Free The Best American Sports Writing 2014 by Glenn Stout Page B

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
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    H E 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