Once the curveball leaves life’s fingertips, the swinging part is up to you. The way Judy Johnston tells it, she just happened to snatch the first open seat she saw near the floor of the gymnasium at Legend High School in Parker last month. What she didn’t know at the time was that the open seat just happened to be next to the one occupied by Angel Rios’ mother, Cher. Or that Angel, a junior 106-pound wrestler at Valley High in Gilcrest, just happened to draw a matchup against her son, Brendan, a senior wrestler from The Classical Academy.
Or how Cher was going to react once she heard Brendan wouldn’t wrestle a woman. Not now. Not ever.
“It was a fluke,” Johnston recalls from a stairwell inside the Pepsi Center during the 2019 Colorado High School Activities Association State Wrestling Tournament. “I had been told Angel is really good, she wants to go the Olympics, so we knew a little about her. And the (Valley) coach came by and said, ‘He’s going to forfeit.’ And Angel came over to her mom and said, ‘He’s going to forfeit.’ She was disappointed. Her mom was disappointed. And me not being able to turn away from a challenging conversation…”
With Cher fuming, Judy introduced herself.
“Well,” she said, words dancing carefully to avoid stepping on any toes, “my son happens to be the one that’s forfeiting.’”
“Why is he doing that?” Cher replied.
“She explained why she felt disrespected,” Johnston recalled. “I said, ‘I totally understand that.’ I said, ‘I know she’s worked hard, but he feels it’s not appropriate to interact with a woman that way, to be physical on or off the mat, at this stage in life.
“So I kind of explained my side. It took a while, but she was able to kind of say, ‘Yeah, I kind of see your point.’ I wished her well and wished Angel well. And that was the end of it.”
Only it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
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In 43 matchups during his senior season at TCA, a charter school in Colorado Springs, Brendan Johnston lost only six times. Officially. But five of those losses were a forfeit, a self-induced medical default, and four of those were to one wrestler: Rios.
The fourth is the one that’s going to stick in the record books forever, one of the last dominoes to fall before a flick of history’s thumb. At approximately ten minutes after 10 on a Saturday morning at Pepsi Center in the third round of the Class 3A consolation rounds, Johnston huddled at one corner of Mat 8 with his coach, Sean Collins, to go over last-second strategies. He stripped off his grey warmups, same as always. Only instead of getting loose near the center of the mat, where Rios was doing mental laps in her head and physical ones along another corner, he made a sharp turn right, toward the official standing at the scorer’s table. There was a brief discussion, some nodding of heads, and handshakes all around.
When the official walked back to the center of the mat, where Rios now waited, Brendan didn’t join them. Said official instead lifted Rios’ left arm, declaring her the winner and — chronologically, at least, given the moment — the first girl to ever qualify, in the 84th installment of the event, for a podium finish at a Colorado high school state wrestling tournament. Faith and principles won out by technical fall.
“You’ve got to respect his personal decision to do what he did, and standing on his principles,” said CHSAA assistant commissioner Ernie Derrera noted. “And I think there’s a bigger lesson there than wrestling.”
You know what? He’d do it again. The walking away part. Not the wrestling-against-a-female part. Not now. Not ever.
“I’m not really comfortable with a couple of things with wrestling a girl,” Johnston explained. “The physical contact, there’s a lot of it in wrestling.
“And I guess the physical aggression, too. I don’t want to treat a young lady like that on the mat. Or off the mat. And not to disrespect the heart or the effort that she’s put in. That’s not what I want to do, either.”
Johnston is forever a part of Colorado state tournament lore now. He’s cool with that. His decision to forfeit twice at the 2019 state tourney — effectively eliminating himself from a competition he had a solid shot at winning — on personal and religious grounds rather than wrestle two girl competitors, may divide your inner circle right down the middle. He’s cool with that, too.
“Wrestling is something we do, it’s not who we are,” Johnston told The Denver Post before forfeiting to Rios on Saturday in his final match as a high-school wrestler. “And there are more important things to me than my wrestling. And I’m willing to have those priorities.”
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There will be arguments that without those priorities, some of the dominoes that fell over the weekend might never have toppled in the first place. For the first time, not one, but two, girls from Colorado joined a state tourney podium. While Johnston was abandoning his bout with Rios, Jaslynn Gallegos of Skyview pinned Hunter Frederickson of Moffat County, cementing her foothold in the narrative as well.
When the dust settled early Saturday afternoon, Rios finished fourth at state; Gallegos, who was on the other side of the bracket, wound up fifth. The latter’s first matchup on at the start of the tourney on Thursday? Johnston. He walked away then, too. Sometimes, you pick the battle. Sometimes, the battle picks you.
“I’m OK with the decisions I made,” said Johnston, who made the same decision a year ago, knocking himself out of the 2018 state tourney after declining to face Conifer’s Cayden Condit, a female competitor, in the consolations.
“I’m peaceful. I’m fine. I’m calm. Coach Collins always says, ‘Wrestling is what we do, it’s not who we are.’ So I know who I am. And my identity lies elsewhere. I’m fine with that.”
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More than a decade after Golden’s Brooke Sauer became the first Colorado girl to qualify for a state wrestling tourney, roughly 300 girls participated in the sport this winter at 114 different schools. Club wrestling at a grassroots level and the success of women in combat sports such as mixed martial arts have helped to pump interest, and participation, up to the point where a vote on sanctioning girls wrestling statewide starting with the 2020-21 school year — new sport, new postseason bracket, with the championships integrated into the schedule of the current title weekend — is expected in April, Derrera said.
“Are there concerns that people are going to continue to do what Brendan Johnston did?” Derrera asked. “I don’t know if it’s a ‘concern.’ But I think you will continue to see, for whatever their personal reasons are, that you’ll have males refusing to wrestle females. Just like you have some females that have refused to take part in the male portion of the sport.”
Derrera said the Johnstons have taken an “admirable viewpoint” on the bracket draw, as opposed to a litigious one; Federal law, he noted, states that girls and boys have the right to participate in any sanctioned sport in which a gender-specific alternative isn’t available. CHSAA has run a pilot program with a female-specific state wrestling bracket in recent years, but Rios and Gallegos chose to test their skills climbing the boys’ postseason ladder.
“I think, for the most part, people respect (the choice). Some of these boys are willing to wrestle — some of them, if you talk to them, they don’t look at it as whether they’re wrestling a boy or wrestling a girl, they’re wrestling another wrestler. When I was coaching and my sons had to wrestle girls, I always told them to take the viewpoint (that) you can’t look at it like you’re wrestling a girl. You’re wrestling a wrestler.”
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Brendan Johnston’s decisions may leave you wanting to shake his hand. He may have you walking away shaking your head. He’s down with either.
“I wouldn’t say there was backlash (last year),” Collins said. “There is a difference of opinions. Coaches say, ‘Hey, is it the mom and dad or is it the school?’ No, it’s Brandon’s choice. And he’s comfortable with it and aware of what it means and is OK.
“There are bigger things than state tournament wrestling.”
There’s college next year: Johnston has looked into competing at Division III Wheaton College, a private school in the Chicago suburbs. There’s the bd’s Mongolian Grill on Wazee Street, which he planned on hitting once he’d finished cheering on his TCA teammates still left on the bracket.
There’s no looking back.
Not now. Not ever.
“How do I feel right now?” Johnston said, repeating the question. He took the Pepsi Center tunnel in for a second, eyes darting to the parade of gladiators stretching and flexing to his right, an ear perked to the cacophony of whistles to his left. He exhaled. “I feel good.”
