What Andrew Johnson endured is indicative of amateur wrestling’s institutional failures
The young wrestler was failed by a system that upholds racism and prioritizes the team over an individual’s identity.
Last week in South Jersey, Andrew Johnson, a wrestler for the Buena Regional High School Chiefs, was presented with a difficult decision before he walked onto the mat during a dual meet against the Oakcrest High School Falcons. Johnson, a competitor in the 120-pound weight class, had grown out his hair into short dreadlocks. Though he’d worn a protective covering over his head, referee Alan Maloney ruled that the covering was not attached to Johnson’s headgear and therefore not in strict compliance. While the crowd looked on, the sixteen-year-old athlete was forced to cut the dreadlocks off or forfeit the match and give up six team points for the Chiefs.
Johnson went on to win his bout against Oakcrest’s David Flippen, 4-2, in overtime. Though he was universally praised for his response, a video of his haircut went viral, with many wondering aloud whether a white athlete would have been subjected to the same ordeal. With less than two minutes to make up his mind, Johnson had handled an impossible situation with dignity and poise.
A week after the incident, the rest of us have had a little more time to reflect on what institutional failures allowed him to be put in that position to begin with. Amateur wrestling is an easy-access, inexpensive sport, requiring little specialized equipment. As a former wrestler and lifelong fan, I’ve always marveled at its ability to bring people of different cultures, religions and nationalities together. (Just watch the way spectators in Iran greeted Jordan Burroughs, of Team USA, after a lifting of the travel ban allowed the two countries to meet in the World Cup.) But what happened with Andrew Johnson makes it clear the sport has not done enough to be inclusive of participants of all races.
“Watching him in just a few seconds, I learned about who he is and how he carries himself, and what he’s willing to do to get the job done,” says J’den Cox, who won a gold medal in freestyle at the Senior World Championships this October. “It just saddened me that all that was taken away from that moment because of a situation that, I believe, could have been avoided in so many different ways.”
Mike Frankel, a local reporter, tweeted about the incident and described Johnson as “the epitome of a team player” for accepting the haircut. Though he later expressed regret for his choice of words, his framing was typical of the culture of wrestling at large. Wrestling is an individual sport, but a dual meet is a team enterprise, and questions about personal identity can often be overtaken by the ethics of the group.
In high school and college, wrestlers are encouraged to give up rights and prerogatives that young people with budding personalities and social lives might want to hang onto. They put on a uniform. They forgo dessert at Thanksgiving to make weight, building or shrinking their bodies to fit into a spot on the lineup where they will be most effective. On nights and weekends, coaches might sound like clergymen in their instructions to “stay out of trouble,” enforce positive peer pressure, and “look after each other.” As the injury clock ticked away, and the school trainer walked across the mat with a pair of scissors, Johnson might have felt like he was simply being asked to do the right thing.
“To deny one’s self normal pleasures, while all around others are enjoying those pleasures,” Frank Gifford once wrote, describing the work ethic of Olympic wrestling champion Dan Gable, “is, to me, a rare act of courage.”
It seems worth asking, however, what it means to sacrifice one’s own right to self-expression in a sport that is far less racially integrated than others such as baseball, football or basketball.
“He was being selfless to some degree, doing whatever he had to do to make his team win,” says Lars Ojukwu, a founding board member of the non-profit Boston Youth Wrestling, who was a starting wrestler and team captain for Williams College. “Awesome. Great. However, he should never have been put in that situation.
“Growing up, even though I didn’t have a lot of hair, I was always going to be the person who would stand out. That meant a ton to me. I would say what this scenario presented was people discounting the individual in favor of the team.”
Compared to other more popular sports, relatively few young men of color are ever exposed to amateur wrestling, or given a chance to participate. Of those who do give the sport a try, many do extraordinarily well — almost half of the starting lineup for the US senior men’s freestyle team, for example, is black — but the rosters of elite college teams like Penn State, Iowa, Oklahoma State, or Michigan remain at least eighty percent white. The pattern is also seen in coaching staff, referees and announcers, where stand-outs like Bobby Douglas, Kevin Jackson and Lee Kemp are rare. During the 2016 election, members of the Iowa team posed for a photo with Donald Trump — apparently unconcerned with how the candidate’s proposed travel ban or immigration policies would affect non-white access to the sport.
Ben Askren, a UFC fighter who won two Hodge Trophies while wrestling for the University of Missouri, has been known for his thick, bushy hairstyle. He called the official’s decision “stupid” on Twitter, and shared an anecdote from state tournaments on Facebook Live, talking about how the crowd’s reaction to a post-match celebration could vary wildly based on the athlete’s skin color: “One black kid dances, and everyone’s booing him.” But Askren, who is white, was also unwilling to explicitly call Maloney’s actions racist, and didn’t say whether he’d ever been cited for not covering his own head during competition.
Regardless, Askren is actually more candid than most. In the wrestling media, it’s not uncommon for a white sportswriter to mention a black athlete’s “politeness” or “humility” during interviews, then go on to praise the aggressive, colorful demeanor of a white competitor — often to the point of lending tacit approval to those who pick fights or argue with referees. One can watch this dynamic play out in moments like the 2009 NCAA finals, when Darion Caldwell, a black 149-pounder from North Carolina State, astonished fans by defeating Brent Metcalf, a returning champion and Hodge Trophy winner from Iowa, 9-6. In the last five seconds of the match, Metcalf had no hope of making a comeback, and Caldwell ran in a circle around the mat, then launched into a celebratory back-flip with Metcalf still chasing him. After getting his hand raised, he dropped to his knees, overjoyed.
“Now he needs to get up. And he needs to walk off,” commented Jim Gibbons, a broadcaster for ESPN. “Let’s win right, too.”
Gibbons might have thought that the loud booing from the stands, which could be heard on TV, was in response to Caldwell’s celebration. Metcalf was the overwhelming favorite, after all, and the last-second back-flip could have looked like showboating. But what ESPN viewers could barely see was that Metcalf had half-shoved the winning wrestler in mid-air, causing Caldwell to land dangerously on his back. Caldwell was unhurt, and Metcalf was compelled to apologize, later telling reporters he didn’t know that the match was over. He was formally reprimanded by the NCAA, and Iowa was docked a team point from the tournament.
Furthermore, there are those in the wrestling community even voicing their support for Maloney. Howie O’Neill, a member of the Southern Chapter of the New Jersey Wrestling Officials Association, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that that the real mistake was to ever allow Johnson to compete with a non-compliant head covering, as he had in a tournament a few days before.
“Alan did everything right. He followed the rules. I would have done exactly the same thing,” said O’Neill, an official for more than 40 years. “Because somebody else didn’t do their job, our guy looks like the bad guy.”
A week later, concern over what Johnson was forced to endure continues. Several commenters have brought up an incident in 2016, in which Maloney had been suspended for hurling a racial epithet at a fellow referee. Others have pointed out that even if Johnson’s hair covering didn’t meet with regulations, the pre-meet weigh-in would have been a perfectly practical time for an official to inspect for improperly-covered hair —whereas Maloney had allegedly arrived late.
The day after Christmas, the Buena Regional School District held an emergency meeting in the high school library, where an executive session had been called to discuss “personnel matters.” As superintendent David Cappuccio explained, Maloney had been assigned to the match by the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA), and because he was not an employee of the school district, the board had no control as to where he could continue to work. Buena would, however, refuse to participate in any further contest where Maloney was a referee. The NJSIAA, for their part, had announced that Maloney was barred from officiating, pending an investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division on Civil Rights.
Johnson didn’t attend the meeting, but his parents, Charles and Rosa, had released a statement through their attorney, Dominic Speziali, the previous Friday. They expressed gratitude in response to all the emails, phone calls and messages they’d received on social media, and were enormously proud of their son. But they were eager to hear what the consequences would be for Maloney. When it was his turn to speak, Speziali asked whether others in a position of authority could have intervened before the impromptu haircut took place.
“It’s still not clear to me why that had to happen in that manner to Andrew,” he told the board. “From my understanding, there were administrators and others up there, who remained silent all the time.”