Read Online The Best American Sports Writing 2014 by Glenn Stout - Free Book Online Page B

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.”
    Â 
    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,