The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  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.

  Last year I chased down John Smith, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and Oklahoma State’s head coach since 1992, to ask him why, for heaven’s sake, he hadn’t recruited Robles to Stillwater. I reminded him that Robles had won a high school national championship after wrestling for just three and a half years. “We ended up not going that route,” Smith drawled, looking sheepish. “It was a mistake. I shoulda went that route.”

  I put the same question to Tom Brands, knowing that Iowa had been Robles’s dream program. He fumbled through a couple of thin excuses, then suddenly erupted: “Are you looking for a fight?” Thanking Brands for his time, I turned to walk away. “Hey!” he barked after me. “Hey! That’s off the record!”

  A few weeks before the 2012 Olympic Trials, I told Robles about my encounters with college wrestling’s two most revered coaches. He looked entertained, but not as gratified as I had anticipated.

  I tried something more provocative. I told him how some former and would-be Olympians had reacted to his decision not to try out for the U.S. Olympic team. Kenny Monday, a 1988 gold medalist, and Raymond Jordan, who had helped coach Robles at ASU, both told me they consider the top position to be Robles’s strongest, and that freestyle wrestling—a variant of the sport practiced at the Olympics—is better suited for wrestlers who excel in the neutral position. Jarod Trice, who wrestled at the Olympic Trials and calls Robles a close friend—“I just texted him this morning! He’s my boy!”—reluctantly agreed: “I don’t know how the leverage would work for him [in freestyle wrestling], because of the leg.”

  Where collegiate wrestling awards two points for any takedown, freestyle scoring is more variable. The simple leg tackles preferred by Robles earn just one point, while dramatic lifting-and-throwing takedowns—nearly impossible to execute while balancing on one leg—are worth three or five. Even more problematic, time on the mat, where Robles does most of his damage, is limited in freestyle wrestling.

  Still, Robles might be a better freestyler than he at first appears. He may not throw many opponents, but his ultralow center of gravity makes him equally difficult to throw. And unlike college wrestling, where using the same tilt twice in a row without changing holds doesn’t earn points, in freestyle wrestling Robles could repeatedly roll his opponent with a single tilt, sco
ring with every revolution.

  I shared his colleagues’ comments with Robles because I was frustrated by his choice to forgo the Olympic Trials. I was looking for an explanation, and somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I harbored a hope of spurring him to action, to prove the naysayers wrong. But before I let him speak, I goaded him one more time. Was it possible that he was too—ahem—inhibited to try out for London? Did he prefer walking away a college champion to risking a loss at the next level?

  “A little bit,” Robles confessed. He admitted to wanting to end his career on a high note, and to the seductive appeal of giving up to mitigate the pressure that accompanies sustained success.

  “But my dream was never to win a gold medal,” he said. “When I was in college, when I was wrestling in high school, my dream was to be a national champion.” He said he missed wrestling, profoundly, but that he was happy with the direction his life had taken in the last year: connection with fans, lucrative motivational speaking engagements, Nike sponsorship, a book release, a movie deal in the works.

  And then he hinted at the 2016 Olympic Games, in Brazil: “I’m still young. I’m only 23 . . . Four years from now, I’ll still be prime age.” (At the time the International Olympic Committee had dropped wrestling from the 2020 Games, and it appeared Brazil would be Robles’s last chance at Olympic competition; the sport was reinstated in February 2013.)

  I didn’t find it an altogether satisfying answer, and suddenly I realized why. I’d been wanting Robles to see things my way. I’d seen his crossing over to freestyle wrestling, where his anatomical advantages are reduced, and still winning—as I imagined he would—as the ultimate rebuttal to his critics. I’d wanted him to erase the invisible asterisks that accompany every record he ever posted. I’d wanted Robles to demonstrate, once and for all, that ingenuity and discipline, not brawn, were the bedrock of his success, because these are attributes I value.

  But I was just another guy reaching for phantom parts of Robles. His journey has been about many things, but it is not, fundamentally, about proving anybody wrong. Or being controversial. Or even about learning to wrestle with one leg. These are all epiphenomena of something larger.

  Robles has been trying to solve the problems that life has been heaping on him since the moment he was born: a body that didn’t look right and the bullies who wouldn’t let him forget it, one father absent and another full of hate. Wrestling just happened to be an exquisitely efficient response to his dilemmas. It gave him, all at once, a sanctioned way of blowing off steam, an assessment of his abilities independent of other people’s appraisals, and a vehicle for working collaboratively, for a change, with other men.

  His decision to retire from wrestling had less to do with inhibition than with the challenge of how to be the 23-year-old he wanted to be. By not wrestling, Robles gets to support his family and through his words lift up the thousands of people who look to him for inspiration. And with a quiet pride that a less mature man might consider vanity, he allows himself to revel in the enormity of his achievements.

  Before his final tournament, Robles told an interviewer that the thing he likes most about wrestling is the way it allows you to focus on your advantages—what you have rather than what you lack. Some people are tall and can use their length for leverage, he said. Some capitalize on physical strength.

  Robles was suggesting, in essence, that as long as he didn’t dwell on the nuisance of missing a leg, he could go about the business of becoming a champion wrestler. It was a preposterous remark, except that it turned out to be true. An absence isn’t a weakness if you make it someone else’s problem.

  CHRIS JONES

  When 772 Pitches Isn’t Enough

  FROM ESPN: THE MAGAZINE

  HE IS OUT THERE SOMEWHERE on this all-dirt field; he is one of these few dozen possible boys. But on this overcast Saturday morning in June, before the start of the first of two exhibition games in Akashi City, the greatest teenage pitcher in Japan—the best since Yu Darvish—and one of the top 16-year-old prospects in the world—as can’t miss as Stephen Strasburg—continues hiding in plain sight. Saibi High School isn’t wearing numbers on its white uniforms today. These boys never wear names. And from a distance, as they practice their drills with alarming precision, looking less like ballplayers and more like a marching band, like toy soldiers, any single one of them disappears into the lockstep crowd. An arm like Anraku’s, this inhuman appendage, must look different. It must have scales, or talons, or somehow drag across the earth, leaving fissures in its wake. But for now his arm is just another arm, and Anraku is just another player, his otherworldliness lost in this army of Japanese ordinary.

  Masanori Joko, Saibi’s 66-year-old manager, stands like a general on a hill overlooking the field. “Is Anraku the one with the shaved head?” someone asks him, and he smiles. “They all have shaved heads,” he says through an interpreter, before he offers his only description: “He is the tallest one.”

  There he is. That must be him. He is the tallest one by several inches, more than six feet tall, with a cap perched high on his head and a red glove on his left hand. His back is so broad, his shirt—the only one its size on this entire team—rides up his long arms. He has thick legs and a surprisingly American ass, and when his feet dig into the dirt, he ripples like a sprinter. He runs with another, much smaller boy into right field, the pair lost in the same cloud of dust, where they wait for a coach to hit a ball their way. When a pop fly settles into Anraku’s glove, his arm is put on display for the first time: he throws a one-hopper to the plate. A murmur rolls through the crowd. This is a good sign.

  There has been talk in America that Anraku’s arm had been destroyed weeks earlier, in April, stripped of its powers at Koshien—a high school tournament that happens twice a year in Japan, in spring and in summer. Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa and one of the West’s principal translators of Japanese culture, has a hard time capturing the meaning of Koshien, first held in 1915. “It’s like the Super Bowl and the World Series rolled into one,” he says. “It’s the closest thing Japan has to a national festival.” In the spring, 32 teams from across the country arrive at Koshien, the name of a beautiful stadium near Kobe but also the de facto title of the tournament that’s played there. (In the summer, 49 teams participate, one from each of Japan’s 47 diverse prefectures, plus an additional team from Tokyo and Hokkaido.) They meet in a frantic series of single-elimination games until a champion emerges. At any one time, 60 percent of Japan’s TV sets will be tuned in to the drama. More than 45,000 fans will be packed into the stadium, and if the games are especially good, many of those fans will be weeping.

  “It’s not just baseball,” says Masato Yoshii, who pitched in two Koshiens long before he joined the New York Mets. “It’s something else. It’s something more.”

  This spring, Anraku single-handedly carried Saibi, from his hometown of Matsuyama, representing Ehime prefecture, to the final. He stood on the mound and felt he was exactly where he should be. His parents met at Koshien as young concession workers. His father was a promising pitcher who blew out his arm even before high school; he started his son pitching when he was three years old. In some ways, it seems as though Anraku never had much choice about any of this, and he would agree. The Japanese don’t use the word “destiny” very much. They call it fate.

  He threw virtually every pitch for Saibi at Koshien, including a 13-inning complete game in which he threw 232 pitches. But in the awful final, he fell apart, terrifyingly and completely, eventually losing 17–1, pulled only after he’d thrown his 772nd pitch over five games in nine days. His fastball was not nearly so fast; his curveball no longer broke; his slider stayed flat. Every one of his instruments abandoned him, and yet he had continued to throw until his precious right arm hung limp at his side. Don Nomura, the agent who represents Darvish, told Yahoo’s Jeff Passan that Anraku’s treatment was nothing less than child abuse, a sentiment shared by several American scouts. Those strong wor
ds traveled over the ocean and upset many in Japan, where if anyone saw Tomohiro Anraku as a victim, he was blessed to be one. In fact, he’s been given the most coveted and celebrated title of all. He is a kaibutsu.

  Anraku is a monster. Anraku is a beast.

  Yet even in Japan there has been a rising unease regarding Anraku’s fate. Kazuhisa Nakamura, a 65-year-old journalist and former scout for the legendary Yomiuri Giants, sat in a Tokyo restaurant recently, stirring his coffee, shaking his head. “I felt sorry for him,” he said, remembering that final game. “It was so obvious. Everybody could see something was wrong.” The problem wasn’t that Anraku had thrown so many pitches. By Koshien’s measures, his performance was something like normal. Daisuke “Dice-K” Matsuzaka had thrown 767 pitches in six games in 1998; even Darvish, who allegedly had been protected from the excesses of Japanese baseball culture by his Iranian father, threw 505 pitches in five games in 2003. What separated Anraku was how plainly he had faltered. It was like watching a prize colt find a hole in the track, only no tarps were put up to protect us from his agony. The torturous spectacle of this broken boy and the unkind Western attention that followed were enough for some Japanese to wonder whether Anraku represented everything that’s wrong with Koshien rather than everything that’s right. “Before, he was the number-one prospect in Japan, easily,” Nakamura said. “Now,” he said, and he stopped and shrugged. “Now we have to wait and see.”