The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (6 page)

 

The first time I met Anthony Robles—and nearly every time after—he was intercepted by a fan. We had arranged an interview at a Sheraton in St. Louis, where he was in town to provide color commentary for ESPN during the 2012 Division I championships. Robles loped into the hotel lobby on a pair of aluminum crutches—powerfully built with a handsome, gap-toothed grin that faintly recalled a young Mike Tyson.

I turned to greet him, and as I did an enormous man stepped between us. Four-time Super Bowl champion linebacker Matt Millen wanted to introduce himself to Robles and, not surprisingly, I couldn't get around him. Fifteen minutes passed. At last, Robles looked over to his agent, Gary Lewis, who maneuvered me between his client and Millen. Each man, the wrestler and the linebacker, extended a beefy hand in my direction.

It was a daunting decision. Wrestlers are known for their prodigious hand strength. Oklahoma alumnus Danny Hodge can still crush an apple in one hand at the age of 80. But Robles's grip is fearsome even by wrestling standards. Opponents have rarely been able to pry it off with one hand, and only sometimes with two. Many have ended up surrendering to his hold and have focused instead on limiting the damage he could do with it. “I couldn't even think of breaking his lock,” one candid victim told me.

I opted for the evil I didn't know and tentatively placed my hand in Millen's massive paw. He squeezed it, hard, and when he finally returned it to me intact, I felt as if I had gotten away with something splendid and improbable, like a deer bolting free of an anaconda's coil. Then I turned to Robles, whose handshake turned out to be restrained, even gentle. I wondered at this as we ducked into the hotel's sticky-floored lounge, which was not due to open for several hours, and where I imagined his fans wouldn't find us.

Twenty minutes later, a middle-aged man with a Negro League baseball jersey peered into the darkened banquette where I was interviewing Robles. He was missing a number of teeth, and he looked like he hadn't been eating well. “Man! Man!” he cried out when he discovered the person he had come looking for, and fell sobbing into Robles's arms. “You're a good brother! You're a good brother!” the man said, over and over again. Robles held him, and they talked for what seemed like a long time.

After the man left, blubbering an apology for interrupting, I asked Robles if he knew who he was. Robles said no. I asked if that kind of thing had happened before. Robles looked at me evenly. “It happens a lot,” he said.

Later that day, while Robles, Lewis, and I were walking the concession-stand loop of the stadium, a staffer stopped Lewis to ask if he needed a wheelchair for—pointing at Robles, on his crutches—“that one.” Robles demurred so generously that the staffer smiled with the satisfaction of someone who has just discharged an important civic duty.

 

Wrestling has barely changed since it was practiced in ancient Babylon, and one of the axiomatic truths of the sport is (or was) that success depends on a pair of strong, flexible legs. From my own high school experience, I learned that a wrestler can compensate for minor physical idiosyncrasies—a torso that is too long, say, or arms that don't straighten all the way. But to excel at the Division I level, you need legs like a Clydesdale's.

Yet Robles, in his senior year at ASU, carved through the opposition like Sherman through Georgia. He was so good, in fact, that a contingent of wrestling fans declared his missing leg to be an unfair
advantage.
Most wrestlers outside the Corn Belt train and compete in near-obscurity, but like a gambler who wins too much at the blackjack table, Robles had become too dominant not to be an object of scrutiny and suspicion.

He can carry more muscle in his torso
, the brief against him went.
He can get so low you can't shoot under him.
And the ultimate reversal:
It's unfair that he has just one leg for opponents to attack.

Did Robles win in spite of his one-leggedness, or because of it? It's an ungracious question, but it deserves consideration.

For some differently shaped athletes, the matter is testable. When Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee sprinter now accused of murdering his girlfriend, moved from Paralympic competition to able-bodied races, he underwent intensive biomechanical evaluation to determine whether his artificial legs were inherently faster than flesh-and-blood ones. Treadmills and stopwatches found no advantage, and he was cleared to compete. In his case, the question of fairness was simply a question of physics.

Wrestling is more complex. Where the outcome of a sprint is dictated by a single variable—speed—wrestling matches turn on an interaction of factors, including flexibility, timing, strength, endurance, and countless others.

Robles was at a marked disadvantage on one of the most influential of these dimensions. His balance is awful when he stands without support. A stiff shove sends him toppling like a tower of blocks, hence his dropping into a tripod whenever possible during a match. But wrestling demands a certain amount of time upright. When an opponent stood from the bottom position, Robles had to stand too, to prevent his man from escaping. This left him in the precarious situation of simultaneously leaning on his opponent for support and trying to lift and hurl him back to the mat. When the roles were reversed and Robles began on bottom, it was difficult for him to stand with his opponent clinging to his back. Similarly, the need to keep one leg under him compromised his ability to trip opponents, a common takedown finish.

Strength also figures importantly in a wrestler's likelihood of winning, and is largely a function of his weight. For an ordinary person, one leg takes up about 16 percent of his total body weight, which would give Robles the frame of someone weighing 150 pounds. In fact, he is even stronger than the math would predict, able to bench-press more than 300 pounds and knock out 100 pull-ups in two minutes. A lifetime on crutches has given him tremendous grip strength, which he used in the neutral, or both-men-standing, position to tie up opponents' hands and wrists, preventing them from initiating an attack. Down on the mat, his grip helped him jerk their arms from under them, secure their wrists fast, and wrench them onto their backs. On the occasions that he found himself in the bottom position, he broke the top man's hold and smartly shucked him off.

At five-foot-eight, Robles is also one to three inches taller than most 125-pounders. This gave him a reach advantage and allowed him to create of himself an extended lever arm for “tilts,” high-scoring moves that use concentrated torque to briefly expose an opponent's back to the mat.

But perhaps the greatest tactical advantage of Robles's having just one leg was that he had just one leg. This meant, yes, only one leg to defend against attack, but more importantly it meant a profound change in the way other wrestlers related to his body, and consequently the way they experienced the unfolding of a match. They became discombobulated, groping for a part of him that wasn't there. Strangely, they were the ones knocked off balance.

 

The day Robles entered the world, doctors whisked him from the delivery room, to spare his mother, 16 years old and single, the shock of seeing her one-legged child. He was what's known as a congenital amputee, and the cause of his condition remains unknown. When the doctors finally returned him to his mother, she looked her boy over carefully and predicted that the smooth declivity where his right leg should have been marked the end of her freedom forever.

Three years later, another doctor thought Robles would walk better with a prosthesis and fitted him with a heavy artificial leg. The boy promptly took it off when he got home and hid it behind a piece of furniture. At five, he shinnied 50 feet up a pole outside his house.

But if Robles was willful and assured by nature, a childhood of being stared at and taunted eventually saddled him with terrible self-consciousness. “I wanted to fit in so badly,” he later said of his elementary and junior high school years. “For a while I tried to hide . . . to be camouflaged.” But the bullies were not put off, and Robles gave up trying to disguise his differences.

And then a new idea began to crystallize along the margins of his awareness. What if, instead of trying to conceal his deformity, Robles were to put it on display? Perhaps by making himself as visible and vulnerable as possible, he could face—and even one day move past—the shame he felt about his body.

So in the ninth grade, about a decade later than most eventual champions, Robles pulled on a singlet and competed in his first wrestling match. He got off to a dismal start. Many of his early outings ended with Robles getting pinned to the jeers of hostile crowds. Worse still were the patronizing, after-match kudos for trying in spite of the obvious. At the end of his first season, Robles was last in the city of Mesa, Arizona, an area not known for great wrestling.

Watching Robles rule the NCAA championships eight years later, many believed that he had always been on an inexorable path to glory. He seemed simply
too good
for it ever to have been otherwise. The problem with this logic, however, is that it only works in hindsight. In the ninth grade, Robles was a miserable wrestler. Virtually nothing about him portended a champion. He was not born into a wrestling dynasty or raised in one of the handful of states where the sport still rivals football in popularity. He was 10 pounds underweight, even in the lightest weight class. He finished half his matches on his back.

What Robles did accomplish in that first season was largely psychological. Standing nearly naked in front of his peers started him, as he had hoped it would, on a long march back to feeling comfortable with his body and his identity, a feeling he had not known since he was a toddler. “Wrestling helped me come out of my shell,” Robles has said. “It forced me to say, ‘This is who I am.'” If it seems paradoxical that this metamorphosis began with Robles's being repeatedly trounced by his opponents, it may have been that he was learning to substitute the punishments they dispensed for the ones a self-reproving teenager inflicts on himself. Life is full of abuses, Robles knew, even at 14—the trick is to find the ones that offer the promise of redress.

 

After his first year of wrestling, nobody thought Robles stood a chance against most two-legged opponents, except Robles himself, who decided the expedient thing to do was to make the sport
more
difficult for himself. He asked the best wrestler on the team, a 152-pounder named Chris Freije, if they could train together over the summer. Freije agreed, but his interpretation of “training” turned out to be closer to most people's definition of cruelty. With a 50-pound advantage on his new apprentice, Freije pummeled Robles every day, often reducing him to tears. Robles had said he wanted no allowances for his weight, inexperience, or disability, and Freije, with a mix of stewardship and sadism, took him at his word. “He liked to be mean,” Robles told me.

Freije smacked Robles in the head and had him push cars over speed bumps in the withering midday Arizona heat. On the mat, he was even more punishing. Robles admired Freije immensely, but he needed to find a way to protect his psyche and his body, fast.

One day, Robles tried a radical change in his stance. Instead of balancing on one leg, he dropped to the mat, on two hands and a knee. Suddenly, with his lowered center of gravity, Freije could barely budge him. And by tucking his leg under his haunches, Robles substantially reduced his exposure to attack.

With his defense transformed, he turned to offense, mastering a series of tilts. By stringing together a few of these, including one he invented himself, Robles discovered he could rack up a dozen points in a single period.

Wrestling offers little room for revolutionary change. There is hardly any equipment to overhaul or reengineer. The principal aim of the modern wrestler is what it's always been, to drive his opponent from his feet to the ground. When a major innovation arrives, as it does maybe once in a generation, one of two things happens. Either a reliable countermove is developed and the innovation is consigned to a footnote in the sport's history, or the innovator catapults his own career, and sometimes those of many others.

There was no countermove for Robles's discoveries. In his sophomore year, his second season of wrestling, he used his lowered stance and his arsenal of tilts to rise from last place in the city of Mesa to sixth in the entire state of Arizona. Then he really started improving. As a junior and senior, Robles went 96–0, crowning his high school career with a national championship.

Becoming a national champion on less than four years' experience is an extraordinary accomplishment, and Robles figured it put him in position to realize a fantasy he had nurtured throughout high school: to wrestle for the University of Iowa, one of the most storied and successful athletic programs anywhere in the NCAA. With two undefeated seasons and a national title behind him, he finally indulged in the conscious belief that he would soon wear Iowa's black and gold.

Only Iowa never called. And neither did Oklahoma State or Columbia, his second and third choices. Only two middling Division I programs offered Robles the scholarship his family needed to afford college: Arizona State and Drexel. Robles was crushed. Rumors circulated that he was considered too small to win at the D1 level; that coaches shrank from the challenge of working with his unusual body and style; and that prospective teammates complained that if they were to train with him, they might become adept at wrestling a one-legged opponent, but ill prepared for the two-legged competition they would face on match days. Robles looked like a gamble at best, a liability at worst. In the end, his mother urged him to go to Drexel because the school's offer covered room and board. Robles chose ASU to stay close to his family and took a night job washing airplanes to make up the scholarship difference.