Free The Best American Sports Writing 2014 by Glenn Stout

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.
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    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