Anthony Mantanona remembers the feeling vividly. Lying on his back, the bright stadium lights nearly blinding him, the sound of a whistle and a faint whisper ringing in his ear. The former Palm Desert wrestling star remembers that moment of his junior year because of how close he was to his dream.
Mantanona alwaysheldon to that feeling from his bitter loss in the championship round of the 170-pound division at the CIF State Wrestling Tournament because it’s a moment he never wants to experience again.
So far, so good.
The future University of Oklahoma standoutran through his senior high school wrestling season a spotless 49-0, claiming his fourth consecutive Desert Valley League title before asserting his dominance at the CIF Southern Section, state, and national levels.
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It’s a story that continues today with Mantanona being named The Desert Sun’s top male athlete in the valley for the 2016-17 school year, but it started long before today – and the former Aztec hopes it will continue both in and out of the Coachella Valley.
“I set the bar pretty high. I came in here, and people were talking about trying to just place at the CIF Southern Section meet,” he said. “When I came in here, no one expected a guy out of the valley to do anything amazing.”
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And if you’d watched Mantanona’s first-ever wrestling match, you wouldn’t have either. A love for grappling sports runs through the Mantanona family’s blood. His uncle has been the assistant coach of the Palm Desert High School team, and Anthony grew up watching his father compete in ju-jitsu. Once he was old enough to decide, Mantanona wanted to give the sport a try and impress his father.
In a way, he did, but not as he would have intended.
“My first day of practice, I got put with two girls and got beat up pretty bad,” he said. “I hated it. I didn’t want to do it, but I looked over at my dad, and he was proud, so I said I’d stick with it. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t half-bad.”
Mantanona went on to win his first tournament, and he was hooked. But because the valley lacked the level of training programs his family thought he needed, the future Sooner spent much of his pre-teen years either in the car, in out-of-town gyms or on the large mat the family staged in their garage.
Whatever he needed, his parents did their best to provide.
“My mom would drive me two hours each way every other day to get me to train out in Los Angeles,” he said. “She’s the reason I got the training I needed to be successful.
“I’d go to programs in San Marino, Rowland Heights, at St. John Bosco (High School). I’d go everywhere. … Until I got to high school, she’d say ‘If there’s someone good you want to wrestle, I’m going to drive you three hours so you can get a good workout in.’ ”
That support and strong competition put Mantanona lightyears ahead of most of the rest of his future high school wrestling competition – many of which don’t often take up the sport until they start high school. The unintended consequence, though, was the cockiness he picked up and demonstrated.
“My attitude my freshman year wasn’t the best. I was used to being a one-man team with me and my family,” he said. “I went in there thinking it was all about me.
“As long as I was doing well and winning, I didn’t really care.”
Mantanona came onto a team that had just won its first DVL title in nine years that boasted a gritty, blue-collar attitude. To try and challenge him, Palm Desert coach Tom Lee would pit his freshman star up against older, bigger wrestlers to give him a challenge. More than anything, it frustrated him.
“I won’t say he had a hard time relating to the other kids, but some of the other kids didn’t benefit from wrestling since they were young,” Lee said. “They would get rough, and he was used to working out with kids of similar talents. They were hard-nosed wrestlers, and he had to learn how to respect that.”
Lee said his young prodigy showed glimpses of team chemistry, though. While at big weekend tournaments, like the CIF Southern Section finals where the Aztecs finished runners-up in 2014, Mantanona would watch his team rise up the results board and turn into the team’s biggest cheerleader.
“He would get pumped up and excited, and that spread to the other teammates,” Lee said.
But Mantanona found himself at the state finals that freshman year and hadn’t learned how to go about his business quietly yet. He was on the biggest stage yet and the No. 2 seed in his weight class. Even in the first round of the state finals, he wanted to show himself off.
Soon, he learned how much trouble that attitude could get him into on the mat.
“I’m up 5-0 with five seconds left, and I’m thinking ‘It’s my freshman year at the state tournament. Let’s be flashy’ and I went for something big and got put on my back and pinned,” he said. “I won three more matches, and then the same thing happened, up 5-0 and got pinned, and I ended up not even placing.
“That was probably one of the worst moments of my life, and I told myself I needed an attitude change.”
The way Lee saw it, Mantanona’s shortcomings simply came with being a freshman, a kid thrown into the mature world of wrestling. Though he put on a brash exterior, Lee said Mantanona struggled with confidence. Rather than competing at a more natural weight, Lee said a young Mantanona focused intently on cutting weight to slide into a lower weight class where he thought his skills might serve him better.
“Once he worried less about the competition and he let his wrestling take care of the competition, rather than cutting weight, he got better,” Lee said.
That improvement led to a fourth-place finish at the state finals his sophomore year, which Mantanona said himself he wasn’t entirely pleased with. Along the way, though, he was starting to gather teammates in his wake and lead them toward success. The Aztecs even held practices during the postseason open for wrestlers from any team.
Slowly, the cheerleader and self-absorbed one-man-team was starting to realize he needed those around him to be better if he himself was going to get to his ultimate dream of a state title.
Junior year came, and the buzz about Mantanona was deafening. In the offseason, through a growth spurt and lots of time in the gym, he jumped from 145 pounds to 170, and his prospects as a state finalist were almost certain.
But just a finalist. He had a best friend, current Oklahoma sophomore Jeremy Thomas standing in the way.
“I rememberdriving up to Corona that summer to train with him,” Mantanona said. “We always talked his senior year with his twin brother Justin, who won a state title too, and we had another buddy and we said we were all going to win a state title together.
“But when things fell into place, and we saw No. 1 and 2 in the state was me and Jeremy, it made things a little awkward. … We didn’t think we’d be in the same weight class.”
The pair faced off in the CIF SS Masters Meet, and Mantanona came away the victor, but that left him far from confident going into the state finals. He knew the type of grit that loss would have given him, and he knew Thomas would react just the same, especially as a senior in his final weekend of high school wrestling.
“I was a little excited, but I knew this wasn’t the end,” he said. “He’s coming back home, he’s pissed and ready to come back and win a state title.
“I knew I had the capability to beat him, but I needed to have a smart match and things just didn’t go my way.”
Mantanona took an 8-4 lead into the final two minutes, but looked a bit gassed. After exchanging takedowns and escapes, the lead shrunk to 10-8 with 30 seconds left. Then, in what he was used to doing to others all season, Mantanona found himself squirming on his back like a rollie pollie.
“I remember being so sad that I didn’t feel like I was in real life,” he said. “I’m walking off the mat, and I remember it so vividly. I see the light and hear the whistle blow, and it’s just like everything stopped. I was wrestling my best friend, and I remember he said ‘I’m sorry. I love you.’
“As soon as it hit me that I had what you were working for ever since you were a little kid and you let it slip through your fingers with 30 seconds left,I just became a mess.”
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The dad that got him into the sport to start with, the one who couldn’t have been prouder after watching his son lose to girls his first time on the mat, got in Mantanona’s ear after the loss.
Each day, he reminded his son how many days he had left until the 2017 state finals. He even steered Mantanona back on track after a brief distraction from joining the football team.
The sport wasn’t even a consideration when Mantanona was a 132-pound freshman, but as a relaxed senior at 184 pounds, he wanted to test himself at defensive end and have some fun along the way.
“I played one game, and we lost 52-0 (to Rancho Mirage) and Pops said ‘You’ve got to worry about what you’re good at’,” Mantanona said. “I ended up hurting my wrist pretty bad, and he said there’s no need. ‘You’re not going to do anything with it. You’ve got to focus on your goal. I thought you wanted to be a state champ and a national champ.’
“But it was cool to play a different sport. I go to wrestling matches, and I’m expected to win every match and not just win but by a substantial amount. That puts some pressure on me, but with football, I think we were down 35-0 at halftime and I’m still laughing.”
With that same relaxed mantra – and maybe because he didn’t have to face any offensive linemen – Mantanona tore through his senior season in a breeze. With Thomas off at Oklahoma, Mantanona’s future collegiate home, Mantanona rarely was challenged.
During his first four matches at the state finals, he pinned all four of his opponents – each in less than 80 seconds. His 5-2 victory in the finals over Oakdale’s Abel Garcia that went the distance seemed almost ceremonial and unexciting in comparison.
“The way he physically dominated was impressive,” said La Quinta coach Ryan Flores. “Obviously, there’s a big difference in a wrestler or a football or basketball player, but just the way he did it in his own sport, I don’t think there’s been an athlete in general dominate the way he has.”
To Mantanona, as great as it felt to redeem himself, it was just as good to begin another chapter of his wrestling career. Oklahoma boasts head coach Lou Rosselli, who also led the USA Olympic Freestyle Team at the 2012 and 2016 Games. In Norman, he has his eyes set on four consecutive NCAA titles and hopefully a future Olympic team bid.
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“I want to be the best. I want to be the best that ever lived,” he said.
But it’s not all he wants. Mantanona leaves behind two younger brothers Brock and Beau, and he not only hopes, but expects, them to far surpass anything he ever did in a Palm Desert uniform.
“They would make me look silly at that age,” he said. “They’re the best ones. If people are impressed with what I did in high school, then they’re going to blow everything I’ve done out of the water.
“They’re going to come in and make the high school scene look silly.”
But they’re only a small part of who Mantanona hopes he influenced during his four years on the college wrestling scene. Mantanona’s other younger brother, Troy, will be a junior next year and already is projected to take home two state titles before he graduates, according to Anthony.
Elsewhere in his wake, Mantanona hopes him raising the bar for competition in the Coachella Valley leads to more successful young wrestlers – both at Palm Desert and other schools.
“For me to come out of Palm Desert High School and do that, it shows other kids that we can do this,” he said.
“Seeing what he’s done and knowing he’s a valley guy, someone can think ‘I could be the next Anthony Mantanona. I could do it if I put my mind to it’,” Flores said. “Having those goals and seeing they’re realistic, it’s not something you just close your eyes and dream about, but it can be reality if you put your mind to it.
“His name is going to echo in wrestling rooms around here for some time.”
Anthony Mantanona facts
College-bound: Headed to the University of Oklahoma on scholarship to wrestle.
Going out on top: After finishing runner-up at the CIF State Wrestling Championships at 170 pounds his junior year, Mantanona ran through his senior campaign with an undefeated 49-0 record that included a 5-2 victory in the title match over Oakdale’s Abel Garcia.
National attention: Mantanona’s rise to the national spotlight took off with his 160-pound title at the FloNationals in Pennsylvania just weeks after his junior year state finals loss. That same summer, he also took home the 160-pound title at the Junior Greco National Championship in Fargo, N.D. This spring, just weeks after his state title, Mantanona clinched the USA Wrestling Junior Folkstyle Nationals title at 170 pounds in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The next week, he was named the USA Wrestling Athlete of the Week.
Family affair: Mantanona leaves three younger brothers in his wake, all of which he expects to top his achievements. Troy, a future junior at Palm Desert High School, finished seventh at 145 pounds in the state meet this year and is expected to be a state championship contender the next two seasons. The youngest Mantanona brothers, Brock (11) and Beau (12), could be the best yet, according to Anthony.
