This is what happens at Speedway High when a kid on the wrestling team screws up. Well, it’s what used to happen when a kid screwed up, mouthing off to a coach or teacher, being late to practice, skipping a class. That sort of thing. Used to be, Speedway coach Jacob Beyer would discipline the kid by putting him through something called the dirty dozen, or something that sounds worse, the shark tank.

The dirty dozen: 12 sets of 12 exercises, done 12 times. In other words: a dozen push-ups … 12 times. Followed by a dozen sit-ups, 12 times. And a dozen pull-ups, 12 times. And on and on until the kid has done 12 different exercises, with 12 sets of 12 reps each. How long does that something like that take, anyway?

“Most of a practice,” Beyer tells me, and I swear he’s smiling.

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The shark tank: The kid in question stands in the middle of the mat while the rest of the team jogs a slow circle around him. Beyer blows his whistle, and someone leaves the circle to wrestle the kid in the middle. The rest of the team keeps doing that slow jog – until Beyer blows his whistle again and someone else emerges from the circle to wrestle the kid in the middle. And so it goes, Beyer sending one fresh body after another, until the kid in the middle can’t continue. This isn’t mean, isn’t cruel. It’s called discipline. It’s called wrestling.

And like I said, that’s what used to happen when a kid at Speedway screwed up. Not this season. No, this season, when kids on his team need discipline, Sparkplugs coach Jacob Beyer does something else.

“I make them wrestle Riley,” he says.

Cartoon body and a mean streak

Last time I saw Riley Walker, he was a Speedway freshman who weighed 145 pounds. This was three years ago, his first year on the varsity, and he was just learning the sport. By the time I heard about this kid at Speedway, he had wrestled 14 matches. I was there for his 15th match, against Brebeuf. Riley jumped to an 8-0 lead against the wrestler from Brebeuf, then started to run out of gas. By the time Riley's lead had shrunk to 8-7, his tank was empty. Moments later he was pinned, dropping his season record to 5 wins, 10 losses.

I wrote about him anyway. Hey, the kid has one leg. Whether he’s good at wrestling or not, that isn’t really the point. He’s wrestling.

Riley is a senior now. He’s better, or so I heard. Bigger, or so I heard. Some things you have to see for yourself, so back to Speedway I went a few days ago to watch the Sparkplugs wrestle Cascade, and I’ll put it like this: People were telling the truth about Riley Walker. He’s wrestling at 170 pounds, with a cartoon physique – chest pushing 50 inches, waist barely 32 inches – and a mean streak he didn’t have back in January 2016.

Understand, "mean" is relative.

The Riley Walker I see now, he’s not running out of gas. It’s possible he doesn’t even run on gas anymore. He’s a hybrid, an athlete with a hyphen, an amputee-wrestler – unique, unlike any other athlete in the state – and now he has the fitness tool he needs, a tool he didn’t have back in 2016, to push his cardio. More on that tool in a moment. For now, just know this: Riley can push a pace most kids can’t handle, even kids in a sport as demanding as wrestling, kids being pushed to the limit at whatever school they call home.

Riley doesn’t have a limit.

And so I watch him grab ahold of the 170-pounder from Cascade and just sort of gnaw on the kid, slowly taking every bit of meat from the bone. The coach at Cascade is yelling at his wrestler, encouraging him, telling him to “get up” and “fight his hands” and “get your head off the mat.”

In the front row, I’m jotting in my notebook: You get out there with Riley, Coach. You try.

The other coach, the coach from Speedway – Jacob Beyer – is saying something else. He’s not yelling it. Just saying it quietly, so softly that it’s sort of eerie:

“Pressure, pressure, pressure …”

Riley is listening, grinding the kid from Cascade into the mat. Every time the kid stands up, Riley is still there, hanging onto an ankle and burying one of his shoulders into the back of the kid’s knee, collapsing the leg and sending the Cascade wrestler face-first into the mat. The danger here, for Riley Walker, is that the referee will decide he’s stalling and stand both wrestlers up. So now Beyer starts to yell:

“Climb his body!”

And I’ll be damned …

Riley Walker turns the kid from Cascade into a ladder, climbing from his legs to his waist to his shoulders, draping himself all over the poor kid, covering him. He’s 170 pounds of mist, and this is how it goes for six minutes until the match is over and Riley has won by a score of 4-1, and afterward I realize the blind luck of timing that brought me here tonight: Three years after watching his 15th match as a freshman, I’ve just watched his 15th match as a senior. Remember back then, he was 5-10.

Now he’s 13-2.

I can’t believe he lost twice.

'I’m wrestling you today'

Back to the discipline at Speedway.

It wasn’t Beyer’s idea to have his team deal with Riley Walker. Not at first. It started early last season, actually, when Riley was a junior and there was a new kid on the team, a kid who was bad-mouthing Beyer behind his back and making smart-ass comments in general and basically turning wrestling practice into performance art. This kid wasn’t there to wrestle. He was there to cause problems.

The way I hear it, one-legged Riley Walker hopped over to that kid and said four words:

“I’m wrestling you today.”

The way I hear it, the other kid didn’t make it through practice. He walked out, never to return. I tell Riley I know that story, and that I know coach Beyer uses him as an instrument of discipline, and Riley cringes.

“I sound like a jerk,” he says, and I’m telling him what I’m about to tell you: No, no, no. You, Riley Walker, are a great kid.

And he is. He’s a 3.89 GPA student, a kid who wants to go to Purdue and become a biomechanical engineer and design prosthetics for amputees. When Speedway coaches attend an Indiana Crossroads Conference event, and coaches are asked to bring a kid who embodies class and sportsmanship, coaches bring along Riley Walker. A few weeks ago, a longtime IHSAA referee named Frankie Medvescek, an Indiana Wrestling Hall of Famer from Plainfield, presented to Riley a token of appreciation for being an inspiration – a signed, framed copy of that 2016 story in the IndyStar – calling it an honor to have officiated so many of his matches.

A jerk, Riley Walker? Not even close. He’s a quiet, humble kid who played football this season on his one leg, and note that I’m not calling it his one “good” leg because his right leg isn’t all that good. But his younger brother Reis was going to start at linebacker, and Riley thought it would be special to play alongside him. So Riley played football despite having a condition, fibular hemimelia, that cost him most of his left leg six years ago, and may well cost him his right leg someday. If he breaks that leg, doctors won’t wait for it to heal; they’ll just remove it. He was born without ankles, and because of that the calf is underused and tiny. And that’s his “good” leg.

And Riley risked it all, talked his family into it, because he wanted to play football for the first time in three years. To be with his brother. He weighed about 190 pounds in football season. Wore a prosthetic on the field. Started at nose tackle. Held his own. That’s who he is.

Well, OK, this is also who he is: He visits his mom’s class at Stokes Elementary School in Lebanon to speak to the kids about his legs, about his decision to live his life in victory and not defeat, and when he leaves, the kids are blown away.

“All they can talk about for the next several days is Riley,” his mom, Alicia, tells me. “And they all want to start wrestling.”

A semi taking a curve too fast and toppling over

For years, Riley didn’t know what he was doing on the mat.

He’s unique, not like any other wrestler in the state, but he was trying to wrestle like everyone else: Go for the takedown, and start working toward a pin. On paper, sure, that’s how you wrestle. But that paper wasn’t written about a wrestler with most of one leg missing, the other leg weak and not flexible, the upper body enormous.

“Riley is top-heavy. Good wrestlers use his size against him,” Riley’s father, Steve, is saying as we sit in the stands at Speedway and watch a good wrestler, junior Brayden Stinnett from Cascade, try to do just that.

See, a good wrestler can feel when Riley starts moving toward a pin, and when the time is right they’ll go in the same direction, using Riley’s momentum against him and flipping him over. He’s powerless to stop it, a strong and powerful semitruck taking a curve too fast and toppling over. Took him almost four years, but this is what Riley Walker has learned: He has to grind out a victory, getting top position and maintaining it, climbing his opponent’s body, demoralizing wrestlers accustomed to being put face-down on the mat, yes, but not like this. Not for six minutes straight.

At 170 pounds, Riley Walker combines the upper-body strength of a heavyweight with the cardio of a much smaller wrestler. It’s that fitness tool I was telling you about earlier, a Nordic skiing cardio machine called a SkiErg that a wonderful IndyStar reader named Dianne Phillips donated to Riley after reading that story I wrote three years ago, when Riley was telling me that cardio is a problem because he shouldn’t run or even hop too much on his right leg; it’s vulnerable and could break.

Unable to work on cardio, Riley had to go for the fast finish. But good wrestlers were using his one-legged, top-heavy aggression against him. It was a no-win position, and Riley didn’t win much as a freshman (he finished well below .500) or as a sophomore (he thinks he may have broken even that season).

But as a junior he had the SkiErg, and he used it every day, and had the stamina to grind out wins and go 19-10. What’s a SkiErg? Imagine doing pull-ups. Now imagine doing them for 15 minutes. Compared to that, wrestling three two-minute periods isn’t so hard.

Neither is flipping tires, which is how Riley stayed in shape during football season. The SkiErg was back in the wrestling room – Riley keeps it there – so when Speedway football coaches had the team running stadium stairs, they put a tractor tire in front of Riley and told him to start flipping it. Down the field he’d go, one flip at a time, and then he’d come back the other way. He got so good at it, the coaches put him against the strongest player on the team – a kid who outweighed Riley by more than 50 pounds and, as if this needs to be said, has two legs – and Riley dusted him.

He’s some kind of strong, Riley Walker. A member of the Speedway powerlifting team, last year Riley set a Next Generation Power Lifting record of 430 pounds in the deadlift. He’s blown past that by 50 pounds in practice – his max deadlift is 480 – and he can bench press 315. All of this on a body that goes about 165 pounds. He could wrestle at 160, but he likes his speed advantage at 170, and besides, he’s stronger than his opponents in the bigger class anyway.

Which brings me back to the discipline at Speedway: A kid screws up – small stuff, as I’ve said: late to practice, that sort of thing – and Beyer makes the kid wrestle Riley. That’s what Beyer is telling me, and I’m asking him: Even heavyweights? Is that punishment for a heavyweight, to wrestle a 170-pounder? Beyer starts to chuckle.

“Oh, (the heavyweight) might hold his own for a few minutes,” Beyer says. “But eventually he gets tired, and Riley doesn’t stop. And I also think …”

Beyer pauses. He’s not sure how this next part will sound.

It’ll sound fine, I tell him. Trust me.

“OK,” he says. “I also think Riley likes punishing people.”

It’s a wrestling thing, a mentality. Two highly conditioned athletes in the same weight class step onto a small wrestling mat. Only one can win. It’s an alpha-dog moment, and there can be only one. Riley wants to be the one.

“I guess I do like to punish people,” he says, then cringes again. “That makes me sound like a jerk! But when it’s time to wrestle, I want to make the other guy quit.”

I’m looking at Riley, just to see what it looks like when a young man this sweet says something so ferocious, and I’m not surprised. This kid with the short blond hair and ruddy complexion is blushing.

“Maybe I am a jerk,” he says softly.

No, Riley, and here I’ll tell you what I told him: You, Riley Walker, are an amazing young man.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.