D’Arcy Grapples With Success : After a Junior Season Replete With Defeat, La Canada Wrestler Has Won Two Tournaments : and the Respect of an Old Nemesis

As a junior on the La Canada High wrestling team, Xander D’Arcy was intimately familiar with the emotional charge of victory. All he had to do is watch his opponent’s reaction.

D’Arcy would sweat more before a math test than he would during the brief span of some of his matches.

“It wasn’t fun,” D’Arcy concedes. “I had the strength and the cardiovascular (conditioning) but I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

Apparently, suffering breeds wisdom. This season, D’Arcy has moved up a weight class to 112 pounds and it’s his opponents who are left squirming helplessly. D’Arcy, the team captain, has improved dramatically, winning his weight class in both the Harvard and Whittier tournaments.

D’Arcy, 17, wasn’t out-muscled last season. In fact, he was stronger than many of the guys who folded and twisted him like so much origami paper.

But because it was his first year on the team, his limited repertoire of moves was quickly exhausted.

Spartan Coach Scott Beeks says D’Arcy’s dilemma is not uncommon. “You can be half as strong and half as conditioned, know three times more and win,” he said.

Though D’Arcy may not have been schooled on the nuances of the sport, he did not lack aggressiveness.

Once, he caught an opponent’s head between his knees in an illegal scissor position and applied pressure.

“I’m just squeezing and squeezing as hard as I can and he gets a bloody nose,” D’Arcy said. “He got a point for the illegal move but I think it was worth it. It was a new experience.”

Recently, D’Arcy had a commanding lead in a match and was on top of his opponent, who began pinching D’Arcy’s stomach.

“I was like, ‘ Ow! Dude, what are you doing? It’s not going to work,’ ” D’Arcy said.

It is not uncommon for a wrestler to bend the rules while bending an opponent.

“You do anything you can,” Beeks said. “Bite, kick and scratch. Do it to them before they can do it to you.

“La Canada is sheltered. You go to other schools and kids have older brothers in gangs. You can’t be passive and take everything because you’re going to get beat up.”

Doling out pain might be terra incognita for D’Arcy. But receiving it isn’t.

Xander, short for Alexander, hung out with older boys and served as the neighborhood punching bag in his younger days. Dean Ross was one of the perpetrators.

Ross, who is three years older than D’Arcy, would punch the youngster’s arm until he screamed at the precise pitch.

If D’Arcy was off key, the pelts continued.

“He’s tough. He’s the kind of kid that can take a beating,” said Ross, whose relationship with D’Arcy is considerably more amicable now. “When you pinned him to the ground his head would turn purple and look like it was going to pop, but he’d pull through.”

The beatings abated when D’Arcy began to establish his prowess on the mat.

Said D’Arcy: “Now it’s kind of pay-back time.”

But it’s D’Arcy’s opponents, not neighborhood bullies, who are the targets of much of his revenge.

In a meet against Schurr High last Thursday, D’Arcy beat Jose Torres, 21-6. The decision was bitter for Torres, who had not lost a Rio Hondo League match this season.

But he wasn’t about to credit his opponent.

“Sorry to say it, but he doesn’t have anything,” Torres said. “You would be ticked, too, if you lost to a fish.”

It was Torres who spent much of the affair floundering on the mat, however.

D’Arcy is still raw but the experience gap between he and other wrestlers is rapidly shrinking.

“You begin to develop instincts in your third year,” Beeks said. “But Xander is a very quick study.”

Beeks adds that D’Arcy, who has seemingly reached a weight plateau, has a distinct advantage over younger wrestlers who are still growing.

“He’s older, his body’s older, so he’s stronger,” Beeks said. “He has 10 to 15% more strength than a guy the same size, so if he’s not in exactly the right position, he can compensate.”

Being out of position still costs D’Arcy, though. While he is winning most matches by a wide margin, he is often unable to deliver the crowning blow--a pin.

“If you put a guy on his back two or three times, he should be worn out enough to pin,” Beeks said. “He has won a lot of matches by 15 points.”

But those points will be far more difficult to come by on the college level.

D’Arcy plans to attend Humboldt State and hopes to continue wrestling.

D’Arcy says he regrets not starting earlier. He turned to the sport only after his size--or, more accurately, his lack of size--all but ruled out football or basketball.

“When I was a freshman, I thought wrestling was the stupidest sport in the world,” he said.

Stupid, at least, until he tasted victory.