By Tom Rinaldi
ESPN
“Leroy, touch your toes.”
Leroy reaches his arms out in front of him in mock effort, and says, “They’re at home.”
And then, the boys laugh.
He didn’t know they were gone.
Staring down at the sheets of his bed, the morphine starting to fade, Leroy Sutton was still numb, but he had a feeling something was wrong.
“It was when I tried to sit up, “Leroy said, remembering that day nearly eight years ago. “I pulled the covers up, and that’s when I figured everything out.”
It was Dec. 7, 2001, the day that shaped Leroy’s body, and his life.
He was 11 years old at the time, walking to school with his brother along the Wheeling and Lake Erie railroad tracks near his home in East Akron, Ohio. A freight train approached, and Leroy got too close. His backpack got caught on one of the passing cars, and he was pulled beneath the wheels.
“I didn’t even look down, “said Leroy, now 19, recalling the first moments afterward. “I was just staring at the sun the whole time. I wasn’t trying to look down because that’s when I would have panicked.”
The paramedics who arrived within minutes saved Leroy’s life, but the doctors could not save his entire body. At Children’s Hospital in Akron, his left leg was amputated below the knee, his right leg below the hip. He knew what had happened, but didn’t understand what he’d lost until a day later, when he lifted the sheets, and looked down.
As the memory came back to him, his voice dropped and his head dipped.
“The whole time I was in the hospital, I just asked, ‘Why? Why?’ “he said. “Every night I could not go to sleep “¦ because when I tried, I’d end up hearing the sound of a train.”
Leroy left the hospital a month and a half later. He endured long, difficult hours of rehabilitation. He accepted that a wheelchair would be part of his life but was determined to make it a small part.
“I did not want to be in my chair, “he said. “I had to build my arm muscles up so I could move around. “¦ I move around on my arms a lot.”
That ability to move — to lift and flip and twist his body — led him to a place few expected, and into a friendship few could have foreseen.
“Leroy, don’t forget your shoes. “¦”
Others look down, duped. Leroy just smiles.
“You just can’t see them. “¦”
In January 2008, midway through his junior year in high school, Leroy transferred to Lincoln-West High in Cleveland. By the time he was a senior, he was a familiar sight (his wheelchair flying down the hallways) with a familiar refrain (his laughter booming off the lockers). When he decided to join the wrestling team, just as he’d done at his previous school, the coaches welcomed him. They knew his story and were eager to tap his strength.
“I told him, ‘You’ve been hit by a train. What else, what kid, what wrestler, what can stop you?’ “said Lincoln-West coach Torrance Robinson.
At Leroy’s first practice, his first partner was the only other wrestler on the team powerful enough to handle him. Dartanyon Crockett was Lincoln’s best and strongest talent. He was 5-foot-10 with muscles bunched like walnuts, and already a winner in multiple weight classes. But when Leroy hopped off his chair and onto the wrestling mat, the competition was more than Dartanyon expected.
“He was a complete powerhouse, “Dartanyon said, recalling their first drills together. “I never wrestled anyone as strong as him. We pushed each other to our limits, and we didn’t let each other give up.”
Hour after hour, month after month, practices connected them in ways that went beyond the gym. They went everywhere together: between classes, on team bus rides, at each other’s houses — both dialed in to a wavelength few others could hear. They spontaneously broke into songs only they knew. They performed imaginary superhero moves they invented. They laughed at jokes and words only they understood.
Yet, their simplest connection was the one everyone saw and no one anticipated. Not even Leroy and Dartanyon know exactly when, or how, it first happened.
“One day I’m coming out of my office, “said Kyro Taylor, the school’s power lifting coach. “I look over to the corner of the gym where the mats were at, and right up the steps I see Dartanyon with something on his back, and the closer I get, I’m like, ‘Is that Leroy?’ And it was Leroy on his back. Dartanyon’s carrying him.”
It was not a onetime ride.
Dartanyon lifted Leroy onto his back and carried him to and from every match, on and off every bus, into and out of every gym, all season long. At more than 170 pounds, Leroy was not a light load. Dartanyon never cared, and the carrying never stopped.
“Most of the time we wouldn’t get a wheelchair lift, so I would have to carry him on the bus, take his wheelchair apart, put it on the bus, then carry him off the bus, “he said. “And then, into the building and up the stairs.”
Dartanyon lifted Leroy onto his back for the playing of every national anthem, and carried him down the bleachers before each match. Yet as inseparable as they were, a team unto themselves in a way, they also shared something greater than their sport.
That’s because the teammate who carried Leroy on his back all season long knows about challenges himself.
Dartanyon Crockett knows, because he’s legally blind.
Dartanyon sings.
“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.”
Leroy listens, then corrects him: “But you can’t see.”
“So? I can still sing.”
And they pick up the song together, twice as loud.
Born with Leber’s disease, a condition that causes acute visual loss, Dartanyon, 18, has been severely nearsighted his entire life. He can barely make out the facial features of a person sitting 5 feet away.
“I’m basically blind compared to someone with 20/20 vision, “he said.
As a boy, his father watched him bump into the same table corners and fumble for the same objects over and over again, uncertain what was wrong. He received the diagnosis just after his son started elementary school.
“I wanted to grab him and help him, but I wasn’t allowed to do that, because the world isn’t like that, “Arthur Harris said. “I never let him feel sorry for himself.”
“I did feel like something was wrong with me because I was completely different from everyone, “Dartanyon said. “Like I was “¦ some type of freak.”
Yet as he grew older, he not only accepted the condition but also adjusted so well to his inability to see that those around him often were unaware of anything until he told them.
“I asked him, ‘Are you serious?’ “said Lincoln-West teacher and assistant wrestling coach Justin Hons. “Nothing about him ever gives you the hint that he has a disability. The way he carries himself, he doesn’t ask for anything.”
Still, there are signs. At times, his eyes dart back and forth as if ricocheting between objects. Boarding the city bus for the ride to school, he asks the driver to tell him when his stop is near, unwilling to trust his glimpses of the passing landscape. In class, often he places text just inches from his face to read. On the wrestling mat, although his moves are quick and bold, he sees little more than rough shapes lunging toward him.
Yet his own view of his limits remains focused and clear.
“I’m just seeing it as a challenge God has given me and how I’m going to react to this challenge, “he said. “Let it make me the person I am, or let it break me.”
Other trials in his life could have broken him long ago.
After his mother died when he was 8, he moved in with his father, Harris, who struggled to take care of himself in the midst of an addiction to drugs and alcohol. There were times when Dartanyon scavenged the house for food, but found none. For most of his time in high school, he had no steady place to call home.
“I let him down, “Harris said. “It was terrible for him.”
Through it all — being evicted from their apartment in Lakewood, the nights Dartanyon covered his father with a blanket after he’d passed out — Dartanyon stayed in school, stayed on the mat and supported his dad’s effort to stay clean. Harris now has been sober, while working two full-time jobs, for more than a year.
That Dartanyon would pick someone else up was no surprise. He learned to carry a father before he ever carried a friend.
“He made a lot of mistakes in the past, and he’s learned from them, “Dartanyon said. “It’s made our bond stronger than I could fathom. He’s a great father.”
When the words were related to Harris, he dropped his head and began to cry.
“Above all, I’m glad the love never left, “he said. “I’m glad that stayed.”
Dartanyon and Leroy move down the hallway after class.
“I am Darth Cripple, “Leroy says.
“I am Blind Vader, “Dartanyon replies, and they turn a corner; their laughter is all that’s left behind.
Friends joke. They jab. They can be the least flattering of critics and the loudest of supporters. So it is with Dartanyon and Leroy. They mock each other and themselves, every chance they get, in ways others never would dare.
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