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  EPIGRAGH

  Each step is like a candle burning in the night. It does not take the darkness away, but it guides us through the darkness. When we look back after many small steps of love, we will discover that we have made a long and beautiful journey.

  —HENRI NOUWEN

  CONTENTS

  Epigragh

  Chapter 1: Praying For A Champion

  Chapter 2: The New Kid

  Chapter 3: Road To Espn

  Chapter 4: The Call

  Chapter 5: Playing For Trust

  Chapter 6: Destined For Greatness

  Chapter 7: Impasse

  Chapter 8: Elephant In The Hood

  Chapter 9: What Would You Do For A Friend?

  Chapter 10: New Lives

  Chapter 11: The Gentle Way

  Chapter 12: Transitions

  Chapter 13: The Dark Ages

  Chapter 14: London

  Chapter 15: The Real Education

  Chapter 16: Unlikely Family

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Leroy and I never talked about our struggles or our disabilities. We didn’t have to. We just sort of looked at each other like, You too? I thought I was the only one. That’s how our friendship started.

  —DARTANYON

  CHAPTER 1

  PRAYING FOR A CHAMPION

  If you could reverse the wheels and unbreak the bones, revive the dead and sober up the nights, if you could erase the scars and outrun the ghosts, then perhaps a story could have begun. But instead: The funeral. The accident. The evictions. There is nothing glorious about origins, especially when painfully disguised as endings. To two young men—boys, really—who wandered haunted and hapless, every day felt like a cosmic mistake. Until one fateful fall, on a beat-up high school wrestling mat jammed against some rickety bleachers in a decrepit high school gym, when that hopeless bunch of endings converged to unknowingly begin anew.

  THE HEARTLAND SOWS a common dream: that sons will one day become champions. In the world of high school wrestling, there is no more revered path for the molding of those champions than St. Edward High School. Fathers move their families to Ohio, and to the Cleveland area in particular, to give their sons one chance—what they see as the best chance—in life: the opportunity to wrestle at St. Ed’s, which has built a reputation as both a college prep high school and a wrestling dynasty, holding the state record for most individual state champions (105) and most team championships (30) since 1978.

  Every fall, sixty to seventy teens walk onto the St. Ed’s wrestling mats to battle for fourteen coveted varsity spots. Few of them are unknown, each grinding out fifty matches a year in youth wrestling feeder programs from the time they are seven years old. They understand the honor at stake; they deem the pressure noble.

  The intensity within the St. Edward High School wrestling facility is akin to any Division I college program in the country. The temperature in the room intentionally holds at ninety degrees, dripping with the stench of warriors past. Sights set on identifying the crème de la crème among the talent pool, the head coach circles the room while a dozen technique coaches bark orders, many former collegiate All-Americans in their own rights. The Eagles believe that champions breed champions.

  The yearning to uphold the tradition and legacy of the green-and-gold singlet is palpable, and outside of practice, the bar rises ever higher, as many parents drive their sons to additional strength sessions with personal trainers or open mats at wrestling facilities. Athletes opt to ride the stationary bikes during their lunch periods, to cut weight. They feed off one another’s contagious enthusiasm and tireless dedication. Through discipline and hard work, they believe, they will be victors, both on the mats and in life.

  SEVEN MILES DOWN Lorain Road, a main artery of the city, over crumbling pavement and into boarded-up neighborhoods of stray dogs and lost souls, lies another local high school: Lincoln-West High School, an atrophied limb of Cleveland’s decaying city school district. Lincoln’s athletes don’t funnel out of a system; they straggle in off the streets of this lower-class, predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Kerry McKinney was substitute teaching at Lincoln-West when he inquired about an open wrestling coach position in 2006.

  “Is it JV or varsity?” he asked.

  “Uh . . . whatever you want it to be,” the athletic director answered.

  Kerry McKinney grew up enmeshed in the Ohio wrestling culture and was coached by the legendary John Duplay, an Ohio wrestling Hall of Famer and a pioneer in recruiting African Americans like McKinney to the sport. Twice McKinney advanced to the Ohio State Championships for Warrensville Heights High School. His senior year title match in 1991 is regarded as one of the greatest matches in the history of the state tournament, with McKinney losing in double overtime on the referee’s controversial stalling call. Nearly a decade passed before he could walk down the street without someone saying, “Hey, McKinney, you should have won that one!”

  McKinney knew what it was like to cut forty pounds in a season. He had spent humid summer days in wool coats and trash bags. He had passed out from dehydration more times than he could count, and shoved twice as many tampons up his nostrils to plug the resulting nosebleeds. He knew what it took to get to the top of Ohio wrestling. And he knew it couldn’t be done without shoes. Why were all these kids barefoot? he wondered as he walked into Lincoln’s first day of practice.

  “We only have two pairs of shoes for seven kids,” explained assistant coach Torry Robinson, a burly black man who spoke with breathless energy. “It’s a waste of time to rotate the shoes during practice. Better to just all practice barefoot. Then we’re all equals.” Seemed more like insanity than equality to McKinney. Equality was supposed to be about everybody having the same thing, not everybody having nothing.

  But it only took one practice to see that the Wolverines were indeed equals, unsurpassed in their respective inabilities. All seven were uniformly horrible. When McKinney told them to line up in their stances, half of them dropped into a three-point football stance, while the others looked around nervously. What should have been as basic as breathing had to be broken down into three deliberate steps: (1) Stand behind your opponent. (2) Bend one knee to the mat. (3) Put one hand on your opponent’s belly button and the other hand on his arm.

  “No one just shows up as a high-schooler and starts wrestling in Ohio,” McKinney said. “And if they do, they gonna get themselves killed!”

  Though they lacked experience, these kids came with the nicknames of legends. Weighing in at 145 for the Wolverines was a Latino kid who went by Uno. Then there was Noel, at 160 pounds, who answered to “Christmas” and smelled like a pile of sweat socks because his mother didn’t have enough money for all her kids to take baths each day. Christian Keely wrestled at 189; they called him Psycho because of his mile-high Afro and eyes that darted around like pinballs. And Robinson told Shawn “Mama’s Boy” Bonilla that if he had half the heart his mother had, he’d be a pretty good wrestler. “We’d get annoyed with him because he was the only kid with wrestling experience, and he could have been good if he had any will,” McKinney said. “But then his mom would bring chicken and rice and empanadas to the matches, so everything was cool again.”

  At 215 pounds, Matt Sifers was known as Blue Ribbon, not for his storied athletic accomplishments but because he moved like he had a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon sloshing around in his fifteen-year-old gut. “He looked like a middle-aged white rapper, all the way down to the money belt buckle,” McKinney said. “Nicest and toughest kid I ever met, though. He practiced through injuries, pain, you name it. But he was a terrible wrestler.”

  The only two Wolverin
es without nicknames were the two Willies—Willie Diaz and Willie Santiago, the lightest heavyweight in the league. Both desperately wanted fly handles, but nothing materialized. As Latino Opie Taylors of sorts, they were simply too wholesome to tease.

  One would have expected Uno to be the team’s best wrestler, with a name that translates as Number One. But the kid looked uncoordinated while stretching. “Then we start running, for conditioning, and I see Uno can barely breathe,” assistant coach Scott Conklin remembered. “I’m thirty years old, way past my prime, and he can barely keep upright alongside of me.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Conklin asked. “You’re in worse shape than I am!”

  “I only have one lung,” Uno answered matter-of-factly.

  Conklin screeched to a halt. “What do you mean, you only have one lung?” he yelled. “Stop running!” Conklin shared this revelation with McKinney, who echoed Conklin’s astonishment: “You only have one lung?”

  “’Course he only gots one lung,” said Christmas. “Why else would we call him Uno?”

  Practice ended early that day, in part to avoid asphyxiating Uno and in part to give McKinney a chance to find out what other life-threatening issues he should know about his young wrestlers. On his way out, McKinney tossed his old college wrestling shoes to Christmas. “They’re pretty torn up,” he said, “but you can have them if they fit.”

  The next day, Christmas showed up strutting in McKinney’s shoes; the holes in the toes were gone. “Stitched ’em all up with some fishing line,” Christmas said proudly. “Good as new.” McKinney thought of private school wrestling budgets and decided there was something endearing about Christmas cobbling together some hope.

  McKinney figured it was best to start with the emergency moves, to get these kids out of the trouble they would surely find themselves in once their matches began. “The first thing I taught them was to escape. I knew they’d be spending a lot of time underneath other people, and it’s depressing if you can’t escape. We didn’t move on to anything else until they could all escape.” But teaching even the basics proved difficult, because the kids possessed the technical language of wrestling infants. If he told them to rip the half or reach back or go for the double, they would just stop and stare at him like he had asked them to recite the theory of relativity.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Robinson would say whenever McKinney pressed his palm to his forehead. “I’m praying.” Robinson thought that if God could multiply five loaves and two fish, he might as well see what could be done with seven kids and two pairs of shoes. Truth be told, Robinson didn’t have much technical background in the sport either. He had been a horrible high school wrestler and had been ejected from more matches than he actually won. “I’d bite kids, spit on them,” remembered Robinson. “One time, I even got in a fight in the locker room and was ejected before the tournament began. I was not the best wrestler, or human being.” But Robinson had calmed down since then. He said God had helped him root out the anger and plant joy in its place. Robinson thought wrestling was the ideal sport for instilling structure and character into the lives of young people. He wanted to contribute what he could, so he walked the indoor track above the basketball courts every day before practice and prayed. He prayed for mercy. He prayed for protection. And he prayed for the season to go by fast.

  McKinney arrived with renewed expectations and big plans each day, trying to pack in the decade of wrestling these boys had missed, only to leave deflated each night. He began to worry less about the prospect of losing and more about the probability of these kids being slaughtered. One day in early November, just a week before their first meet, they were looking so bad that Robinson told McKinney he was going to go pray during practice.

  “Sure,” McKinney said. “Whatever you can do.” So while the boys drilled, Robinson walked the perimeter of the gymnasium, his hands motioning in serious conversation with the heavens. He skipped the pleas for mercy and protection and shot straight for the miracle. “Give us something to work with, someone to build around,” Robinson prayed.

  And that’s when Robinson heard God: Your champion is upstairs.

  Now Robinson was no Father Teresa. He had made his mistakes, but he was a spiritual man who ultimately heeded heaven’s lead, even if he took the roundabout path. But this directive required immediate action, and he had to be sure it was really God. “When you’re 275 pounds of red meat and mashed potatoes, a trip up any set of stairs had better be for a real good reason,” Robinson pointed out. He stopped under the basketball net and waited to be sure. The tug came again. Your champion is upstairs.

  The only thing upstairs was the weight room, and this time Robinson wasted no time hustling up there. He was met at the entrance by a boy of average height who had muscles bunched like walnuts. “Kid, you know how to wrestle?” Robinson asked, catching his breath.

  “Uh . . . I don’t . . . uh—,” the boy answered.

  “Don’t matter. Come with me.”

  “I DON’T REALLY want to wrestle,” the kid said as they got to the mat, Robinson still pulling him by the shirt.

  “You only gotta stay one day,” Robinson said. “If you don’t like it, you don’t gotta come back.” The kid didn’t answer. Robinson had recruited half of the Lincoln-West team like this. If you walked upright, or even if you didn’t, he’d say, “You should be on the wrestling team.”

  “What’s your name, kid?” Robinson asked.

  “Dartanyon.”

  “Geezus, you’ll fit right in with a crazy name like that,” Robinson said. “You don’t even need a nickname.”

  Like the rest, sophomore Dartanyon Crockett spoke no wrestling language. Unlike the others, though, he had an uncanny aptitude for the maneuvers. McKinney explained a drill, and Dartanyon executed it on his first attempt as though he had done it a thousand times before. “Maybe he does need a nickname,” Robinson said. “Maybe he’s our LeBron.”

  Born and raised down the interstate in Akron, and drafted directly out of high school into the NBA, LeBron James was Ohio’s golden child and this generation’s Michael Jordan. The real LeBron stood six-eight. If someone had hit him over the head with a carnival mallet a few times and shrunk him down a foot or so, he indeed could have been mistaken for this man-child now rolling around on the mat. “Dartanyon looked like someone drew him,” McKinney said. “Like he had just walked out of a comic book and into our gym.” Maybe they wouldn’t go winless this season, McKinney thought. With a body like that, Dartanyon could at least scare a few kids into submission.

  McKinney skipped over the opening stance lessons with Dartanyon and went straight to throwing. He suspected that a strong kid like this would enjoy tossing other people around, and he guessed correctly, because Dartanyon showed up the next day without anyone dragging him by the collar. With their first meet days away, McKinney showed Dartanyon a headlock and an escape, while Robinson paced and prayed it would make up for his lack of conditioning.

  Just before Thanksgiving, McKinney hauled his boys over to the east side of Cleveland for a dual with Collinwood High School, a city school in Lincoln’s conference with more experience and an established coaching staff. The Wolverines got their heads handed to them. “From top to bottom, every kid laid an egg,” Robinson said. “It was like they were raised on a chicken farm.”

  The following weekend, they headed an hour east for a tournament in Ashtabula, Ohio. Robinson took note of the rural demographics as they drove into town, and of the halls of white teens as they entered the school. And then he hatched a plan: “Crockett, take off your shirt as we walk into the gym,” he said. Being a boy of few words and even fewer questions, Dartanyon obeyed.

  “This big, muscular guy takes his sweats off and looks like a superhero. The other teams were terrified!” McKinney said. “I’m laughing because I know it’s not the advantage they think it is.” But it was enough. Dartanyon pinned his first two opponents with ease, maintaining the same fixed, expressionless stare from
start to finish, as though he could not see anything but the task at hand. He dropped the finals match, settling for second. But in a life engulfed by perpetually losing battles, Dartanyon thought this winning felt pretty good.

  MCKINNEY GAVE DARTANYON a lift back that night, as he had been doing once or twice each week. Sometimes Dartanyon wanted to be dropped off at a friend’s house, other nights at his dad’s work or with a cousin, and once on a street corner. Rarely did McKinney drop him at the same spot twice, and never did the place look like a home. The only constant was the black canvas duffel bag Dartanyon carried with him, large enough to fit a child. Having worked as a detention officer in the juvenile justice system, McKinney knew what that bag meant. “Nobody needs to carry a bag that big unless they are carrying everything they own, to a destination unknown,” McKinney said. Dartanyon was transient.

  Dartanyon’s nomadic existence hardly shocked McKinney. About one-third of Lincoln-West’s attendees had no stable place to call home, and nearly the entire student population showed up for the school’s free breakfast each morning. He knew he likely had kids on the team who went hungry. The surprising part to him was that all eight of his wrestlers were still turning up for strenuous practices one month in, volunteering to make their lives more difficult. But one look at Dartanyon’s duffel bag reminded him that their depleted childhoods prepared these kids for the single most important facet of wrestling: self-preservation. It’s unlike other sports: You don’t enter the circle with five other guys on a line beside you. No one rebounds your misses and puts them in for you. A wrestler endures alone. Wins alone. Falls alone. Northeast Ohio’s powerhouse feeder programs spent years training kids for these battles, but life prepared Lincoln’s kids in another way, equipping them with the most important lesson of all: how to get knocked down and get back up. Coach Conklin told the team early on to let him know if they were hungry, and he would get them food. No one spoke up. Life also taught them that pride trumps hunger.