UKIAH -- It was always there, wherever Michael Darby went, whatever Michael Darby did. No one saw it. Only he knew it. Only he felt it. Right to the marrow. It was there when he was a Ukiah senior and the Empire's No. 1-ranked wrestler at 171 pounds. It was there when Darby was in his 20s toured, touring college campuses, singing those love songs he said "at every sorority."
It was there when Darby became a radio talk show host in Seattle, Los Angeles and Palo Alto. It was there when he interviewed Michael Jordan, Christina Aguilera, Cindy Crawford, Will Smith, Robin Williams and Kobe Bryant.
It was an anvil he was carrying on his shoulders, the one the bullies began putting there beginning at Terrace Middle School in Lakeport, the one he shouldered all through Ukiah High School and his 1994 graduation. It was so heavy, he nearly collapsed under the weight.
"Every single day," Darby said, when asked often he was bullied, pushed or thrown to the ground from grades 7-12.
Darby was 6-foot-4 but he only weighed 137 pounds through most of high school. Even when Darby wrestled at 171 pounds, he still looked like a rail. His mom, Cynthia, a teacher, taught him "to be kind and gentle." That certainly disabled him for what was to follow, a soft target from his wrestling teammates as well from the kids he sang with in the school choir.
"The wrestlers thought I was a sissy and weak because I was in the choir," said Darby, 37, who gave an anti-bullying musical presentation Thursday at Frank Zeek Elementary School. "And the kids in the choir thought I wasn't very smart because I was a jock."
The result?
"I was scared," he said. "I was afraid to go to school, to go to recess, to lunch."
That Darby became a top wrestler didn't change a thing. He already had been imprinted for six years before that No. 1 ranking. He has gone to live with Ukiah wrestling coach Gary Cavender halfway through his senior year - "sanctuary" was what Darby called it. But Darby still had to go back to school five days a week, his two loves, music and wrestling, having become snakes that bit him.
After graduating with a communications degree from Evergreen State College in just two years, three months, Darby began his radio odyssey. Years passed and Darby began writing and singing his own songs in every state except Hawaii and Alaska. He won music awards. Then one day, on tour in Japan, Darby found himself alone in Osaka with a troubling conundrum. He hadn't given his wrestling itch a full scratch.
"I didn't want to wake up one day and say I coulda, shoulda and woulda," Darby said.
He hadn't wrestled in 10 years, since high school. For a year and half Darby trained. He started at 235 pounds, got up to 265 by eating this everyday diet: 36 raw eggs, three steaks, three full-course meals. His primary instructor was Brandon Ruiz, a four-time All-American in Greco-Roman, a world bronze medalist in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
On Feb. 8, 2007 Darby competed in the Senior Division in the Dave Schultz Memorial International Open at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. With 10 countries represented, most of them with past or future national champions, Darby on this global stage won his second 265-pound match, a decision over against Puerto Rico's John L. Vega.
The anvil left his shoulders.
"A huge weight was lifted off me," said Darby, a Las Vegas resident. "I didn't have to prove anymore how strong I was, or how tough I was."
In eight matches - five of them unofficial - Darby never once was thrown off his feet. That has led him to believe this: "I actually think I would have had a chance to go the Olympics. No one ever took me down."
If he had continued wrestling, could Darby have become an U.S. Olympian?
"I wouldn't have been surprised," said Cavender, who has coached wrestling for 33 years at Ukiah.
Cavender has sent kids to college who became All-Americans. "Michael was physically gifted. No question. He obviously had the talent."
But Darby didn't continue. Why? Wal-Mart happened. Yes, Wal-Mart. They asked Darby to write birthday songs, sympathy songs, and the like for an in-store promotion linking music to a customer's personal video scrapbook. He couldn't refuse.
"The money was big," Darby said. He stayed in the song-writing business. One day he received a packet of letters from Jennifer Bush, once a sorority sister who heard Darby's love songs in college, now a first-grade teacher in Sacramento. Bush played the songs in her class. The kids loved them and wrote Darby letters. That moved Darby to write a few children songs and, boom, it hit him.
Nothing to him had ever felt so intimate, so personal, as overcoming what the bullies did to him. To write songs for kids, encouraging them to embrace all colors, creeds and national origins, Darby never felt more alive. A tuning fork began vibrating inside him.
"This is what I want to do the rest of my life," said Darby, now 6-foot-6, 309 pounds.
"Michael Darby And Smile" will play at 100 schools this year, in front of 50,000 kids. With Darby on guitar and on the mike with close friend Ashley Miller, the pair hand out a 20-page book to the kids: "I Have A Friend Who ..." The illustrated pages have a plump kid, a kid with straight hair, a skinny kid, a kid in the wheelchair, a kid who is sick. They are all cool, worthy of respect, that's what the kids at Frank Zeek Elementary were told and repeated back in chorus.
They are all cool, even that beanpole who likes both wrestling and choir. Darby didn't sing that but how could he not think it? Every time he sings.
Michael Darby has found a way to beat the bully without throwing a single punch.
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