NO MORE BACK SEAT : Cuban Defector Goes From Weightlifting Hero to the Barrio and Back

Abe Lincoln grew up in a log cabin in Illinois. Babe Ruth spent his youth in a Baltimore industrial school. The Wright brothers built flying machines in their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio.

But when it comes to humble cradles of the Great American Dream, Roberto Antonio (Tony) Urrutia has ‘em all beat. Urrutia’s entry is an abandoned car on a side street somewhere in the Little Havana barrio of Miami.

America’s top Olympic weightlifter slept in the back seat of that car for about six months in 1981, when he was between jobs. He was also between countries, between medals and between meals. He was caught between his American dream and reality.

Be it ever so humble, that immobile home, a true fixer-upper, provided shelter while Tony (the name he now prefers) Urrutia waited for someone or something to come along and jump-start his life.

Hollywood surely will thank Urrutia (pronounced yur-OOT-ia) one day for that car, which will make one stupendo prop for the opening scene of “The Tony Urrutia Story.” The made-for-TV movie is actually in the planning stages, its fate possibly contingent upon Urrutia’s winning a medal in Seoul.

Urrutia is a medal longshot, even by Hollywood standards, since many experts will be surprised if any U.S. lifter, including the legendary middleweight Urrutia, cracks the top 6 in any of the 10 weight divisions.

Still, whether a middleweight medal is won, whether the movie is made, there is a lot to love in the Tony Urrutia story, and a lot to think about.

With apologies to the old car in Miami, this version of Urrutia’s story will begin in Havana, where a puny 12-year-old kid then called Roberto is hauling buckets of water for his mom, up the stairs to their fifth-floor apartment. The bigger kids in the neighborhood, which is to say all the other kids in the neighborhood, taunt him and bully him routinely.

So little Roberto finds the nearest weightlifting gym and goes to work with a vengeance.

“It’s the Charles Atlas syndrome,” says Lou LaRose, a New York film producer and Urrutia’s adviser.

At first Urrutia is drawn to body building, but he is soon steered toward the more socially acceptable--in Cuba--sport of weightlifting. He becomes consumed by the sport.

He enters his first competition at 14 and within two years is the Cuban national champion at 132 pounds.

Soon, Urrutia is no longer carrying water; he is carrying Cuba.

In a country obsessed with barbells--there are 400 salaried weightlifting coaches and 30,000 serious lifters, contrasted with the United States’ zero paid coaches and 1,500 lifters--Urrutia becomes the man of iron. He finishes fourth in the Montreal Olympics, then blossoms, winning gold medals at the World Championships in 1977, ’78 and ’79.

Cuba rewards Urrutia with a home overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, a sports car, clothing, food, travel. He walks the streets of Havana, a teen legend. Only boxer Teofilo Stevenson and track star Alberto Juantorena are in Urrutia’s class as national folk heroes.

Soon, Urrutia also has a wife and a baby son.

And all this is before what is to be his and Cuba’s moment of glory--the 1980 Olympics, in Moscow, where Urrutia will win a gold medal as surely as Fidel Castro will light up a victory cigar.

However . . . Seeds of discontent are sprouting within Urrutia’s soul. He visits a Cuban friend, a former athlete now living in a shack, penniless, unable to buy so much as an egg. The friend tells Urrutia, in essence, “Someday, when your skills fade, this will be your fate.”

Urrutia’s coach is pushing him relentlessly, in the fashion of Cuban weightlifting. Possibly there is pressure on Urrutia to use steroids, which he will not do.

And Urrutia has been sampling the world on his weightlifting trips, seeing life outside Cuba. The United States, in particular, holds a fascination for him, the complex lure of freedom and the simplistic lure of material plenty.

Urrutia has no political beef, no grudge against Castro or communism. He simply is a restless and vaguely angry young man.

In July of 1980, the Cuban team is training in Mexico City for the Olympics. One day Urrutia has a severe stomachache and asks to be excused from training. His coach denies the request.

So Urrutia makes an impulsive decision that he will come to deeply regret, and then, much later, to be thankful for.

After breakfast Urrutia knots together his bed sheets, shinnies down from his fourth- or fifth-floor hotel room window, and flees into the streets. His wife and son are left back in Cuba. He is as scared and alone as a national hero can be.

Urrutia locates the U.S. Embassy and begs entrance, but is turned away by the guards. So he runs around back and scales the fence--expecting at any time to be pulled down and dragged back to the hotel by Cuban secret police--and enters the embassy to beg for asylum.

“I want protection,” he says breathlessly to the first person he sees. “I want the Marines.”

John Wayne is not available, but within two days Urrutia is given a green card and $500, and is dropped off in the border town of Laredo, Tex. Vaya con Dios , dude. Buena suerte .

He buys an airline ticket to Miami, and upon arrival falls into instant poverty and obscurity. America, just as Urrutia has fantasized, truly is a land where things happen fast.

While America yawns, Cuba mourns.

“In Cuba it was a catastrophe,” says Rafael Guerrero, who owns two Miami gyms and during the ‘60s was the Cuban national weightlifting coach. “It was like a disaster. Roberto had won three world championships, was the favorite to win a gold medal for a small country that had never won a gold medal (in weightlifting).

“It turns out they got a gold medal that year from another lifter, but this truly was a disaster for Cuba. Roberto was the best lifter they had.”

Guerrero himself had left Cuba in 1968 for political reasons. He had been a prominent sports leader, but became a non-fan of Castro and was put in an agricultural work camp for 18 months, then allowed to leave the country.

Urrutia, with no political ax to grind, left Cuba the fast and easy way, but found his U.S. welcome a quiet one. So quiet you could hear a star fall.

“When I came here, it was a big disappointment,” Urrutia says, in massive understatement. “I tried to reach people, but nobody knew nobody, you know?”

Guerrero says: “I’m sure when he came to the U.S., he expected to find in America the same kind of adulation he found in Cuba. In Cuba, he had what a major superstar in America would have, even more. All of a sudden he finds himself in a country where he is a nobody. In fact, a friend of mine is a newspaper reporter and he wrote a story about Roberto the first few days after he arrived in Miami, for the Miami Herald. The headline was ‘Mr. Nobody.’ ”

Urrutia has no friends or relatives in Miami, no connections, no money, no job skills, can’t speak English. His claim to three world weightlifting titles, along with a quarter, buys him a cup of coffee anywhere in town.

Our dazed defector somehow contacts Murray Levin, a securities investor in Florida and then-president of the U.S. Weightlifting Federation. The two had met years before at a U.S. meet.

Levin contacts the State Department and appeals to have waived the mandatory wait (four years of permanent residence, then an individual’s case is considered) for U.S. citizenship. We have a weightlifter here who can win gold medals for the United States, Levin tells the State Department. Many calls are made, many letters written, many pleas pleaded on Urrutia’s behalf, to the government, to the United States Olympic Committee.

To no avail. The final answer is a simple, bilingual no.

It is not a big surprise. Though the wait for U.S. citizenship has been cut short for some athletes, there is no consistent policy, and many others--among them tennis players Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova--have had to wait with everyone else.

Since Urrutia then is prevented from representing the United States in international competition, he has no resources and little motivation for the killer training required to maintain his skills.

He drops out of sight. He disappears, “gobbled up in the environment,” says his current coach, Stan Bailey. Urrutia drifts through a few low-paying jobs--car wash attendant, convenience store clerk--and works out from time to time in Miami gyms. But the famed Roberto Urrutia is, for all Olympic Games purposes, history.

Now we get to the car.

“I know I no be forever sleeping in the car,” Urrutia says now.

Still, prospects aren’t blindingly bright for our young hero. He is sleeping in the back seat of that car when he is discovered, so to speak, by a church social worker who happens to pass by.

“One day I received a call from a young man, a church worker in Miami,” Guerrero says. “He tells me he has found a young man sleeping in an abandoned car, and that the young man claims to be a three-time world weightlifting champion. Of course (the social worker) didn’t believe it.

“He said his church had no more funds for such work, he cannot do anything for the young man, but can he bring him to me? He drops Tony here, like on my lap. I give him a room to sleep in, in the back of one of my gyms. It’s not a big room; today it is a ladies’ room. I helped him find a job in a local nightclub (as a bouncer).”

In the disco, Urrutia meets an American woman, Laura, whom he will marry in 1983, and who will encourage him in his rebirth as a weightlifter. His climb back, out of the gutter, has begun.

Guerrero contacts Levin, tells Levin that Urrutia has resurfaced and wants to get back into a little lifting.

Levin is shocked when he sees the 5-foot 6-inch Urrutia, who has expanded to about 210 pounds from his competitive weight of 165. Levin lets Urrutia and his bride move into his home, and lets Urrutia use his garage gym. Levin also gives his iron-fraternity brother clothing and encouragement, and becomes godfather when little Antonio is born.

Still, any Olympic dreams are strictly dreams. Weightlifting will be a nice hobby while Urrutia gets on his feet with his young family--his wife has a daughter by a previous marriage.

The next dramatic turning point in our story occurs at Miami’s Orange Bowl on July 3, 1986. As part of the Statue of Liberty centennial celebration, Chief Justice Warren Burger swears in some 26,000 new citizens in a special nationwide naturalization ceremony. Urrutia is one of the chosen many, thus shortening the usual five-year wait by a few months.

Scene: Orange Bowl, a steaming hot afternoon, Burger’s voice on the loudspeaker. Urrutia stands in the crowd in a black woolen suit, sweating, crying, waving a U.S. flag, pledging allegiance, hugging Laura.

It is at this moment that Tony Urrutia resolves to return to competitive weightlifting, to try to represent his new country in the Olympic Games of 1988.

He has a steady job, driving a truck for a supermarket chain, and a supportive wife. He builds a lifting platform in the back yard of his father-in-law’s modest home in--where else?--Hollywood, Fla.

With Levin’s help, Urrutia also obtains a $3,000 grant from the Sunshine State Games Foundation, for training supplements and travel expenses. Levin also gets Urrutia a grant of $100 a month from the York Barbell Co. This Levin is a handy fellow to have as a friend.

For Urrutia, the enemy now is time. He has two years to regain his old form, two years to shake off five years of physical rust and mental cobwebs. And he will be 30 for the Seoul Olympics, in this body-wrenching sport where few lifters compete beyond their mid-20s.

If genes and desire play a part, you have to like Urrutia’s chances.

“His acceleration is unique,” says Stan Bailey. “From knees to overhead, he is the quickest lifter in the history of the game. The heavier the weights, the quicker he becomes. It’s nothing you can teach.”

Nor is the intensity.

“When he started training with the American team, everyone caught fire,” Levin says. “Our lifters work out an hour and a half a day, two hours at most. Tony will lift three hours. The others watch him and they marvel. On the patio he built for weightlifting in his yard, he has barrels. He jumps over them like an ice skater. He does cardiovascular conditioning. Our guys don’t. None of our guys train like that. He’s incredible, he’s like a machine.”

But a machine not yet back to full speed after a long, strange layoff.

Urrutia’s biggest test so far was the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis. He finished third, behind two Cuban lifters, who then publicly denounced Urrutia as a traitor.

The next day, Castro himself sent a telegram to his two lifters, saying in part: “You taught an exemplary lesson to the traitor who became a citizen of the empire to compete against his own people. . . . (You) have shown that the imperialists’ money is worthless when facing dignity and high principles.”

Was that setback temporary? Can Urrutia be a force at 30, a dozen years after his last Olympic competition?

He says yes, and showed he means it by setting a U.S. record in the clean and jerk at the Olympic trials. “My attitude is to win a medal, no matter what,” Urrutia says. “Too old? I don’t think so. I feel stronger than ever. I feel more ready.”

Alas, we interject a note of cold reality into this bi-coastal Hollywood-Hollywood tale.

Guerrero, Urrutia’s friend and fan, says: “I wish, both as an American citizen and a weightlifter, he could win a medal. But realistically, he won’t even make it in the top six. He and Mario Martinez of California are our two top lifters, and they maybe don’t crack the top six.

“It has nothing to do with the fact Tony is 30. He’s been back in serious training just two years. He has the courage and the determination. It would not be impossible, but very, very unlikely.”

There is one possible factor in Urrutia’s favor. Reportedly, he is a strict anti-steroid lifter. It is speculated that many of the world’s top lifters are steroid-assisted, and it is further speculated that there will be strict drug testing at Seoul. That could be the great equalizer.

Urrutia doesn’t concern himself with such global matters. He sees only iron. He has put his past behind him. He’s weary of re-telling his Gulliver-esque tale of travel. He has no direct contact with his former wife and 10-year-old son in Cuba, and little contact with his mother.

Guerrero says he and Levin have visited the family in Cuba and have kept Urrutia updated. They say his ex-wife has remarried, the family has suffered no official or unofficial harassment, other than one egg-throwing incident. Prominent in Urrutia’s mother’s home is an old photo of her son being congratulated by a proud Castro.

But Urrutia now lives for America, for his new family and to lift weights. He has no time to discuss past pain, or to provide insights into the spiritual side of his sport, the pitched battle between iron will and iron plates, which he understands possibly better than anyone. Normally warm and friendly, Urrutia in training is a man of few words.

Despite his longshot status at Seoul, it’s hard to write him off. Neither Hollywood would allow it.

“He’s our only legitimate medal hope,” says Bailey, speaking for both Hollywoods and all points and dreams in between. “I really, honestly believe this guy is going to throw a bomb on the rest of the world at Seoul.”

If so, print up the tickets. Florida has itself another roadside tourist attraction, the rusting hulk of an abandoned automobile. Write on the door, “Tony Urrutia slept here.”

Add an inscription, a lesson Urrutia has learned, a knowledge he possesses that gives him an edge on the field in Seoul. Explaining why he trains so hard, he says simply:

“Nothing come easy.”