WARSAW, Ind. (AP) - There is a board in the Warsaw wrestling room with various motivational notes and notices about upcoming camps and clinics. But there is one sign, in block capital letters that is pinned diagonally from top left and bottom right that stands out. It reads:
“NO EXCUSES”
In front of the sign, Jacob Linky bends down in a plastic chair and laces up his wrestling shoes. He smiles at his teammates, who have already started to warm up for practice. There are so many reasons Jacob should not be here, as the only Warsaw wrestler to qualify for the state meet at Bankers Life Fieldhouse on Friday and Saturday.
On the mat, there are no excuses. It does not matter that he is deaf. It does not matter that he had nowhere to live nine months ago. It does not matter that he endured abuse in his native Ghana that would extinguish the inner fire in most of us. It does not matter that he was a slave to his biological father.
On the mat, Jacob is thinking only one thing: “I don’t want to lose.”
Brian and Brenda Linky had trips planned. Their sons, Zack and Ben, were out of the house - Zack, 28, living in San Francisco, and Ben, 22, a senior at Indiana University.
“Almost done,” Brian Linky said. “I’m 57 years old. I never thought I’d have a teenager in the house again.”
Brian was in Las Vegas on May 16, on a business trip, when his wife called. Brenda works as a secondary special needs coordinator in the Warsaw school system. It was Jacob’s 18th birthday. He had a suitcase packed with all of his clothes, social security card, birth certificate and adoption papers with him at his part-time job at Culver’s.
This will be temporary, Brenda told Brian. She told him Jacob had nowhere to go and needed a place to live - for a while.
“I thought she was kidding,” Brian said. “Then she saved herself and said it was temporary. I said, ‘No problem, just make sure he’s gone by the time I get home.’ I got home and he wasn’t gone.”
The Linkys, Jacob included, laugh at this memory with nine months of hindsight. But it was no laughing matter at the time. In the weeks that followed, Brian and Brenda, who are both careful not to disparage Jacob’s former family, came to know a young man who had felt isolated from the world. Through an interpreter, Jacob said with his former family he felt, “like I was just told to have a lot of rules. I really didn’t learn.”
Jacob said he was kicked out of his house with nowhere to go. He turned to Brenda, who he knew from school. She picked him up and brought him home.
After four weeks, Brenda got tired of yelling upstairs to Jacob, who could not hear her anyway. She bought him a phone. It was the first in a series of moves the Linkys made to allow Jacob to make more decisions on his own.
“I would feel comfortable saying that I know he is flourishing with more choices,” Brenda said. “He’s fun to teach, too. He’s polite and respectful. We laugh with him constantly. He is still very innocent despite experiencing a lot of horrific things in his life.”
Jacob does not have a lot of positive memories of his native Ghana, a country of almost 30 million people on the west African coast.
“I remember my mom being really nice to me,” Jacob said through his interpreter, Rebecca Black. “But I don’t remember anything nice about my dad. Nothing positive.”
Jacob describes his childhood as “slavery.” He explained that his father traded something - he does not know what - for his cousin, Christian. His father, who ran a fishing business, physically abused the boys.
“He would hit me and my cousin in the head,” Jacob said. “The fishing nets, sometimes they would get stuck. He hit me over and over again. He would force me to go really deep in the water. One time I felt a ‘pop.’ I think that’s what made me go deaf.”
Jacob said he was probably around 8 years old at the time of the incident. In Ghana, thousands of children are sold to work in the fishing industry, as young as age 5. In 2006, the New York Times reported on the child labor trafficking in the Lake Volta region of Ghana.
Jacob and his cousin, Christian, were saved from slavery through the Touch of Life Foundation, whose founders, Pam and Randy Cope, have helped save more than 100 children from slavery in the Lake Volta region. Jacob and Christian were sent to an orphanage in Ghana, away from Jacob’s biological father.
After roughly a year in the orphanage, Jacob and Christian were adopted by a family in Warsaw that had previously adopted internationally. Jacob was 11.
“‘These people are so white,’” Jacob remembers thinking. “‘What are they here for? They took me and Christian on a boat. I wasn’t sure where we were even going. Christian, he was super nervous. I was nervous, too, but I was so ignorant. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I felt when I got here I’m like, ‘Why am I here?’ I didn’t understand what happened or why I had been taken away.”
There were plenty of positives for Jacob in Warsaw. He learned to express himself through art and his new family introduced him to wrestling in grade school. But he still struggled to communicate. He was not fluent in English or sign language and his native language of Twi was of little use in the United States.
It was not until the eighth grade that Jacob began working with an interpreter. Cochlear implants also allowed him to communicate without signing.
“Now I feel like I can communicate with people,” Jacob said through Black. “It’s good.”
It has not been easy, though. And those close to Jacob see a big difference in his personality since he moved in with the Linkys.
“He used to be a lot more uptight,” Warsaw junior teammate Brandon Estepp said. “I had him in English class and he wasn’t as open about things. He seems so much happier now.”
Black moves in unison with Jacob around the mat at practice. When Warsaw coach Kris Hueber relays information to Jacob on the mat, Jacob focuses on Black’s sign language to process Hueber’s coaching points. During matches, Black will circle the perimeter of the mat in Jacob’s sightline to relay Hueber’s instructions.
Hueber jokes that Black is probably also passing along her own coaching points.
“She is one of the stars of the show,” Hueber said. “It has been really easy for me because I have such a good network of people to work with. Rebecca has taken a specific interest in the sport and she wants to know what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t go as far as to say she’s one of the coaches, but as far as a relationship between those two, she has as much to say as anybody. I wouldn’t put it past her that she’s throwing some of her own stuff in there, too.”
From a technical wrestling standpoint, Hueber said Jacob is just now starting to take off. He reached the semistate last year as a junior, but was more reliant on brute strength than wrestling technique. This year, in the 160-pound class, he will take a 34-4 record into the state meet.
“Some of the technical imperfections he had normally get polished out in ninth or 10th grade,” Hueber said. “It’s one of those things where he probably skipped over some of the building blocks. We’ve tried to fill in the gaps. We know there is a huge amount of growth left in him. He’s not really reached the ceiling in any regard.”
Jacob clinched his spot in the state meeting with a 10-9 comeback win over Robert Stanley of Andrean last week in the semistate at East Chicago. Many of the fans there, knowing Jacob is deaf, erupted in applause when he clinched the victory.
Brian Linky still calls it a “miracle win.”
“That kid has to work,” Black said. “I was scared he wasn’t going to make it. To see the crowd erupt, that was pretty cool. Our team isn’t so big, so we had kind of a tiny section. But all of the other schools were standing up and screaming and waving to him.”
The cheers were loud enough for Jacob to hear.
The Linkys are not sure of the exact day or moment when it became clear that Jacob’s living situation was more than temporary. It might have been right around the time he was wrestling a friend in his bedroom and kicked a hole through the drywall.
Brenda waited until Black could be with her and Jacob to have a mother-son moment.
“I was so mad and talking so fast that I knew he wouldn’t be able to get it all unless Rebecca was signing it to him,” Brenda said.
But that accident was the only minor setback the Linkys can recall. Brian and Jacob came up with the idea to officially change Jacob’s last name to Linky in the fall. Brenda was apprehensive at first, but now could not imagine it any other way.
“A lot of people have said, ‘You’ve been a blessing to him’ or ‘You’ve saved him,’” Brenda said. “But really, he’s been a blessing to us. I don’t think he quite realizes the scope of it. I don’t think he quite realizes that it goes beyond our community and people around the state are going to be cheering for him because they want to see a kid who has overcome the difficulties he’s had in his life succeed.”
More than anything, the Linkys are happy to see Jacob thriving in other areas. The obstacles he has overcome are not even imaginable. Now, they see a future – with their third son – full of possibilities. From where Jacob has come from, that is a truly a miracle.
“I feel like finally I do have a family,” Jacob said.
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Source: The Indianapolis Star
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