Carry On

by Lisa Fenn

  The only open weight class on the team for Leroy to fill was heavyweight, and less than fifteen seconds into his first match, he was lifted in the air like a five-pound dumbbell. Half of the gym reacted in laughter, the other half in fright. Leroy was promptly pinned by a kid who had fifty pounds on him. But he was not entirely disheartened by the loss. It had become a familiar place for him. And as Dartanyon carried him onto the bus that night, Leroy noticed something unfamiliar—the consolation of companionship.

  The following week, Robinson moved Leroy down to 189 pounds and bumped Dartanyon up to heavyweight. Dartanyon continued mowing people down in robotic fashion. “Even when he weighed forty pounds less than his opponents, kids were still peeing themselves when Dartanyon walked on the mat,” Robinson said. “I heard one guy say, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ Next thing I know I hear him praying in Arabic. I guess he converted. Then I hear a Hail Mary. I’m thinking, ‘Hey kid, give up. It’s not gonna happen.’”

  Leroy intimidated his opponents as well, though in a different way. At times, Robinson heard grumbling from opposing teams who didn’t want to wrestle a legless kid; they felt like bullies for taking Leroy down. Then they realized that to lose to him would have been even worse—akin to losing to a girl.

  But it was Leroy who lost again and again and again over his next five matches. He belonged in the 171-pound division, where teammate Joe Pissos fought. Pissos was a decent wrestler who led the team in pranks. Throughout the winter, Pissos shoved handfuls of snow down Leroy’s pants while Leroy was riding on Dartanyon’s back. But while Pissos got a kick out of torturing Leroy, he couldn’t stand to see others do it. “Coach, let Leroy wrestle at 171 instead of me,” he told Robinson, serious for the first time all season. “He deserves a fair fight.” He figured few battles in Leroy’s life had been so.

  JOE PISSOS’S WORDS struck a chord with an embattled Robinson. His estranged wife had recently announced that she was pregnant with another man’s child. A molten ache churned and scraped in his chest. Robinson was done with psychiatrists, done sitting in groups talking about his feelings. He didn’t want to call another prayer chain or take another meeting with his lawyer. Time took intolerably too long to heal all wounds. One night he collected fifty-two prescription Darvocets, poured a fifth of vodka, and invited sorrow’s escape. Cupping the tablets in his hand, he thought of his wrestlers. Should he leave them a note? How could he tell them that his life was insufferable, but the blind and the legless should keep going? Shame mounted on top of his anguish. “I’m sorry, Lord,” he whispered. “I am out of answers and energy.” He swallowed the pills and drifted off.

  A crowd closed in on Robinson the next morning. He sat in the center of a stadium, with the throng chanting “Rob-in-son! Rob-in-son!” Their voices amplified, disorienting him until their force shook him from sleep. But there was no stadium, no crowd of allies. He lay in his empty apartment, still alive. One remaining voice spoke: Your wrestlers need you. Robinson sensed the voice of God, yet found no comfort in it. “When I came to, I was disappointed because in my heart I was ready to die,” he said. “I wanted the pain to go away.”

  That next week, Leroy recorded his first victory, at 171 pounds, with a pin. The Wolverines swarmed the mat to celebrate—everyone except Robinson. Coach walked out of the gym, leaned against a bank of lockers, and quietly wept. “Leroy was like the kid who practiced every single day but never made the shot. And then he made the shot,” Robinson said. “I realized that if he could keep going, if he could win, then so could I.”

  Leroy unwittingly saved Robinson’s life that season. In fact, he invigorated all of the Lincoln wrestlers. They rallied around him, brainstorming how to adapt various techniques for his repertoire. Coach Hons studied videos of other amputee wrestlers like Georgia high school phenom Kyle Maynard and Arizona State University’s Anthony Robles. He and Leroy were like two scientists in a lab, altering arm angles and grasps ever so slightly, trying anything to give Leroy a chance. Leroy couldn’t fake one way and go the other. He had to come right at his opponents and get just close enough to grab their ankles. From there, he could lock his hands and use his shoulder against their shin for leverage. They adapted low ankle picks, low single legs, and developed a creative variation of a low double leg that showed potential, if even just a sliver. They brought in Dartanyon to test their hypotheses. As if they were playing a game of Twister, he and Leroy experimented with one takedown after another. Those that could be too easily countered in a way that put Leroy on his back were abandoned. Some adjustments worked. Most did not.

  “Hate to say it, but you kind of are like a turtle, Leroy,” Dartanyon said one day.

  “At least he can see better than you,” Robinson said. “Turtles are known to have exceptional vision.”

  “What’s wrong with your vision?” Leroy asked.

  “You don’t know?” Robinson cried. “Son, your ride is blind!”

  “Visually impaired,” Dartanyon corrected. “I can see some things. Sometimes.”

  “Won’t be long before he’s walking the two of you into walls,” Robinson said. “You better watch out.” Leroy refrained from questions. Dartanyon withheld explanations. He simply continued carrying Leroy into and out of every gym, onto and off of every mat, that season. Each time Dartanyon wrestled, Leroy sat on the edge of the mat. They became each other’s competitive constant, and the competition connected them in a way that went beyond the mat. They grew inseparable in the school halls and then outside of school on the weekends. And their respect for one another’s physical limitations evolved into self-deprecating humor, with mutual consent.

  “Hey Leroy, if you disappeared from your grandmother’s house, would you be considered a runaway or a rollaway?” Dartanyon would ask.

  “If you were in charge of looking for me, I’d just be gone,” Leroy would retort with a deep belly laugh. They became de facto team leaders, with the rest of the Lincoln wrestlers singing backup to their jokes and marveling at their accomplishments. Leroy won nine matches that season, the majority by pinning his opponent. Dartanyon finished 26–3.

  In early February 2009, Robinson called Cleveland’s newspaper, the Plain Dealer, to tell the wrestling beat writer that he had not one, but two disabled kids on the same team. He thought it would be nice to get them a little recognition. He wasn’t hoping for much—just a few lines of print and maybe a picture would do.

  CHAPTER 3

  ROAD TO ESPN

  My first mention in a newspaper came in 1984, when I was ten years old. I won a local Junior Olympics 100-yard dash in about seventeen seconds. A volunteer handed me a polyester blue ribbon upon crossing the finish line, and I could not imagine anything more glorious. The local Sun News printed the names of the participants in each event. There were probably a hundred names listed in tiny font, but my name had a coveted number 1 in front of it.

  Newspapers and sports have long held equally revered places of importance in my family. My grandfather worked nearly his entire career as a journalist for the Cleveland News and the Cleveland Press, covering Ohio sports and news before transitioning to full-time editing. As children, my cousins and I dug up dust-covered plaques in my grandfather’s basement awarding his clever headlines. His regular Cleveland News column, “Fenn’s Flyers,” handicapped the local nightly harness racing with astounding success.

  My father began every morning with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, always starting with the sports section. He scoured box scores of professional and local high school teams, looking for buried treasures in the form of triples and stolen bases, particularly admiring of an athlete’s speed. And now I was the fastest ten-year-old in that morning’s paper. My father circled my name and carried the clipping with him wherever he went.

  “You should have seen her. She was lightning fast,” he bragged, waving the folded page with a convincing excitement. “No other girl came close. She blew them all away.”

  Swept up in his excitement, I made a bold decision about my
future. “Daddy, I am going to be an Olympic sprinter,” I declared.

  He laughed. “You can’t be an Olympic sprinter,” he said. “You’re white. You have to be black to be fast enough for the Olympics.” My father grew up throughout the 1950s and ’60s in a hostile and racially divided Cleveland. He remembers entering Carl F. Shuler Junior High for the ninth grade and being drawn toward a ruckus in the lobby late one afternoon. There, a black teen was violently assaulting a white classmate. It was my father’s first encounter with race. He froze. He wanted to defend his white friend, but after assessing the circle of black teens cheering on the culprit, my father retreated instead. “From that point on, I had a fear and a hatred of blacks,” my father remembered. “And it was mutual. They feared and hated us too.” From there, my father was shaped in circles of friends and family who believed that African Americans were entrenched in poverty due to their poor work ethics, subpar intelligence, and propensity for violent impulsivity. He was taught that separate equaled safe.

  “It’s not your fault you’re white, honey,” he reassured me as I clutched my blue track ribbon. “There should be different competitions for those people to keep it fair.” My father pointed out that I could still achieve great things. “You’ll just need to do them with your mind rather than your body,” he said. He drove me to visit all eight Ivy League universities, desiring a grander life for me than the one he felt backed into.

  As a teen, my father had longed to study journalism, yet his own father belittled his aspirations. “You can’t spell,” the editor admonished his son. “You’ll never be a writer.” My father’s dreams were deflated, and he trudged through twenty-five years as a disgruntled greeting card salesman instead. I, on the other hand, spelled proficiently, and when I came home with an A on my third-grade poem entitled “In The Garden”—a haiku of crisp greens and string beans—my grandfather heralded it as Pulitzer Prize material and declared I would be the next writer of the family. Despite the slight, the news liberated my father, for it proved that the journalism gene had been wrapped in his DNA and passed on to me.

  But the idea of committing to any type of work unsettled me. For many members of my family, an uninspired sense of permanence seemed to come with choosing a job. My mother served thirty quiet years as a secretary. Her father toiled for fifty years in a factory as a tool and die maker. My father’s mother worked second shift as a bank cleric for twenty-five years. They lived in the same modest homes, where they ate the same rotation of meals and stretched their dollars to pay the same basic bills, every week of their adult lives. A job was a means to the mortgage, void of either growth or disdain. Fulfillment came in raising a family—the respectable norm within middle-class Cleveland.

  However, the lofty messages I encountered during my college years at Cornell University ran counter to those of my upbringing: Discover your purpose. Settle for nothing. Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. I tried to merge these competing philosophies of success and security, and in doing so, I aimed high. If I too were to remain in one job forever, it needed to be a good one. I applied to the two leading contenders for world dominance: the CIA and ESPN.

  I came across the Central Intelligence Agency’s job posting in the Sunday newspaper in the spring of 1997. They were recruiting officers in Cleveland to serve on the front lines of human intelligence, forging strong relationships with clandestine sources, and to balance the harvested information with the needs of Washington security and strategy. Candidates needed foreign language proficiency, degrees in politics or science, and extensive foreign travel. I had none of these things, but I had something even more useful propelling me forward: my father’s derisive laughter. “Yeah, you could be a CIA officer,” he said, choking on his cereal as I read the ad. “You didn’t last the week at that seventh-grade summer church camp. I had to come get you because you were crying.”

  In my defense, the girls in my cabin were really mean and cared only about kissing boys in the woods at night, the fear of which in fact prompted me to fabricate stomach cramps until my counselor called my parents to pick me up. But my skin had thickened since then. During college, I spent a summer serving in a remote region of Siberia. My host family spoke no English, I spoke no Russian, and each night I slept under a tattered mosquito net that left my skin ravaged and swollen by morning. And not once did I ask my dad to fly over and get me, if for no more noble reason than that there were no phones in the village. I deserved to put my camping debacle to rest once and for all. I polished my résumé of irrelevant experiences, slipped into a contrived air of confidence, and made my way to the CIA recruiter that next weekend.

  The interview took place in a blank conference room at a budget motel near the airport, with a white man in a dark suit who did not offer his name. I imagined he had chosen this location in case hostile forces caught wind of our meeting and we had to dash aboard a waiting aircraft, sending me into a life on the lam. I anxiously waited for him to probe my love of the dark, experience burrowing underground tunnels, and ability to rappel down caverns on a strand of dental floss.

  “Do you feel you work well in teams?” he asked dryly, interrupting my global espionage fantasy. In reality, this position sounded much like the administrative opening at a local radio station that I had interviewed for one week earlier. The intelligence officer spoke of the need to deal with fast-moving situations and exhibit strong intuition. The only difference was the “street sense” requirement, which I did not have but assured him, in a stiff whisper, that I absolutely did. He asked very few questions, instead testing how firmly I could return his unflinching eye contact. He seemed to be gauging my intimidation threshold, waiting to see if I knew what to offer up and what was best kept close to the vest. After twenty minutes, marked by the audible ticking of the plastic clock on the wall, he said he would be in touch.

  While waiting for Washington to send me my cape and save-the-world instruction manual, I got busy preparing for my ESPN interview. “Yah, ESPN’s going to take you,” my dad scoffed again. “Do you even know who was on the mound the last time the Indians won a World Series?”

  I did not. I grasped the rules and strategies of the sports I had played, but I did not study them as my father and grandfather did. The names and histories sounded easy enough to learn, though. I scurried to the library and checked out every issue of Sports Illustrated and the Sporting News on file. For the next three summer months, our back porch looked like the office of a general manager on draft day. Rosters on marked-up poster boards. Team divisions on chalkboards. Depth charts on scrap paper. I had flash cards, baseball cards, notecards. I probably should have written myself a good-luck card as well; anyone who has to study that hard for a sports interview is clearly not a natural fit for the job.

  Oddly, my interview at ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, was more uncomfortable than my introduction to the CIA. Al Jaffe, a seasoned and stoic hiring executive, greeted me. And when I say he “greeted” me, I mean he opened the door. No further pleasantries were exchanged. He said he would ask me ten questions, and then he did just that:

  “Who is the backup catcher for the Astros?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Name the Bengals offensive line.”

  “I didn’t study the NFL very hard, being that it’s the off-season.”

  “Who won the Vezina trophy this year?”

  What’s a Vezina trophy?

  “Name the starting rotation for the Padres.”

  “Andy Ashby . . . Sterling Hitchcock . . . umm . . . I know Trevor Hoffman closes.”

  “Who was the best sixth man in the NBA this year?”

  “Tony Kukoč of the Chicago Bulls!”

  Al Jaffe said it would be a ten-question quiz, but by my count, he enacted the mercy rule and gave up after eight. His silent disapproval transported me back to college biology, where I memorized the stages of the Krebs cycle until my eyes rolled into the back of my head and still only scraped by with
a C on the exam, which was really an F before the curve. Unimpressed with my single correct answer, Al Jaffe said, “Unless you’d like to add anything, we’ll give you a call if a position opens up,” to which I said, “I do have something to add, because I am certain my phone will never ring.”

  Was that out loud?

  Prior to that moment, I had only dreamed of being bold, of kissing a boy in the moonlit camp woods, or of urging my grandfather to support my father’s ambitions. Finally, to my own astonishment, I showed up as the hero in my own life. Al Jaffe remained unruffled. Unlike the CIA officer who had never once broken eyeline, Al Jaffe had yet to glance in the vicinity of my face. His gaze remained locked off to my left, as if David Cone were throwing a no-hitter behind me and he dared not miss a pitch.

  I attempted to clarify my position, cautiously at first. “I mean, I could have easily looked up the answers to your questions in a sports almanac and aced your test. But they tell you nothing about my work ethic, my creativity, or my writing abilities. I know I could be a valuable contributor here. All you’ve done is proven that I am lousy at bar-room sports trivia.”

  “Is there anything else?” he droned, still looking past me. Finally I turned around. The wall was stark white, and yet I still could not compete with it.

  “Yes. There is one more thing,” I said, growing in fearlessness, or perhaps foolishness; the line is indeed a fine one. “You have not made eye contact once since I walked in. That’s rather rude.”

  I prepared to leave, awash with an unsettling mix of humiliation (I’d failed the audition) and personal pride (I’d stood up for myself). Except, of course, I knew he wouldn’t allow me the last word. I gripped the base of my chair, disoriented, bracing for his retort, the verbal equivalent of a fastball high and tight. Instead, Al Jaffee threw me the most unlikely curve.