This was why the 5-foot-2 sophomore had joined the wrestling program at National Trail, a small high school in western Preble County near the Indiana state line.
He wanted to be part of a team, wanted to be one of the guys, wanted to be like some of his heroes on the Blazers’ squad, guys like senior captains Josh Cook, a superb 152-pounder, and especially Ben Sullivan, the 220-pound Division III state champ last year who’ll head to West Point next season.
While his Down syndrome often had kept him separated from his schoolmates, whether it’s with the special classes he attends at school or in the few invitations he gets on weekends to join others in their fun, now Brooks was about to become the center of attention.
Before the day’s competition, National Trail coach Mike Eyler had spoken to the other two coaches about Brooks.
“I told them ‘I just need a match for my kid,’ ” he said. “I didn’t say I need a win or anything like that. I just said, ‘He wants to be a competitor like the other guys.’
“And the Wayne coach stepped up and said ‘I’ve got the perfect kid.’ ”
It was Warrior senior Tyler Stevens.
Eyler did not know what Stevens would do, nor was he sure how his own wrestler would respond.
Certainly Brooks was no shrinking violet. He previously had competed in basketball in the Special Olympics and had shown various 4-H animals at the Preble County Fair. This past summer he took fifth place in the poultry competition at the Ohio State Fair.
And then there had been the Blazers’ recent Homecoming, when it seemed as if he never left the dance floor.
But this was different. Neither his corsage-wearing date, nor his 4-H chickens had been trying to out-muscle him.
Wearing an orange singlet, dark blue headgear and wrestling shoes with lime green laces, Brooks was undaunted and quickly locked up with Stevens. Soon both were on the mat.
Tanya, who had been trying to film the match with her phone, had to stop because of her tears.
“And all of a sudden everyone in the audience, his teammates, everybody, was telling him, ‘C’mon Brooks. You can do it. Pin him! Pin him!’ ” she said.
And that's just what he did to the eventually-compliant Stevens, who, after the pin, stood up, shook Brooks' hand and patted him on the back.
“I knew how it felt to lose my first match,” Stevens said afterward, “and I didn’t want him to feel like that.”
At first, Brooks didn’t seem certain what he should do afterward. But once the referee lifted his arm into the air, the triumph washed over him and he headed back to his teammates with an exaggerated, lumbering strut that reminded you of Popeye the Sailor.
“He puffed his chest out,” Tanya grinned. “He was so proud.”
“You had to love that strut off the mat,” Eyler laughed.
Cook agreed: “It was awesome. You could tell he was pretty pumped. That’s what it’s like when you win. I don’t think he’s done a lot of things where he’s had to go up against someone like that.”
As she rushed to the floor to congratulate Brooks, his teammates and Stevens ‘’for showing great sportsmanship,” Tanya said a woman called out, asking if the winner were her son.
“’That’s my boy,’” she had beamed and now added: “It’s amazing what he can do.”
Other people seem to agree.
The other day Eyler checked one video of the match that’s posted on social media and said it had “57,000 views.”
A similar video on the Dayton Daily News site has over 28,000.
Why the popularity?
As Eyler put it:
“I think for anyone to see a young man who’s had a lot of obstacles put in his way — and for him to go out and overcome them and do it as a wrestler, a sport that’s got some of the toughest people in school — that really touches them in a good manner.”
Early challenges
Jay and Tanya Henning — before they split up nine years ago — had three children.
The two older girls, Shelby and Hunter, were popular National Trail cheerleaders. Hunter also played volleyball.
Early in 1998, Tanya became pregnant with her third child. Midway through the pregnancy she said an Alpha-Fetoprotein blood test came back with abnormal numbers.
“They sent us to a chromosome specialist who wanted to do an amniocentesis, but I’d already been on bed rest for nine weeks and there was some danger that I could miscarry,” she said as her voice began to break.
“I remember calling my grandmother, God rest her soul, she was a very Christian lady who lived in Tennessee. I said, ‘Grandma, I don’t know what to do.’
“And she said, ‘Tanya, turn it over to God. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be and if God takes him instead, that’s his choice.’ ”
When their son — who they named Brooks McCoy Henning after country musicians Garth Brooks and Neal McCoy — was born early and weighing under five pounds, he was taken to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).
“The next morning, they came in and said the baby had a heart condition and they thought he had Down syndrome,” Tanya said. “I was really upset. It was hard to accept. You go through like a mourning process.
“I remember all these questions I had: ‘How is this going to change our lives? How am I going to take care of him? What will this do to us financially?’ ”
She said her ex-husband comforted her and told her they’d get through it.
“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” he said the other day.
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That’s not saying they weren’t taken to the brink at times.
Brooks spent his first three weeks in the hospital with a feeding tube. He had hearing problems and gastro issues and would need open heart surgery to fix a hole and two valves before he was 2.
“It was chaotic when he first got home,” Tanya said. “He was on oxygen and had a heart monitor. There were so many (specialists) coming in and out of our house.
“Brooks didn’t sleep well. He was crying and screaming and Jay and I were like Zombies on no sleep.”
Initially, she said, some family members — they’ve since come around — didn’t accept Brooks.
The turning point for her though, she said, came when she attended a Preble County support group gathering for special needs children:
“I heard all the stories. Some people’s children could not sit up or roll over or even eat. And I was thinking, ‘Gosh, I don’t want to have to stand up and brag on my child and make other people feel bad.’ That’s when I realized we had a lot to be thankful for. Our child was a true blessing to all of us.”
She and Jay and their two daughters worked hard with Brooks. And though some things were delayed and his speech is still difficult to understand, she said he was sitting up by five or six months and walking at 14 months.
“We treated him like we had the other two kids and I pushed him to do things he liked,” Tanya said.
Except for a woman who briefly came into their lives later and would hit Brooks to reprimand him, Tanya said, people have mostly embraced him. She praised everybody from the teachers at National Trail High and Eyler and his wrestlers, to a 90-year-old aunt who kept a photo of Brooks on the night stand next to her bed:
“She’d kiss his picture every night before she went to sleep and again every morning when she woke up. She loved that child. She knew he was really special.”
A gentle heart
As she watched her son wrap his arm around Eyler at wrestling practice the other day and then beam, Tanya smiled:
“He’s got just the gentlest heart. He cares about everything.”
She said he has a special relationship with his sister Hunter, who, at 21, is three years older.
“I remember when he was 4 or 5, his sister got terribly sick to her stomach one night,” Tanya said. “It was like 3 a.m. and he heard her and he jumped out of bed and went in the bathroom and held her hair and rubbed her back.”
Then there was the time Tanya’s dying grandmother was in hospice:
“We were gathered around her bed singling gospel songs and when we got ready to leave, he crawled up in the bed with her and gave her a hug and a kiss. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.”
He has just as loving of a way with animals, which accounts for his numerous 4-H ribbons. He’s a member of the Future Farmers of America (FFA) at National Trail and one day wants to work on his uncle’s large hog farm nearby.
At present, he’s got a job in the school cafeteria and he’s fascinated by all things involving the Marines, who are often at the school and have given him various gifts — from a cap to a backpack — after he’s met certain physical fitness challenges.
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“He just loves the Marines,” Tanya said. “Whenever he sees something patriotic, he gives the Marine salute. And whenever he sees a Marine, he goes up and shakes their hand.
“He would join them right now, if he could.”
The one thing he could join this year was the Blazer wrestling team.
He moves back and forth, living a week at a time with each parent — dad in Eaton, mom in Eldorado — and when he’s with his father, who has remarried, he has a baby sitter, who is a National Trail cheerleader and drives him home from school after her practices.
But rather than hang out with the cheerleaders after school, he gravitated to the middle school gym, whose floor, when covered with bulky orange mats, hosts daily wrestling practice.
Brooks’ intervention specialist at school, Pat Hamilton, suggested to Eyler that he take him onto his team. Tanya and Jay thought it was a good idea and that began a union no one will soon forget.
“It’s been quite an experience,” Josh Cook said. “Brooks is always really close with us. He’ll just walk up and give us a big hug and say ‘Hey Buddy.’ ”
With that, he started to chuckle: “The most famous part of the early season was when he gave our 113-pounder a kiss on the neck.”
Tanya understands the unbridled affection: “He loves his teammates and his coaches. Mike has really taken him under his wing and taught him a lot.”
Eyler said everyone has benefited from this venture:
“Every boy wants to be part of a team and now Brooks has that. He’s part of a community, part of a team that looks out for each other. And in the future he’s going to know how to work with others.
“For the other boys, it’s normalizing someone who’s a little different than them. Now when they go out into the real world and run into someone like Brooksey, they’re not going to be confused on how to deal with them.
“We’ve all ended up teaching each other.”
‘He is normal’
As she watched her son wrestle one teammate after another at practice, Tanya admitted something she wasn’t proud of:
“Many times in the beginning, when Brooks had all the issues, I’d pray to God: ‘Please make my boy normal.’ ”
She shook her head: “I regret ever asking that because he is normal. He is everything to me.”
As Jay put it: “He’s no different than other kids. He just learns a little differently and reacts a little differently.”
And like the Blazers wrestlers, Brooks’ parents have learned from him, too.
“He has taught me you never know what life is gonna give you,” Tanya said. “You think you are going to have a perfectly normal child and then you get something you didn’t expect. And that’s when you realize the special gift.
“Brooks has taught me about unconditional love. I love all my children to no end, but you never know just how deep that love goes until you get a special needs child. It’s just amazing. Your heart just swells.”
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That’s what she felt that day her son made his wrestling debut in November and in the other two matches he’s wrestled since.
And that’s what Jay felt three weekends ago when he took Brooks to a leadership conference in Columbus:
“I went to see how he was doing and there he was at the front of the dance floor. One of the girls in his Ag class had said, ‘C’mon Brooks. Let’s dance!’ and he got going and pretty soon the other kids — there must have 200 of them — formed a circle around him and all I could hear was ‘Whoooooo!’
“I said, ‘Oh my gosh!’ and a girl said, ‘It’s been like this all night long. He’s had girls on each arm from all over the state of Ohio!’ ”
And it is stories like that that make Tanya reflect back to those early days of uncertainty:
“I didn’t know what life was gonna hand me with this. I knew there’d be a lot of challenges. But I didn’t know quite how we’d go from there.”
Brooks has shown them:
You go forward in style.
You go as a winner.
You go with a strut.
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