Penn State wrestler has no legs, but that has not stilled his competitive fire,
By Chico Harlan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Before arriving at the sweetest, sweatiest room on campus, Rohan Murphy grabbed his size 7 1/2 shoes. Everybody on the Penn State wrestling team gets shoes and, almost two years ago, when somebody in the Rec Hall equipment room asked Murphy if he wanted a pair, the 125-pound varsity wrestler said, “Yes, “to heck with the fact that he didn’t have feet.Murphy, 22, placed the shoes at the base of his wheelchair, where they met the flapping fabric of his blue jeans. He didn’t need the jeans either — a pair of shorts could easily cover his muscle-bare legs, the part the amputation didn’t take away — but Murphy stuck to his routine. A routine is normal.
On his wheelchair, he zipped to his 9 a.m. class and placed a bagel and Gatorade on his desk — aids, in the upcoming lecture, for staying awake. The professor spoke, and Murphy listened passively. His mind wandered. He thumbed at the headband branded with a silhouette of Michael Jordan cocked across his forehead. And, when the class ended, Murphy wheeled himself into the cold and across campus for a 90-minute wrestling practice that most called torturous. Murphy, as always, called it the highlight of his day.
The way in which Murphy navigated himself to the windowless wrestling room in the basement of Rec Hall, deserves a two-part explanation. He got there, foremost, because he found wrestling in ninth grade; before then, he was only a sports-obsessed child lacking an outlet. While growing up on Long Island, his wrestling record improved every year of high school and, after persisting through two years at Penn State’s Altoona branch campus, he transferred in 2004 to University Park. He e-mailed Nittany Lions wrestling coach Troy Sunderland, telling him about his goal and giving no clue about his disability. Then, in the most figurative sense possible, Murphy walked onto the wrestling team.
“I was so happy to find a sport I could actually play where my disability wasn’t an issue, “he said. Then, reconsidering: “Well, it wasn’t an issue to me, at least.”
Murphy got there, secondly, as he always does — by wheeling himself out of the narrow doorways of his morning class and heading toward practice. He blitzed down the wheelchair ramp, crossed a street, zig-zagged along another ramp. To avoid a barricade of stairs, he detoured into a maze-like student dormitory, swerved through four hallways and took an elevator down to the ground level.
Finally, he entered Rec Hall, changing in the locker room — hoisting his torso from the wheelchair to change — and then soliciting the help of a teammate, A.J. Cummins. Heading toward the downstairs wrestling room, Cummins hoisted Murphy’s chair down two flights of steps. Murphy, meanwhile, flew down the stairs, one hand on the railing, one on the corner of each step, like a child atop monkey bars.
It was almost 10 a.m.
Murphy exhaled in a final a moment of calm. The next 90 minutes, in a room crowded with wrestlers, he would push through shared challenges, not unique ones.
“That’s why I just love wrestling practice, “he said. “It’s the only part of the day when I don’t have to worry about being disabled.”
A ‘devastating’ birth
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| Westler Rohan Murphy does pushups in the weight room at Penn State. |
Murphy’s mother, like all mothers, prayed for a normal child. The boy was born Dec. 22, 1983, only two months after his parents had moved from Jamaica to New York. Deformities ravaged his lower body, likely because of a birth-control pill that Jennifer Murphy had taken in her home country. “It was devastating, “she said.Doctors suggested, then, that Murphy would never be able to sit upright. At 4, his legs were amputated several inches above the knees; his upper body, which would later grow into a muscular powerhouse, tapered into a medical mess.
From the beginning, Murphy loved sports, though they rarely reciprocated. He idolized pro football wide receiver Jerry Rice, and at 10, he asked his parents for a football. “So I got the football, and I was throwing it up to myself, “Murphy recalled recently. “But then I realized, there really wasn’t much more I could do with the thing. That’s when it kind of hit me.”
His competitive fire begged for a channel. He watched even the most obscure sports on television: polo, soccer broadcast in Spanish, anything with sweat would do. During elementary school, his parents signed him up for wheelchair racing and wheelchair basketball, but Murphy craved sports not prefixed with a mention of disability.
“I hated disabled sports when I was growing up, “he said. “Just something about them, they’re so cheesy. You know, just like the whole motto that everybody’s a winner in disabled sports. I just hated it. Sports, there’s supposed to be a winner and a loser — right down the line.”
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| Wrestler Aaron Anspach of Lancaster follows Murphy down the steps at Recreation Hall at Penn State, carrying Murphy’s wheelchair. |
Then, quick as his life could swing a 180, Murphy found wrestling. A coach asked Murphy to try the sport, figuring that wrestling, equalizer that it is, renders legs both a weapon and a liability. On the mat, Murphy stood chin-high with his opponents’ waists. Though he lacked leverage, he focused more on the upside of his most obvious downside: no grappler could trip him up or twist him to the ground.In freshman year of high school, he won only two of 13 junior-varsity matches. Still, his confidence rocketed, and, in two following summers, he traveled to an acclaimed 28-day wrestling camp led by Minnesota coach J Robinson. He practiced and worked out four times every day during those weeks, and, by his senior year of high school, Murphy won more than 30 matches and lost only three.
Now at Penn State, wrestling defines Murphy’s life — at least for now. In part because of the wrestling team’s intense conditioning program, Murphy can now bench-press 290 pounds. He’ll travel in May to South Korea for the International Powerlifting Paralympic Championships. A half-dozen teammates double as his closest friends.
“It was pretty weird at first, because I knew kids would have their heads turned like, ‘Who’s this kid?’ ” Murphy said. “I always get weird looks from them because I don’t have any legs, but my teammates, they’re all pretty cool with it. But it’s everybody else in Rec Hall — the volleyball players, the soccer players. You would think after a year those [other Penn State athletes] would get used to me, but they still stare. Sometimes, I feel like going up to one of them and saying something, but I always just ignore it.”
Murphy smiled.”Do me a favor. Put that in the article, that I get annoyed by the staring. Maybe they’ll get the hint.”
Hills he’s climbed
At the beginning of the school year, Murphy climbed a mountain on his hands. Team strength and conditioning coach Eric Childs had wanted first to get a feel for the workout, so before the team congregated at the base of Tussey Mountain, he jogged skyward along the path of a ski slope, reached the top and thought, while gasping, “This was a good workout.”
Before the team ran up the mountain as part of a conditioning drill, a few coaches pulled together.
“We’ll have Rohan go up half way, “one suggested.
And then Murphy, at once, started climbing and ignoring. Scraping forward on his hands, he reached the halfway point “and there was no way he was going to stop, “Sunderland, the head coach, recalled.
“It was one of the most amazing things. He pushed himself, clawed, crawled. He was going on his knuckles, pushing himself up backwards.”
During the ensuing regular season — the Lions are in the Big Ten Championships, this weekend — Murphy won three of his matches and lost five. He could attribute his wins to his upper body — one corresponding to that of a full-bodied wrestler weighing 175 pounds, his coach said. Though Murphy stood below opponents, he often overpowered them, grabbing them by the legs. On the mat, he used his hands to propel his body, but only in spurts. He needed them free, to grapple.
He won’t wrestle again this season, but, when speaking recently about his record, his thoughts fractured into two tones. He hates losing, he said, always has. Conversely, though, he calls his membership on the team — a yearlong test of endurance — an accomplishment in itself. Murphy will cherish his two years with the wrestling team, particularly because after graduation he plans to continue at Penn State for grad school — where he’ll no longer wrestle. He is majoring in kinesiology — the study of the mechanics of human motion — and doesn’t quite know where grad school will lead him, but he’ll concentrate meanwhile on weight-lifting, preparing for the Paralympics. His two years as a varsity wrestler will drift into past tense, lingering instead as a reminder of what he can accomplish.
On that point, his confidence rushes. In 2004, during his first weeks at Penn State, the team trudged through a marathon of conditioning tests. While Murphy grabbed the chin-up bar — hanging there … 10 seconds … 20 seconds — teammates next in line for the drill watched. “You might as well just drop off because you’re not gonna hang with me, “Murphy said to his teammates.
“He thinks he’s the best athlete on campus, “said Teri Jordan, Penn State’s disability recreation programs coordinator. “Of course, I’m sure [quarterback] Michael Robinson would have something to say about that.”
Before finishing up recently in the Rec Hall weight room — abutting the wrestling area — Murphy churned through a few final exercises. He curled 45-pound dumbbells. He exchanged a few faux wrestling moves with joking teammates. And then, he moved toward Childs, the strength coach, who assisted Murphy with his final drill.
Hanging from a bar, Murphy pulled his chin up ten times, all while Childs, wrapping his arms around the wrestler’s waist, tried his hardest to add resistance. When Murphy managed 10 repetitions, he tried for another 10. And another.
“I think, sometimes, because of my [disability], people don’t realize how hard I work or how good a wrestler I am, “Murphy said. “They notice I don’t have legs, but they never get beyond that. There’s a difference between watching and staring.”
It was almost dinnertime. Murphy asked a teammate, Jason Lapham, to hoist his wheelchair back up the stairs. Murphy, climbing, followed behind. After changing back into his jeans, and after dressing his chair’s footrest with sneakers, he left Rec Hall and headed outside. He was done for the day as an athlete. The long sidewalk outside rolled in an easy decline toward his dorm, and Murphy wheeled away, gliding downhill.
Murphy runs laps in the wrestling practice room at Recreation Hall.
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