Graves shugs off a deadend start
When Norman Graves walked out the door following the freshman team’s last meet in January 2007, the Northwest coaches figured that was that. They knew they’d see Graves in the classroom, maybe in the hallway, but not back here. Not on the mats. Are you kidding?
Graves had gone 0-fer for his freshman season. He hadn’t won a match. Not one.
Northwest coaches Bob Wilhelm and Ron Wilhelm did not pencil Graves’s name into a J.V. roster spot when they looked ahead at the end of 2006-07 season. It had been a long and hard season, and Graves had nothing to show for it but aches and pains.
“I thought, ‘We’ll never see him again,’” Ron Wilhelm recalls.
Graves, of course, came back for more.
This would be one-in-a-million story if he had come back and become a state champion. It didn’t happen quite like that. Instead of a championship medal, he walked off the mat at the recent state tournament with memories – and a regret.
“I think I should’ve placed at state,” says the 17-year-old senior, now 6 feet tall and 215 pounds. “That was my goal ever since my freshman year.”
In a way, Graves’s story is not all that different from nearly 600 wrestlers who leave the state tournament without a state medal. The three-day championships are overflowing with coulda and shoulda stories. But it’s hard – impossible, really – to believe that any of those disappointed wrestlers waited until their sophomore season to win their first match. The way tournaments are structured now, wrestlers can win three matches by the lunch break at the first weekend tournament of the season; Graves didn’t win his third match until he was a junior.
Ron Wilhelm says Graves’s career – and his place in the story of Northwest wrestling – won’t be a did-not-medal-at-state footnote. Graves’s story will be told and retold every time a Lions wrestler falls into a funk or hits a rocky stretch.
“He came the farthest from his freshman year through his senior year of anyone we’ve ever had,” Wilhelm says. “He was one of those guys who just never quit.”
That last comment would make Graves’s father, Norman Graves III, happy. Very happy, in fact.
“My dad wrestled in high school, and he thought it’d be a character builder,” Graves says.
Graves’s character was tested from the first time on the mats at Northwest through the last. His final match came in the third round of wrestlebacks at the state meet. The guy who didn’t win a match as a freshman had advanced to the point where he needed only one more victory to lock up an all-state medal.
“It’s called the do-or-die match,” Graves says.
The senior did everything but win his do-or-die test. He batted Dylan Case of Lee’s Summit through three periods. Neither gave an inch. In overtime, Case came up with the winning move. The 3-1 win sent him on to the medal round, while Graves was lift with ??- what?
His coaches point out that Graves has memories, several of them coming in the homestretch of his senior year.
“He got hot the last two weeks,” Wilhelm says.
A week before the state tournament, Graves had lit up the gym at Lindbergh. Wrestling in the third-place match at the Class 4 district, he trailed 7-3 with 15 seconds left. The match was the kind of done deal a packed house of wrestling crazies had sat numbly through for more than two hours. Unlike all the done-deals that had gone before it, though, Graves’s match wasn’t done.
As the clock ticked toward the finish, Graves scored a thunderous takedown against Eureka’s Armond Minner and followed it with a near pin. It was a five-point move that narrowly beat the buzzer and gave Graves an 8-7 victory.
Watching from the other end of the gymnasium, Wilhelm leaped in the air. The crowd jumped to its feet.
“I didn’t hear it, but my whole team told me about it after the match,” Graves says.
It was quite a moment, the kind worth waiting for.
Even if the wait takes four years.
