Hlas: Tony Ramos follows Trials loss with verbal missteps

IOWA CITY — I've covered five U.S. Olympic Wrestling Team Trials over three decades, and there has been this constant to them: Anguish.

Often, it's severe.

Elation goes only to the handful of competitors who win their way onto the Olympic team. More than 90 percent of the contestants don't prevail. But many believe they could and should, and can't digest a different ending.

So it was Sunday at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in a fairly extraordinary series of events. Two Hawkeye Wrestling Club members won their way into the 57 kilograms final with a pair of wins each. Top-seeded Tony Ramos and No. 3 Daniel Dennis, former Iowa teammates, were pitted against each other in a best-of-3 series for the right to go to Rio de Janeiro as an Olympian.

Iowa assistant coach Terry Brands was in Ramos' corner. Iowa head coach Tom Brands walked into the arena with Dennis, but took a seat in the background instead of matside.

Dennis won the action-less first match, 2-1. An hour later, Dennis took down Ramos in the first minute of the second match, then turned him four times in rapid-fire succession for a 10-0 technical fall in 1:04.

Dennis won, end of story. Except it wasn't.

Ramos, an NCAA champion just two years ago, basically napalmed Tom Brands in an interview session over an hour after his defeat.

Ramos said he disagreed with the welcoming back of Dennis to the Iowa wrestling room after Dennis had been retired as a competitor and living in California for over two years.

'I was stabbed in the back,' Ramos said.

'Would you be OK with someone coming back if you were the top guy and had the top coaches working with you and they're bringing in a guy in your weight class who you know you were going to compete with in the finals? Not at all.

'I need to move on. I need to get out of this program.'

It was a bad moment. It made Ramos look petty and ungraceful. It also made Hawkeye wrestling sound like it was splintered, never an image you want suggested to the world.

Until that moment, Ramos had been a great ambassador of several years for the Hawkeyes, a popular and exciting winner. But in under five minutes, he had publicly and harshly severed ties.

After his remarks, reporters requested Brands be made available to offer his side of the story. Brands appeared, not having heard Ramos' comments.

'I can't speak for him, but I know he's hurting,' Brands said.

'You put your whole life into something and it didn't go your way.'

Ramos was this nation's top dog at his weight in 2014 and 2015, going to two World Championships. Then in the city in which he lives, in an arena in which he had never before lost, he was knocked off his perch and denied the goal of every elite amateur wrestler.

That hurts so much. But you don't slam people who helped make you what you are when things don't go your way. Who has betrayed whom?

Dennis was the best at his weight from Sunday's daytime challenge tournament to the last second of that evening's finals.

'The bottom line is we had two guys at a weight and I am happy for Dan Dennis and I am down about Tony Ramos,' Brands said. 'I'm as down about Tony Ramos as I am about Brent Metcalf (HWC member and No. 1 seed who lost in Saturday's session of the Trials).

'And if Tony Ramos wins that wrestling match, then I am extremely happy for Tony Ramos and I am as down about Dan Dennis as I am about Brent Metcalf. It's that simple.

'We give our soul to those guys, equally.'

Monday afternoon, Ramos spoke on a Des Moines radio show and stood by his Sunday night remarks. He said he hadn't spoken to Tom Brands, but will do so in person 'because it's the right thing to do.'

'But for right now, the best thing for me is to move on.

'Dan, he beat me. ... That's on me, not anyone else.

'I woke up this morning and the sun rose. My son was smiling and happy. It's kind of what got me through today.'

Dan Gable once said something wrestlers and wrestling fans love to recite.

'Once you've wrestled, everything else in life is easy.'