If ever there was a better pairing, on the surface at least, than that of the cast of MTV’s stunt show “Jackass” paired with a bunch of guys who play a sport nicknamed murderball, it hasn’t yet been seen.

“We did wheelchair high jump, wheelchair long jump, black-eye game and wheelchair cattle-prod jousting,” says Mark Zupan, one of the main subjects for the award-winning documentary “Murderball.”

“Murderball,” which had its American release in July, is a documentary that follows members of the U.S. Paralympic rugby team in their everyday lives leading up to their bronze medal win in Athens in 2004.

Granted, playing an updated version of the joust, replacing horses with wheelchairs and lances with electrified cattle prods may be an unusual way to raise awareness for a documentary film, but there is no question it’s appropriate.

Not only did the time spent with Johnny Knoxville and his band of rabble-rousers show how crazy the Murderball guys can get – it succeeded at doing them a greater service, letting the audience know they are normal guys.

The latter, Zupan says, is one of the biggest topics he has been touching on at his recent speaking engagements at college campuses across the United States.

“Just opening people’s eyes to people who are disabled or in wheelchairs and saying, ‘Look, we’re normal people; treat us normally – don’t baby us, don’t treat us like we’re fragile,'” Zupan says.

Between the film and the resulting flood of mainstream press the team received, including a stint on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” Zupan’s college speaking engagements offer a more intimate way for him to raise awareness about the lives of people in wheelchairs and gives the audience a chance to ask him questions directly.

“I pretty much talk about life, my experiences and what I’ve learned and what have you. It pretty much goes into everything – how I got hurt, what it was like after I got hurt – pretty much the gamut of everything,” Zupan says. “It’s been good; it’s been really good. What’s cool is that you get questions – people start to ask questions and most of it is able-bodied people. They’re just generally curious.”

The curiosity is, in part, because of the film’s focus on the lives of the rugby players off the court rather than on it. Although the movie does center around a team of athletes who play a sport off of the mainstream radar – Zupan says the real drama isn’t in the extraordinary sport but in their everyday lives.

“They said that it wasn’t going to be a sports movie; they don’t know shit about sports, and for them they pretty much said, ‘Fine, we’re not going to do a sports movie, we’re going to do a movie about, pretty much, life.’ And they said, ‘We’re not going to make a sappy after-school special – please feel bad for the guy in the wheelchair,'” he says.

“The movie is not just a sports movie; it’s a movie about life; it’s a movie about relationships; it’s a movie about struggle; it’s a movie about pretty much everything. It hits every avenue; it hits on many different levels.”

The film has succeeded on the critical level, garnering acclaim from critics across the nation and even winning the American documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Zupan says its ability to affect the individual viewer is still up in the air.

“When people see it, they come up and they’ll talk,” Zupan says. “A lot of people were scared to talk to people in chairs just because they didn’t know anything. I hope it’s changing perception; you never know, it could reach one person or it could reach hundreds – you don’t know. I think it’ll be big when the DVD comes out because they can get it for four bucks; they can get it from Netflix, you can get it from wherever rather than having to spend eight or nine bucks at the theater and not knowing what you’re gonna see.”

An area where he has been able to gauge the film’s impact is the Murderball court itself. He says the sport is attractive to disabled people with all sorts of backgrounds.

“More people are coming out to play – that’s good. It’s like a recruiting video, essentially. It shows people there’s more to do out there than everyday-life stuff.”