It has been almost a year since Edgar Torres was lying in a hospital bed, wanting to give up.
Almost a year since a New Year’s drive home went horribly wrong and took part of Edgar Torres’ right leg, though he was lucky the accident didn’t take more.
Physically, Torres’ body was damaged. Mentally, he suffered even more.
“I just kind of wanted to quit,” Torres said. “I had lost my dream of being a pro soccer player, and I really didn’t want to continue doing much of anything.”
Before his accident, Torres was a soccer player at Emporia High School, and he was a pretty good one at that. During the 2005 season, Torres was named to the Class 5A All-Region team as a forward and had dreams of one day playing in college, and then eventually as a professional.
However, the accident that took part of his leg at the knee also took with it his days as an athlete — or so he thought.
Torres missed an entire quarter of school while he recovered from his injuries. Eventually, the idea of just “giving up” faded into the recesses of his mind — “I didn’t want to let my family down, and so that was a big motivation for getting out of the hospital and getting better,” he said. — and Torres began to think about how he could get his life back to being as normal as possible.
But a normal life for Torres had always involved sports.
And that’s where wrestling entered his life.
Several of Torres’ friends suggested that he get back into sports by trying out for the Emporia High wrestling team. Torres initially balked at the idea, seeing as how he had never wrestled before in his life, plus, he was a little apprehensive about putting his amputated leg out there for all the world to see. But those fears soon turned to motivation once he started going to the practices.
“At first, I didn’t really want to because I was a little self-conscious about my leg ... and without having any experience in wrestling, that was just another disadvantage,” Torres said. “But I basically thought that if other people could do it, I sure as hell could.
“Once I got out there, everybody treated me like nothing had happened at all. Everybody was normal about it, you know?”
Emporia High coach Greb Buckbee said if there was ever a sport for an amputee to perform at a high level in, wrestling would be it.
“Wrestling is one sport that he can do and excel at,” Buckbee said. “He’s still an athlete, and athletes can overcome and adapt, and that’s what he’s learning how to do.”
Torres, now a junior at EHS, is a member of the Spartan junior varsity wrestling team, and he’s already seeing some success. In his first wrestling tournament ever, a junior varsity home tournament on Dec. 2, Torres finished second in the 135-pound weight class.
There is no doubting that Torres is at an immediate disadvantage every time he faces an opponent on the wrestling mat. But, Buckbee said, finding a way to mask those disadvantages is what the sport is all about.
“The hips and the legs are a huge part of wrestling, but part of wrestling is taking what you have and finding ways to make that advantageous to yourself,” Buckbee said. “No two wrestlers look alike. You have great wrestlers from every make of body type. It’s just finding that way to adapt and overcome.”
And that’s what Torres has done — he has overcome. When he was lying in that hospital bed, wrestling was the furthest thing from his mind. Instead, he wrestled with the idea that he would never live a normal life again, a life that had involved sports.
Wrestling has given Torres the chance to heal the parts of his body that were not physically affected by the accident that took his leg. Wrestling helped heal what couldn’t be repaired with a surgeon’s knife.
When he’s out on the mat, Torres says he doesn’t even think about the fact that part of his leg is missing.
“I’m there to win,” he said, “and that all I want to do. I don’t think about anything else.”
After nearly giving up, it was sports that helped give Edgar Torres’ life a sense of normalcy again.
• For more sports commentary from Michael and Gazette sports reporter Jesse Newell, listen to The Sports Buzz online at www.emporiagazette.com.