The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  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, mast
ering 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.

  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,” Mat
thew 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.