tennis facility of the Dexter and Southfield schools, enclosed by four walls and a

vaulted ceiling. Relying not on fans but on perpetual motion - an arm extended, a wrist flicked, a step taken - instead of wind, indoor kite flyers replicate the graceful undulations of a quintessentially outdoor pastime.

The occasion is the Northeast Regional No Wind Kite Contest, convened by Scott Weider, a former national champion indoor flyer from Rhode Island for whom kiting, indoors and out, is both therapy and passion. He clears the floor of competitors and bystanders. In one of his first ventures flying indoors since a tractor-trailer rear-ended his pickup truck on the New Jersey Turnpike more than a year ago, he demonstrates the improbable sport that will keep him pulling strings long after the weather turns uncooperative.

To music from the movie "Don Juan DeMarco," Weider guides an 8-foot-wide black kite that looks like an elongated bowtie or bat imprinted with a serpent of silver to match the 20-foot Mylar tail that is Weider's signature accoutrement. The kite has four lines, two apiece to the handles that Weider holds. By pulling his hands forward and back, up and down, and sliding across the floor, he makes the kite trace an arc over his head and coaxes it vertical to outline a circle around his body and insists it skim the floor. The Mylar tail trails in intricate airborne curlicues.

"I have a passion that I work on and some people get excited about it. That's a really neat thing," says Weider, 45. "It's totally alternative. It's something fairly new. There's new things being developed constantly with kites. To be on that cutting edge is really neat."

Outdoor kites date back at least 2,000 years, to China, where, legend has it, a farmer tied a string to his hat so the wind wouldn't carry it away and where, according to written accounts from 200 BC, a general floated a kite over city walls to measure the depth of enemy forces. Indoor kiting enjoys a briefer history. In 1994 the East Coast Stunt Kite Championships in New Jersey included the sport's first indoor contest. In 1996 Hurricane Bertha forced cancellation of Newport's kite festival, so organizers moved the Rhode Island event indoors to the YMCA, which is where Weider was introduced to the concept.

"It's taken a while for technology to catch up," says Gary Engvall, a Cranston, R.I., kitemaker and president of the American Kitefliers Association. "In order to compete indoors you need a very light, efficient kite. The old technology of wooden sticks and whatever cloths are available doesn't work well. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that you had graphite sticks and polyester fabric."

The Northeast, Engvall notes, has produced some of the country's strongest indoor flyers. "It gets too cold and dark too early to go out and play," he says. "There are a lot of folks in the Northeast who have gone indoors."

Weider started flying kites in 1992, when he bought an outdoor kite while vacationing with his wife on Block Island. He has earned recognition for stunt and team flying outdoors, and in 2005 he was crowned national indoor champion.

"It takes a special touch to be able to fly indoors, and Scotty is one of the best," Engvall says. "He's an incredibly well-known to the point of famous flier, but he's one of those guys who shows up and does what needs to be done. There's no prima donna aspect."

For Weider, whose troubled past includes an addiction to cocaine that he battled two decades ago, kite flying has become what he calls his "healthy obsession." Weider also suffers from a degenerative disc in his back, and in 1998 he underwent spinal fusion surgery. Kiting became a welcome outlet for a man whose physical limitations forced him to give up construction work and surfing.

"Kite flying gave me the element of being out in nature, being on the beach, being near the water because that's where the wind is best," he says. "It's God's greatest gift, besides children, to put up a kite."

Weider launched a new career as an award-winning photographer for the Woonsocket Call. In 2000 he was injured in a hit-and-run automobile accident while on assignment. "That really set me back more," he recalls. "Last summer was the strongest I've been in 12 or 15 years."

In May of 2007, on his way to judge the East Coast championship kite festival in New Jersey, after a busy season that included winning a regional indoor competition in Oregon and flying inside the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, a tractor-trailer hit his pickup. Weider suffered a concussion and neck injuries that kept him bedridden for three months, and then back problems that laid him up another four months. He resigned his job at the Call and worries now whether he and his wife can keep up with payments on their three-bedroom Cape in Coventry. He has been taking pain medication for a decade. "People see my physical appearance, and it looks like I'm perfectly fine," he says, "but physically I'm not."

His orthopedist is impressed. "He's come back from a lot of adversity. The kite flying is what's helped," says Dr. Christopher Huntington. "He's matched or beaten a lot of people who are a lot younger and have a lot less physical ailments."

Only in recent months is Weider resurfacing in the kiting world. He flew again inside the Air and Space Museum in April. Weider's also back flying kites on Brenton Point in Newport.

"It's been my therapy," he says. "I'm on my feet. I'm flying my kite. I'm running back and forth. . . . It just keeps me going."

The competition in Brookline is a comeback of sorts. It features eight contenders, including a 14-year-old whom Weider mentors; an electrician from Woonsocket, R.I., who balances three small homemade kites off the end of a pole; and Stephen Santos, a 53-year-old business executive from Cumberland, R.I., who wins the event with a routine set to Beatles songs in which he flew two kites in tandem.

"I'm like a little kid flying kites," Weider says. "What's more important in life than just enjoying life for what it is? I've had enough negativity to last 10 lifetimes."

Earlier in the evening, before the competition began, a fellow judge loaned 5-year-old Oliver Waddleton of Jamaica Plain a small white kite and taught him to fly it. The boy, delighted, ran around and around the rink, the kite riding high behind him. Now, exhausted and in his mother's arms, he rests his head on her shoulder while Weider, who on his website likens kite flying to "having a bird listen to your mind," loads his equipment into his 1991 Honda and calls it a night.