The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (7 page)

 

By the end of his college freshman season, Robles was already one of the best wrestlers on the Arizona State team. The next two years, he won All-American honors by finishing in the top eight at the national tournament. Yet he still wasn't wrestling up to his full potential. Unforeseen events kept him distracted. In his freshman year, the ASU athletic department dropped its wrestling program after the Board of Regents cut the university's budget by $26 million. Robles considered transferring, but didn't know where to go, and the program was eventually reinstated. A year later, his stepfather, Ron Robles, abandoned his mother, Judy, and left for California with another woman.

Ron, Judy, and Anthony had become a family when Anthony was two. Since then, Ron and Judy had had four other children together. Anthony never met his biological father, and always longed to be accepted by Ron, whose last name he'd chosen to take. “I don't call him my stepdad,” he told me. “I don't think of him as my stepdad. He's my dad. And I really looked up to him.”

Sometimes the elder Robles reciprocated with a queer sort of affection, as when he took the boy to a tattoo parlor so they could get the same guardian angel imprinted on their bodies. It was an ironic choice: there was little Anthony Robles needed more protection from than his stepfather. Both Anthony and Judy told me that Ron criticized his stepson mercilessly, and sometimes physically abused Judy in his presence.

Judy said Ron couldn't forgive her son the color of his skin—Anthony's biological father is black—or forgive her the love she feels for Anthony. For Ron, she believes, these were intolerable, living reminders that he had to share her with other men.

Still, for all the tumult when he was home, Ron's leaving devastated Judy. In addition to losing her husband, she had no income, four children to feed, and a mortgage to pay. She fell into depression and took to her bed. The bank began arrangements to foreclose on her house.

Until then, wrestling had been Anthony's respite from a noxious home life—“my sanctuary,” he called it—and even the indignities he suffered in his first season were preferable to the ones his stepfather delivered, because there was always something to be done about the former. Losses, no matter how ugly, could be avenged. Ron Robles could not be made to love.

But Ron's leaving and the gloom that hung over Judy were too much. Even Anthony, unremittingly positive until now, started to despair. He told his mother he couldn't keep his mind on the mat, and he offered to quit college and take a job to help out.

Judy knew her son dreamed of becoming an NCAA champion, and seeing his willingness to give up that possibility inspired her to get out of bed. She told him to stay in school. She sold her blood to get enough money to feed the family. Eventually, she got a job working at ASU.

Anthony returned to wrestling with a ferocious determination to make good on his mother's blessing. Until his senior year of college, few supposed him a real contender for a Division I championship. But in the fall of 2010, he emerged as something wholly different—something redoubtable and unprecedented. Against his first opponent of the season, he reeled off 14 points and a pin in under two minutes. The next he pinned even faster. Robles continued in this fashion from November through January.

Just after the New Year, he assumed the number-two rank in his weight class nationally. He then proceeded to technical fall or shut out his next nine opponents. In February, he became the top-ranked 125-pounder in the NCAA. The ASU Sun Devils ended the season with a road campaign in which they dropped every meet from Nebraska to Stanford. Robles, meanwhile, outscored his opponents 69–2 to close out an undefeated season.

 

Typically, a wrestling match begins with a series of skirmishes, starting from the neutral position. Grapplers paw and push, cuff and tug one another until one senses he has unbalanced his opponent enough to create an opening, and then lunges at one or both of his legs. The lunged-at wrestler tries to sprawl his legs away or, if he cannot, gives them up and counterattacks with his upper body. This begins the “scramble”—a battle of vectors, inertia, and angular acceleration, alternating between strained counterpoise and flashes of explosive motion, as each wrestler tries for a takedown.

The critical thing about the scramble is that, at the college level and beyond, it is almost entirely reflexive, moving far too fast to be thought through. Scrambling wrestlers rely on muscle memory, developed through extensive repetition and retained for years. (Hence the theatrics in the audience at many wrestling meets, where former competitors jerk their legs, claw the air, and otherwise try to gesticulate their way free of the fracas before them.) Occasionally, a wrestler exerts some conscious control as he scrambles, deliberately trying something new and counter-instinctual. This is usually the point at which he loses the scramble.

Wrestlers scrambling against Robles regularly reached for the leg that wasn't there, the way people who learned to drive on a manual transmission car sometimes grab for a phantom gear stick in an automatic. This was especially true when opponents tried to “turn the corner” clockwise, or slip past Robles's right side to complete a takedown. With no right ankle to catch hold of, they lacked the anchor they needed to finish their attack. A number of other moves were also literally out of reach, including the navy ride, the western ride, and some cradles. One of the most popular and effective maneuvers for the man on top, known simply as “legs,” involves lacing one leg through the bottom man's same-side leg and turning it outward at the hip. Needless to say, there is no “legs” without legs.

Whenever an opponent attempted to gain purchase on a part of Robles that does not exist, muscle memory failed him. It was a bewildering and anxiety-provoking moment. “A lot of the stuff you're used to doing on a more able-bodied wrestler, you can't do,” Matthew Snyder, Robles's first-round victim at the 2011 championships, told me. “You're looking for the leg and it's just not there.” When this happened repeatedly, as it did for anyone who hadn't trained with a one-legged wrestler before facing Robles, frustration, confusion, and ultimately demoralization set in. This was a fatal combination. No wrestler can win with despondency in his heart, at least not against a foe as formidable as Robles.

What was an opponent to do? Robles's anatomy suggested at least two possibilities. One was to attack his leg relentlessly. Every time Robles scooted across the mat or attempted a takedown, he drove off the same leg. Every time a competitor yanked his ankle outward, the same knee got wrenched against the joint. As a result, the muscles, tendons, and ligaments of Robles's leg endured terrific strain, and thus were more prone to fatigue and injury than those of a wrestler who can distribute the same stresses over two legs. By his senior year of high school, his knee was so stiff after practices that he could barely move it. If an opponent could have somehow consistently circumvented Robles's hulking upper body, he might have eventually been able to take out his relatively vulnerable leg.

A second, and perhaps underutilized, strategy for scoring against Robles can be found 5,000 miles east of Arizona, in the Tuileries gardens of Paris. Among dozens of giant statues dotting the Tuileries is one of the Greek mythical hero Theseus, in close combat with the Minotaur, the bovine-headed, human-bodied offspring of Queen Pasiphaë and a white bull. In this depiction, Theseus forces the Minotaur's massive horned head down with his left hand as he prepares to bludgeon the beast with the club in his right. He triumphs not by evading the Minotaur's deadly horns, but by confronting them directly.

In the 2008 NCAA championships, Stanford's Tanner Gardner took an analogous approach against Robles. For much of the first period, Gardner plowed forward, ramming his head into Robles's and collaring his neck. In the second period he converted a head hold into a takedown, and, beginning the third period in the top position, he took the unorthodox course of releasing Robles's body and applying a headlock from behind. His tactics sent the match into overtime, where he again took Robles down with a head hold, earning himself the win. Theseus would have approved.

All of this—every detail of Robles's technique and virtually every square inch of his body—has been hotly debated in the fertile anonymity of cyberspace. Loyalists tend to concede his superior strength, but emphasize the many other variables that inform the outcome of a wrestling match. Robles both benefits and suffers from his anatomy, they argue, and to focus on a single metric is to miss the point. Many believe justice requires a long view, a weighing of equities and inequities over time. “It might have been unfair for us to have to wrestle him,” Snyder said, “but it was more unfair what he had to go through to get there.”

The detracting camp sometimes cites the numerous amputees in the sport as evidence of Robles's advantage. In 2001, for example, double-leg amputee Nick Ackerman (whose grandfathers, bizarrely, lost their legs in separate accidents) won the Division III tournament. Other critics linger over Robles's disproportionate upper-body strength. If they are aware of the irony of calling the man once considered too small to succeed at the Division I level too big, they don't let on.

This is not a position held only by a few angry bloggers on the periphery of the wrestling community. While many doyens of the sport have loudly hailed Robles as a deserving winner and a first-class human being, several of them have lowered their voices and confided to me—always “off the record”—that he wouldn't stand a chance against a wrestler with the same-sized torso. A 157-pounder, say.

But what most critics don't know is that Robles
did
wrestle a 157-pounder. Every day in practice at Arizona State, he worked out with Brian Stith, a former national runner-up in that weight class. Just as he did in high school with Freije, Robles trained with Stith so that, when it came time to compete in his own weight class, the job would be comparatively easy. And was he able to hold his own against one of the top 157-pound wrestlers in the country? “For sure,” Stith told me. “Anthony would be a champion at any weight he wrestled.”

 

In the last match of his career, the Division I championship, Robles found himself facing Iowa Hawkeye Matt McDonough, the defending national champion. The two had never wrestled before, but Robles had known all year that to win the title, he'd likely have to get through McDonough, the favorite going into the season. He'd kept a picture of McDonough in his locker, where he could look at it before and after practices.

Robles didn't sleep well on the eve of the match. He was up against not only one of the sport's biggest stars, but the coaches who had snubbed him, the critics who had dismissed him, and the hourglass he had turned over when he announced, three days earlier, his plan to retire from wrestling and become a motivational speaker. Robles tossed in his bed, with the knowledge that strange and unexpected things happen this deep in a tournament eating at his confidence. After four matches in two days, injuries flare. Legs and lungs give out. The body mutinies, and attention yields to momentary, decisive distraction.

But the instant the ref blew his whistle, the anxiety was gone. Robles dropped to his knee, and McDonough responded in kind, lowering his own stance to meet him. They vied for control of one another's hands and wrists. Twenty-five seconds in, Robles caught both of McDonough's wrists and spun behind him for a takedown. He then pried McDonough's supports from under him and drove him forward into the mat. With McDonough on his belly, Robles searched for an opening, shading to the right, then to the left.

At 88 seconds, he found it. As McDonough pushed his way up to all fours, Robles cinched his opponent's left wrist across his body and rolled hard across his own shoulders for a cross-wrist tilt. The torque was extraordinary, and the defending champion flipped like a pancake.

It was the most remarkable move of Robles's career. McDonough, inverted, pedaled vainly in the air as the crowd roared to its feet. Few of the 17,000 fans there had ever seen the Hawkeye on his back. McDonough kicked loose, but Robles kept him flat on his stomach. A minute later, Robles turned him with another tilt.

McDonough wriggled free again, but he was badly shaken. Robles had taken him down, kept him down, and was now turning him virtually at will. Tom Brands, Iowa's usually irascible head coach, stood mutely by. At the end of the first period, Robles was far ahead on points, with an even more commanding psychological lead.

Everyone loves an underdog. The problem here was figuring out who he was. Some saw in Robles's two tilts his latest crime against sport and man, others a great comeuppance to a world that had disbelieved. But the fans who watched the match had one thing in common: a year before they could not have imagined a one-legged man winning an NCAA Division I wrestling championship any more than they could have imagined him flapping his arms and taking flight. All of them—every last person who stood staring from the stands—must have felt the tethers loosen between what they beheld and what they thought they knew, the latter drifting away, into the rainy Philadelphia night.

Robles coasted the rest of the way. McDonough raced around him for the last two periods, seeking an opportunity, but there was none. Time expired. The referee raised Robles's hand.

McDonough hurried to the locker room, accepting no handshakes and no applause. There is no second place for Iowa wrestlers.

An interviewer stopped the new champion as he made his way off the mat. He told Robles he was an inspiration. “It's an honor,” Robles said, breaking into a boyish grin. He took up his crutches and strode—there is no better word for it—over to the stands, where his mother and girlfriend jumped and cried and hugged each other. The crowd gave him a sustained standing ovation.

Later that day, the coaches in attendance voted Robles the outstanding wrestler of the tournament, making him, by consensus, the best college wrestler in any weight class, anywhere in the country.