Ex-ASU star sets pull-up record
Anything that Anthony Robles has accomplished in his life is a fist-pumping inspiration for all athletes.
No matter how far he goes around the world as a motivational speaker, he’s the most proud to be a Prodigal Son of Mesa High School’s wrestling program.
The former Arizona State wrestling national champion, born with one leg, added another footnote to his legacy earlier this month when he set his third world record for pull-ups since 2018.
Robles, a 5-foot-9 strongman, did 30 pull-ups while having a 60-pound pack strapped on him within one minute, at his alma mater Mesa on Jan. 30.
He was officially declared the Guinness Book of World Record-holder officially on Feb. 3 for the most pull-ups, 62.
“This record is always going to hold an important piece of my heart,” Robles said to Arizona Republic.
His third world record isn’t the closest to his heart because it was his fifth attempt after failing each of the previous times to reach 62 within a minute.
It was because it happened at Mesa High School, where he learned to wrestle as a freshman and was a member of two state team championships in 2006.
Those early career highlights were before he won the 125-pound national title at ASU in 2011, ESPN’s Jimmy V award and Male Athlete With A Disability at the 2011 ESPYs, inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame the following year and Arizona Sports Hall of Fame as well.
“It’s a special place to me because that’s where it all started,” Robles said. “My freshman year wrestling wasn’t very good, but I spent a lot of time pouring a lot of blood, sweat and tears in those wrestling mats. To have the people that I love the most around me, supporting me and cheering, and to have the opportunity to do it at home at Mesa High, it was just really special.”
The idea for going after these world records began in 2017 after being challenged by one of his friends on Facebook.
“We’re always doing little challenges like most push-ups in the sauna, or box jumps, like, who can do the highest box jump? And he just randomly tagged me in a pull-up video one day.”
The video was from the previous Guinness world record holder Adam Sandel, and Robles said that he set his new goal to get as many Guinness world records that he can get in that category.
The first of Robles’ three world records was for most pull-ups (62) with his 140-body weight, which be broke in November 2018 at the New York Jets’ MetLife Stadium in front of an estimated 18,000 attendees.
The second was at a NASCAR event on March, 8, 2020 for most pull-ups (25) in a minute with an 80-pound pack on March 8, 2020.
Anthony revealed in an interview on NFL Network’s Good Morning Football show on Feb. 4 that he trained a 100-pound pack strapped to his body while doing pull-ups to build muscle mass. He then shaved off eight pounds a few weeks leading up to the 62-challenge to increase his stamina.
His former Mesa wrestling coaches including Bobby Williams, David DiDomenico, and former ASU coaches Brian Stith and Shawn Charles and a small crowd were at the Safe Streetssponsored event to see Robles literally pull off his self-proclaimed greatest feat yet.
DiDomenico was by Robles’s side keeping count as he jolted through all 30 reps.
Alice Cooper spends his latest album, “Detroit Stories,” paying tribute to a city that looms large in Cooper legend for obvious reasons.
First and foremost, he was born there.
And although he met the other founding members of the Alice Cooper group in Phoenix, where his family moved when he was 12, the Cortez High School track star and his bandmates were sharing a farmhouse on the outskirts of Detroit when they recorded “I’m Eighteen,” their breakthrough single.
They’d moved to Detroit after several years in California, where they cut their first two albums for Frank Zappa’s Straight Records.
As Cooper, who now lives in Paradise Valley with his wife, Sheryl Cooper, explains, they didn’t feel as much like outcasts on the Detroit scene, surrounded by such kindred spirits as the Stooges and the MC5.
“Detroit, their sound was hard rock driven by guitars,” he says. “And that’s where we felt right at home.”
‘Let’s make Detroit the thing’
On “Detroit Stories,” an album due to be released on Feb. 26, he celebrates the legendary music city and its hardrock heritage, a premise Cooper first suggested in a conversation with longtime producer Bob Ezrin.
“Bob and I, we never go into an album and say, ‘Let’s just write 12 good songs,’” he says. “Both of us come from a very theatrical background. So I said, ‘Let’s dedicate it to Detroit. Let’s make Detroit the thing.’ Because I’m from Detroit.”
Once they’d decided on that “Detroit Stories” concept, there were certain ground rules.
“I said ‘The most important thing is let’s make sure that everybody on the album is from Detroit. Let’s record it in Detroit. Let’s not give up on that.’”
Guest appearances include such veterans of the Detroit scene as Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad and Johnny “Bee” Badanjek of Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels.
The only person on the album not associated with Detroit, Cooper says, is guitar hero Joe Bonamassa, who plays a cover of the Velvet Underground song “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
Although the Velvet Underground was based in New York City, not Detroit, the arrangement is on loan from Ryder’s cover of the song, produced by Ezrin.
“Bob also produced ‘Berlin’ for Lou Reed,” Cooper says. “And Lou was a buddy of mine. We used to live at the Chelsea Hotel back in the early ‘70s together.”
Ezrin played their version of the song for Laurie Anderson, Reed’s widow.
“And she said she loved it,” Cooper says. “She said Lou would’ve loved our version. The Velvet Underground’s version was very New York heroin chic. We took it and gave it the Detroit treatment.”
How Bob Ezrin helped hone their sound
It was Ezrin who initially helped Cooper and his bandmates hone their sound into the airplay-friendly hardrock anthems that became their stock in trade as “I’m Eighteen” gave way to “School’s Out.”
The young producer had been sent to see them play a gig at Max’s Kansas City (a New York club) with strict orders from his boss, Jack Richardson, a producer enjoying a run of big hit singles for the Guess Who.
“It was the only time a producer ever came to a show,” Cooper say, with a laugh. “And he came there to get rid of us. That’s what Jack Richardson told him. ‘Just get rid of them. Go see them and tell them we’re not interested.” But Ezrin couldn’t do it.
As Cooper recalls the gig that changed his life, where future members of the New York Dolls were pressed against the stage, “The audience went crazy. They loved it. And Bob went back to Jack Richardson and said, ‘I know I’m fired. But I signed them.’ Jack said, ‘Then your punishment is you have to produce them.’”
The success of “I’m Eighteen” convinced the suits at Warner Bros. to take a chance on releasing a full-length Alice Cooper album, the 1971 classic “Love It To Death,” produced by Ezrin.
“Well, ‘Love it to Death’ became a huge hit,” Cooper says, with a laugh. “And nobody saw that one coming. But Bob was totally right. What he saw in us was the future.
“He said, ‘I listened to them. I watched them. And I saw something I wasn’t expecting. They’re great players. But they could be a lot better.’ ”
‘He was our George Martin’
It was Ezrin’s job to make them better. And the weird thing is, they let him get away with it.
“It’s funny,” Cooper says. “We never listened to Zappa. Zappa gave us advice. A lot of guys gave us advice. And we never listened to it. We thought ‘We know what we’re doing.’ For some reason, we listened to Bob Ezrin. He was a young, young guy with long hair.”
Ezrin went on to produce their next three albums, “Killer,” “School’s Out” and perhaps their most iconic effort, “Billion Dollar Babies,” and continued to work with the singer when Cooper went solo in 1975, resulting in another huge commercial triumph, “Welcome to My Nightmare.”
“He was our George Martin,” Cooper says, referring to the man who famously produced all but a tiny fraction of the Beatles catalog. “And still is. I would rather work with Bob than anybody.”
“Detroit Stories” is the singer’s third consecutive album with Ezrin producing, following the “Welcome to My Nightmare” sequel, “Welcome 2 My Nightmare,” and 2017’s “Paranormal.”
A strict interpretation of the singer’s album credits would suggest that “Welcome 2 Nightmare,” released in 2011, was the first they’d worked together since the criminally underrated “DaDa” hit the streets (but not the U.S. album charts) in 1983.
But Cooper says it’s not that simple.
‘If anybody knows Alice Cooper better than me, it’s Bob Ezrin’
“Bob has always been my go-to guy,” he says.
“If I was doing an album with David Foster or all those different producers, I would always run the songs by Bob and say, ‘What do you hear here?’ And he’d send it back and go, ‘Well, I’m doing this other band right now, but this chorus could be better’ or ‘Cut that section in half ’ Or ‘Alice would never say that.’”
There’s a trust they’ve built up through the years that goes beyond familiarity or even friendship.
“If anybody knows Alice Cooper better than me, or at least as much as me, it’s Bob Ezrin, because we created that character together, voice-wise,” Cooper says.
“So we know what he would sing and what he wouldn’t sing, if this song is an Alice song or if we’re forcing it on Alice. Sometimes it’s a great song and you go, ‘Yeah, but it’s just not an Alice song.’ And you put it away.”
‘We always felt like social debris’
“We just always felt like social debris. We didn’t feel like we ever fit in. So that song came out pretty easily. It worked.”
Alice Cooper
The other three surviving members of the original Cooper group – guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith — appear on two tracks of “Detroit Stories”, “Social Debris” and “I Hate You.”
Cooper wrote “Social Debris” with Smith and Ezrin.
“We just always felt like social debris,” he says. “We didn’t feel like we ever fit in. So that song came out pretty easily. It sounds like it should have been on ‘Love it to Death’ or ‘Killer.’ So it worked.”
“I Hate You” was written by Cooper, Dunaway and Ezrin, and features the former bandmates trading insults.
The band loved Glen Buxton
“Most bands when they break up hate each other,” Cooper says.
“We never did that. We didn’t really break up with bad blood. So we wrote a song where each guy has a verse about the other guy. The funny thing is, everybody that thinks the Alice Cooper band hates each other, we said, ‘OK, yeah, we hate each other. Here’s the song.’”
The song ends with a tribute to the late Glen Buxton, who died in 1997.
“But most of all we’re filled with rage,” they sing. “At the empty space you left on stage.”
As Cooper says, “We all loved Glen.”
Alice Cooper doesn’t live in the past
It’s tempting to think that the timing of Cooper’s tribute to Detroit is based at least in part on the 50th anniversary of “Love It to Death,” a breakthrough album recorded while sharing a farmhouse with his bandmates on the outskirts of Detroit.
“Detroit Stories” hits the streets on Feb. 26.
“Love it to Death” turns 50 on March 9.
“People always surprise me when they say ‘It’s the 40th anniversary of this’ or ‘the 50th anniversary of that,’” Cooper says, with a laugh.
“I never think about. I guess because I don’t really live in the past that much. But the fans do. It’s very important to them. I didn’t even know it was the 50th anniversary until you mentioned it.”
Sia’s new movie, “Music,” has outraged the autism community, for both the casting of a neurotypical actress in the role of an autistic character as well as for showing scenes where the character is being restrained. And the criticisms don’t end there.
In the film (now streaming), Music (played by Maddie Ziegler) is a young autistic woman who falls under the care of her half-sister Zu (Kate Hudson) after her grandmother dies (Mary Kay Place). Zu learns all about Music’s daily routine with the help of Music’s neighbor Ebo (Leslie Odom Jr.) – and the movie becomes more problematic from there, advocates say.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Camille Proctor, executive director and founder of The Color of Autism Foundation, told USA TODAY. She started her organization in 2009 shortly after her son was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. “I don’t like the portrayal of the young autistic woman. I feel like (Ziegler) was doing parody.”
The movie depicts Music being restrained as a means to calm her down – something the community has condemned.
“The autistic community has been fighting for decades to end the use of restraints that traumatize and kill,” Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said in a statement. “Had the filmmakers chosen to meaningfully involve autistic people from the beginning, we could have told them how catastrophically irresponsible it is to encourage viewers to use the kind of deadly restraints that killed Max Benson, Eric Parsa, and many other members of our community.”
Benson died in 2018 after staff at his school restrained him facedown for hours, according to the Sacramento Bee. He was 13 years old.
His mother reached out to Sia, according to The Washington Post.
In the case of Parsa, a lawsuit alleges the 16-year-old with severe autism died when sheriff ’s deputies sat on him for nine minutes in an effort to restrain him, according to The New York Times.
Restraint is particularly dangerous for the autism community; an autistic person may not be able to tell you when they can’t breathe.
Ziegler’s casting angered people, because many had hoped to see an autistic actor in the role.
The film received two Golden Globe nominations – for best motion picture, musical or comedy, and best actress in a musical or comedy (Hudson) – and will now include a disclaimer upfront about restraint.
“MUSIC in no way condones or recommends the use of restraint on autistic people,” the disclaimer will read, according to Variety and The Guardian. “There are autistic occupational therapists that specialize in sensory processing who can be consulted to explain safe ways to provide proprioceptive, deeppressure feedback to help (with) meltdown safety.”
Sia, who has since deleted her Twitter account, apologized and said the scenes will be removed “from all future printings,” and that she “listened to the wrong people and that is my responsibility, my research was clearly not thorough enough, not wide enough.”
Some still praise the movie, including
the National Council on Severe Autism’s president Jill Escher. USA TODAY reached out to the film’s representatives and Sia for comment.
Will Lasley of Brentwood, Tennessee, watched the movie and was upset by the depiction of autism. He is autistic.
“While I know there are people on the spectrum who act similarly to her, it doesn’t justify how ridiculous she acts,” he says. “It doesn’t really look like she’s attempting to portray a real person.”
Autistic critics have pointed out the movie really is about Hudson’s character and not about Music. “Despite the movie’s eponymous title, Music, the character, is barely a person at all,” Sara Luterman wrote for Slate.
Matthew Rozsa wrote for Salon: “Music has no character arc to speak of and, aside from some pretentious interpretive song-and-dance numbers meant to put us ‘in her mind,’ we never get a sense of her personality or perspective.”
Proctor said the one thing the movie got right was Hudson’s character, “a callous relative (of an autistic person) who is selfish.”
Maria Davis-Pierre, a licensed mental health counselor and the CEO and founder of Autism in Black Inc., doesn’t think the film had the potential to get anything right. Davis-Pierre has a child with autism; her organization is for parents.
“The movie was filtered through the eyes of someone who was not in the community,” she says. “And that’s one of the biggest issues when stories are filtered through the eyes of someone who doesn’t understand.”
Social media users criticized singer Sia last year for not casting someone on the autism spectrum to play an autistic character, though she doubled down on her decision at the time.
The singer/songwriter has heaped praise on Ziegler, an alum of Lifetime’s “Dance Moms.”
Sia says the teen poured her heart into the role of Music, careful to portray the character in a respectful way.
The two worked together on the video for Sia’s 2014 single “Chandelier.”
She later regretted her response to criticisms.
“Looking back, I should have just shut up; I know that now,” she told Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.
Cal Montgomery was part of a group from disability-led nonprofit Communication First to advise Sia on the film – and their suggestions seem to have been “ignored.”
Montgomery took issue with Music’s apparent lack of grief when her grandmother died.
“Her grief wouldn’t look the same as neurotypical grief, and she obviously wouldn’t be expressing in words. But you would expect a great deal of distress, not just when the routines are broken, but just at the fact that somebody really important to her has vanished and yet she’s portrayed as basically unconnected to people.”
If you’re looking for films about the autism community, advocates recommended “The Reason I Jump,” “Loop“and “In a Beat.”
Advocates agree it’s important stories about the autistic community are told on screen. They just want to be part of the process.
“We have an expertise that other people just don’t,” Montgomery says.